Joyce M. Bowden
Founding Mothers: Greenwood Methodist Church
Greenwood, South Carolina, 1858
Click the image above to read and download Founding Mothers
The church that appears in the cover art and frontispiece is based on artist Virginia Wiggins’ drawing of the first building of the Greenwood Methodist Church, appearing on page 29 of The History of Main Street United Methodist Church, Greenwood, South Carolina by Harry R. Mays, Providence House Publishers, 1992. Virginia Wiggins’ art, in turn, was based upon a sketch in a notebook of Mrs. C.W. Tribble.
In 2014 Joyce M. Bowden published Four Connor Generations in South Carolina 1790–1920 with Modern Memoirs, demonstrating her prowess as a scrupulous and relentless researcher with a keen interest in genealogy. During that research into her family history and its context, she became acquainted with the eight “founding mothers” of the Greenwood Methodist Church in Greenwood, South Carolina and began researching and writing another book to tell their story. On June 12, 2022 Bowden died unexpectedly, leaving behind a work interrupted. Her husband, Adam Lutynski, decided to publish the draft in order to preserve and honor Bowden’s legacy of documenting and shining a light on the lives of those who came before us.
In the introduction, Bowden describes her vision:
This book is about who the founders were, what they did to better the lives of Methodist women and children in the village and what in their own lives motivated them to organize and push for these changes. This book presents a different picture of a Methodist church than the customary one in which male itinerant and local preachers built the church. It shows the women had an entirely different view of the mission of the church. To them, the central question was “What does faith mean for parents, husbands and children?”
While Lutynski oversees distribution of the book’s print edition, the unvarnished draft is published here as an open-access Digital Book so that others might benefit from Bowden’s efforts. The potential for new works of historical fiction based on Joyce Bowden’s research is a particularly exciting possibility. As Lutynski writes in his foreword to Founding Mothers:
Nothing would please Joyce more than to see other researchers unearth new factual discoveries about the founding mothers. However, if this is, in Hilary Mantel’s words, “the point where the satisfactions of the official story break down,” Joyce would be delighted to see an imaginative writer, having the utmost regard for the indisputable historical facts, tell the enriched story of how these eight resolute women, generations ahead of their time, achieved their formidable goal.
Photograph by Adam Lutynski, 2013
About the Author
Joyce M. Bowden was born in Georgia. She earned a B.A. from Florida State University and an M.A. (history) from the University of North Carolina. After serving in the Peace Corps in the mid-1960s, she spent her working life as a university fund-raiser and financial services consultant. She was passionate about genealogy and history and spent many years diligently researching the women highlighted in this book. This unfinished draft was published posthumously by her husband.