Sanford, Mary Belle (1860-1941)

SANFORD

Posted By: Karon Velau (email)
Date: 1/1/2024 at 20:16:32

Mary Belle Leverett Sanford
(October 16, 1860 – August 24, 1941)

Mrs. George P. Sanford
Mary Belle Leverett Sanford, of Council Bluffs, member of the Author’s League of America, newspaper correspondent, short story writer, and widow of George P. Sanford, a prominent banker and financier, was born in Salem, Nebr., Oct 16, 1860. Her parents, James Walker Leverett, and Harriett Maria Tiadel, lived in Nebraska when the Indians were troublesome, and her father slept with a gun by his side. John Leverett, who was one of the early governors of Massachusetts, and whose portrait hangs in the new state house in Boston, was an ancestor, “Parson” Asa Turner, one of the pioneer Congregational ministers, of Iowa, was her father’s kinsman. Her father was a graduate of Colgate University, Hamilton, N. Y., then Madison University. Her mother, a woman of beauty in face and character, was a graduate of Ingham Institute, LeRoy, N. Y., she died Dec. 21, 1909. Mrs. Sanford was educated in the Northwestern University and in the University of Texas. On May 26, 1880, she was married to George P. Sanford, at Garden Valley, Wis., a man of high financial standing, a stockholder in a member of National banks, and president of the First National Bank of Council Bluffs, to which city they moved in 1892. Through the force of hard times and misfortune he lost heavily, and in 1898 sold his stock to the Citizen’s State Bank, which took the name and business of the First National. He died August 1902. She has two sons living and one who died in infancy; Arthur, manager of B. F. Sturtevant Co.’s office in Chicago, and Raymond, a merchant in Decorah, Iowa. She is a member of the Broadway M. E. Church, Council Bluffs Club, and a member for twenty years of Oakwood Ave., Reading Club.
Source: Blue Book of Iowa Women, by Winona Evans Reeves, 1914, p.214