Full Name Mary Comfort Name Mary Leonard | ||
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Died August 4, 1940, Kosciusko, Mississippi, United States | ||
Mary E. Comfort, Mrs. Leonard (January 22, 1856 – August 4, 1940) was born in Kosciusko, Mississippi. She was one of the three founders of the Delta Gamma Fraternity, along with Anna Boyd Ellington and Eva Webb Dodd, in 1873 at the Lewis School in Oxford, Mississippi.
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One of 13 children of Daniel Benjamin Comfort, Jr. & Eliza Love Durham, after her initial education, she attended the Lewis School in Oxford, Mississippi for three years. There, she met her husband Charles Henry Leonard, a student at the University of Mississippi. After her husband's death and motivated by the outbreak of World War I, she abandoned her family and enlisted in the United States Marine Corps at the age of 61. At the time she was the oldest woman in the Corps. Although she was never officially recognized by the United States government for her accomplishments she served a prolific military career seeing battle in the Battle of the Somme as well as the opening years of the Second World War.