Corsicana Daily Sun - Jan 3, 2000 edition

Mettie Marie (Bennett) Stokes

Mettie Marie Bennett Stokes, formerly of Corsicana passed away Saturday, Jan.
1, 2000, in a nursing home in San Antonio. 
Services will be 11 a.m. Wednesday at Corley Funeral Home with the Rev. B.F.
Risinger officiating. Interment will follow at Pattison Cemetery in Emhouse.

Mrs. Stokes was born near Emhouse in 1904 to Drurey and Artie Pattison Bennett.
She graduated from Emhouse High School and attended Mary Hardin Baylor College. 

She taught in rural schools in Navarro County, including Rice, Blooming Grove,
Barry and Fairfield in the 1920s. 

Child-rearing occupied her time from 1930 to the early 1940s, when she began to
take additional college courses. Mrs. Stokes taught as a substitute teacher in
the 1940s until she graduated from Mary Hardin Baylor College in 1949. 

During a long teaching career in Corsicana, Mrs. Stokes taught in several
Corsicana elementary schools, including Robert E. Lee, Sam Houston and W. B.
Travis schools. She also taught for several years at the Corsicana State Home. 

Her favorite grade to teach was the fifth grade, although after she obtained a
masters degree from Baylor University she taught special education. 

Her greatest joy in life was in her teaching, and she taught long enough that
she sometimes taught the children and even grandchildren of her earlier
students. She retired in the early 1970s. 
Mrs. Stokes was active in the Daughters of the American Revolution, the
Daughters of the Republic of Texas and the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
She was a principal organizer of the Jose Antonio Navarro chapter of the
Daughters of the Republic of Texas. 

Mrs. Stokes is survived by two children, Virginia Carroll Stokes Nicholas and
Bennett Stokes; and by two grandchildren, Stephen Nicholas and Drue Bennett;
and by one great-grandchild, Michael. 

She was preceded in death by her husband, Charles B. Stokes, who died in 1965
after many years with Southwestern Bell Telephone Company. 
Arrangements by Corley Funeral Home.