Ruth E. Blakney Brown

1901 -

Ruth Brown, a pianist, taught music at two academies in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s and at Atlantic Union College in the late 1940s and 1950s. A native New Englander, she was born in Maine, the youngest of three children and the only daughter of Herbert l. and Angela B. Watson Blakney.

She attended South Lancaster Junior College, later Atlantic Union College, where she studied piano under Edna Sadie Farnsworth and graduated in 1921. She paid for school expenses by working on campus in the laundry and in the cafeteria. In her second year of school she was placed in charge of the laundry, where she worked five days a week and on Sundays.

Her first teaching position was at Union Springs Academy in New York State. She subsequently taught at Pine Tree Academy in Maine. In 1946 she returned to Union Springs Academy, where she served as preceptress (girls' dean) and taught literature, nursing, and music until 1949, when she accepted a position as piano and voice teacher at AUC.

In 1927 Blakney had married Theodore T. Brown, a businessman and later a physical therapist. They had a son, E. Allen Brown, and two daughters, Janice and Jean. 

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Sources: 1920, 1930, 1940 U.S. Census Records; The Journal of True Education, April 1947, 24; The Lancastrian, AUC school paper, 30 September 1949, 1; Obituary for Theodore Brown, The Atlantic Union Gleaner, 9 November 1976, 18; The Sparrow Family Tree, Ancestry. Com.