Mildred Lewis Rutherford

Mildred Lewis Rutherford
"Miss Millie" Rutherford
Born	(1851-07-16)July 16, 1851 Athens, Georgia, United States
Died	August 15, 1928(1928-08-15) (aged 77)
Occupation	Writer Educator

Mildred Lewis "Miss Millie" Rutherford (July 16, 1851 – August 15, 1928) was a prominent educator and author from Athens, Georgia. She served the Lucy Cobb Institute, as its head and in other capacities, for over forty years, and oversaw the addition of the Seney-Stovall Chapel to the school. Heavily involved in many organizations, she became the historian general of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), and a speech given for the UDC was the first by a woman to be recorded in the Congressional Record. She was a prolific non-fiction writer. Also known for her oratory, Rutherford was distinctive in dressing as a southern belle for her speeches. She held strong pro-Confederacy, proslavery views and opposed women's suffrage.

Mildred Rutherford was born July 16, 1851, in Athens, Georgia; she was the daughter of Laura Cobb Rutherford (Howell and Thomas's sister) and Williams Rutherford, a professor of mathematics at the University of Georgia. Mildred Rutherford was the granddaughter of John Addison Cobb, whose involvement in agriculture (he owned a plantation with 209 slaves by 1840), the Georgia Railroad, and real estate made him "one of the area's wealthiest men". She was the niece of John's sons Howell Cobb, who served six terms as a Democratic Congressman and Speaker of the House for two years, and the lawyer Thomas R. R. Cobb, one of the founders of the University of Georgia School of Law – he "codified Georgia's state laws", "wrote the wartime state constitution of 1861", and was a prominent proslavery propagandist; T. R. R. Cobb founded Lucy Cobb Institute in response to a letter that Laura Rutherford had sent anonymously to the local paper.