Mary Jane Beverly\u00a0<\/strong>was born around 1846 in Anson County, North Carolina, a rural county dominated by large planters and merchants with little room for people like her parents, Lewis and Susan, to advance in life. Sometime between 1846 and 1848, the Beverly\u2019s joined a tide of migrants who moved out from the Carolinas and into the lands once occupied by the Choctaw and Cherokee people. Migrants tended to settle near kin, like the\u00a0famed Knights of Jones and Jasper County<\/a> who came from South Carolina.<\/a>[1]<\/a>\u00a0Mary\u2019s family was no different, and when they settled outside of Demopolis in Marengo County, Alabama, there were nearly two dozen Beverly\u2019s nearby.<\/p>\n When they arrived in Demopolis in the late 1840s, the Beverly family would have found a bustling commercial river port set atop White Bluff overlooking the Tombigbee River. While many of Marengo County\u2019s planter elite built mansions in the city, they never dominated it like they did in the\u00a0Canebrake<\/a>\u00a0and the\u00a0Black Belt<\/a>. As a port town, Demopolis had a brisk nightlife and fluid social order fueled by itinerant laborers and travelers sojourning back and forth from Mobile on the river. \u201cThe People\u2019s City\u201d lived up to its name and offered working-class men like Mary’s father (a carpenter) the hope of carving out a niche for himself.<\/p>\n