Mary Virginia Haile
Mary Virginia Haile of Essex County, Virginia, enrolled at William & Mary on September 20, 1918. She majored in Mathematics and minored in English and Chemistry. She graduated in 1922 with a Bachelor of Arts degree. She also took summer courses at William & Mary in 1926, 1930, 1948 and 1957, to keep her teaching certifications up to date.
Haile was a math teacher her entire career. She taught first in Crisfield, Maryland and then in Upper Marlboro, Maryland but came back to Virginia to spend her summers at her ancestral home, Elton.
As a student, Haile did not live at the university but stayed with her cousin, Christine Cox McRae, in a house directly across from the campus.
According to her niece, Hylah Haile Boyd, "Mary Virginia was Rachel Carson before Rachel Carson. She was a passionate conservationist. I was not aware until I was grown that her commitment to preserving natural resources was somehow passed along to me through our summers together. She also had an understated, quiet but wonderful sense of humor that I and others sometimes missed at the time but found delightful later upon reflection. She published a small, humorous history of her lifelong church, St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Millers Tavern. She also wrote a poem about local post office closing at Minor, which was just published in the Essex County Countryside Alliance Magazine, Fall 2018."
Mary Virginia Haile died in 1972.
