Unmarked memorial for Percy Simolton Scales
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Memorial Artwork
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Sculptural Memorial
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Unmarked memorial for Percy Simolton Scales
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After being an employee of a Davidson College president and the college library for many decades, Percy Simolton Scales, the first and perhaps only female janitor at the time, died on February 15, 1955. She was survived by her siblings and two nieces, Percy Abernathy and Eugenia Donalson. She was eulogized in the Davidsonian, a student newspaper. Students wrote of how she was “respected by both her white and her colored friends” and that “the college never had a more faithful and loyal employee.”
Whether her headstone has been lost over the years or was never erected, we do not know. We do know that she was buried right next to her family under a large tree in the Christian Aid Cemetery on campus. Henry Simonton, her father, and Blanche Byers, her mother, both rest alongside her. The absence of a marked grave leaves questions about how her legacy was physically honored. The student newspaper’s eulogy, however, reveals how college community mourned Percy and their relationship with her. She also married twice, but little information is available about her relationships. Without the context of how her family, friends, and community remembered Percy, her memory in the Davidson Archives perpetuates a narrative of “faithful service” shaped primarily by the institution and its students and not how her family and community might have remembered her.
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Unmarked mound covered with grass by a tree.
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1955
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Friends and Family of Percy Simolton Scales
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“Faithful Janitress Retires After Many Years of Service,” The Davidsonian, October 27, 1950, 3.
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“Library Janitress, Percy Scales, Dies,” The Davidsonian, February 25, 1955, 1.
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“Death Certificate of Percy Scales”, North Carolina State Archives; North Carolina Death Certificates, Ancestry.com
Position: 1240 (60 views)