Sarah Cobb Johnson Hagan Cocke (7 February 1865–20 January 1944), civic leader, was born in Selma, Alabama. Her father, John Milton Johnson, was a physician from Kentucky who served as a post surgeon with the Confederate army, and her mother, Mary Willis Cobb Erwin Johnson, was a sister of Howell Cobb, a former Speaker of the House of Representatives, secretary of the treasury, and Confederate major general. It was the second marriage for both, and the family settled in Atlanta, Georgia, after the Civil War. Sarah Johnson received her primary education in a schoolroom set up by her mother in their home. Because Johnson's father was in his fifties when she was born, she maintained he treated her more as a granddaughter than as a daughter and encouraged her in all pursuits, even those not typical for a girl at the time. In the autumn of 1879 Johnson went to Washington, D.C., to attend Waverly Seminary. She graduated from Lucy Cobb Institute, in Athens, Georgia, in 1883.
Civic Activity
While visiting New York City, Johnson met Hugh Hagan, a medical student from Richmond, Virginia. They married on 26 October 1887 and lived in New York while Hagan continued his studies. In the spring of 1889 they moved to Vienna, Austria, where for about a year he studied neurology with leading physicians. After returning to the United States, they settled in Atlanta, where Sarah Hagan raised their two sons and became involved in local civic activities. Her cousin founded the Atlanta chapter of the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution, and in February 1892 Hagan attended the DAR's first national conference in Washington, D.C. After delivering a well-received speech to the other delegates, she was elected a vice president general. In 1895 she chaired the Ways and Means Committee of the Board of Women Managers who organized the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta. In the autumn of that year Hagan was elected treasurer of the new Atlanta Woman's Club, although she soon resigned. She was enjoying her success as a public figure when her husband suffered a stroke and died on 22 March 1898. Her mother died the following year, and Hagan felt that her life was drifting. At the suggestion of friends she turned to writing short stories based on tales told by her childhood African American nurse, one of which, "Phillis Tells about Her Visit to Michigan," was published in the December 1902 issue of Century Magazine.
In 1903 a friend invited Hagan and her sons to the Homestead in Hot Springs, Virginia. During their stay Hagan met Lucian Howard Cocke, a former mayor of Roanoke who later served as general attorney for the Norfolk and Western Railway Company and as president of the Virginia State Bar Association. They married on 30 October 1903. They had no children, but they raised her two sons and his two sons and two daughters from his first marriage to Lelia Maria Smith Cocke, a portraitist who had died in 1899. Moving to Roanoke, Sarah Cocke was surprised to discover a frontierlike railroad center where expansion had outpaced civic improvements. Violence, drunkenness, and prostitution marred the crowded downtown. Poor sanitation resulted in many deaths from cholera, dysentery, malaria, tuberculosis, and typhoid fever. Attracted by the railroad boom, rail officials and other prominent business professionals from major urban areas moved to Roanoke. Their wives, many accustomed to the luxury of larger cities and unhappy with their husbands' apathy and with city officials' negligence, resolved to improve conditions in Roanoke.
Woman's Civic Betterment Club
With the assistance of Willie Brown Walker Caldwell, among others, Cocke established the Woman's Civic Betterment Club, chaired its organizational meeting on 7 December 1906, and was elected its first president. The organization promoted health and cleanliness in the city and began petitioning Roanoke's board of aldermen on such issues as acquiring land for public parks. As one of her first acts Cocke organized a two-week fall festival to raise money for beautification and revitalization efforts. The festival brought in $5,000 to pay for a sanitation study of Roanoke and a development and remodeling plan by John Nolen, a landscape architect from Massachusetts. Although city officials did not implement Nolen's comprehensive plan, the club's efforts improved the city in many other ways. A boycott of unprotected meat and produce sold at the city market impelled farmers to store and package their foods correctly. The women also raised money for construction of two schools, one for black and one for white children, and for the creation of playgrounds and parks. They pressed for the installation of sanitary drinking fountains, lobbied for more and better paved streets, offered cash prizes for the most improved yards, organized a parent-teacher association, and worked to establish a juvenile court. Largely as a result of Cocke's efforts, Roanoke created a department of public health.
Cocke was active in other organizations as well. She chaired the Roanoke chapter of the Society of the Colonial Dames in the State of Virginia (later the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the Commonwealth of Virginia) and at the organizational meeting of the Virginia Federation of Women's Clubs in 1907 was elected second vice president. Cocke favored woman's suffrage with educational and property qualifications. Beginning in the mid-1920s she served on the city planning commission.
Writing Career
After her second marriage, several of Cocke's friends encouraged her to pursue her writing hobby more seriously, and in 1911 E. P. Dutton and Company published a series of her short stories in a collection entitled Bypaths in Dixie: Folk Tales of the South, which was reissued in 1926 as Old Mammy Tales from Dixie Land. Her stories, inspired by real people and events in her life and written in stereotyped black and "cracker" dialects, continued to appear in such periodicals as the Saturday Evening Post. After spending time with a cousin in northern Georgia, Cocke wrote The Master of the Hills: A Tale of the Georgia Mountains (1917), based on the moonshiners she met there. The success of her stories led to speaking engagements at various institutions, including Columbia University. Between 1929 and 1933 she wrote her memoirs, which were adapted and published in 2002 under the title A Woman of Distinction: From Hoopskirts to Airplanes, a Remembrance.
Sarah Cobb Johnson Hagan Cocke died at her home in Roanoke on 20 January 1944 and was buried in the Cocke family cemetery at Hollins College (later Hollins University).
Sources Consulted:
Family and personal information in J. Hayden Hollingsworth, ed., A Woman of Distinction: From Hoopskirts to Airplanes, a Remembrance (2002); biographies in Philip Alexander Bruce, Lyon Gardiner Tyler, and Richard L. Morton, History of Virginia (1924), 5:508 (portrait between 508 and 509), and Margaret Wootten Collier, Biographies of Representative Women of the South, 1861–1929 (1929), 5:147–151; Roanoke Times, 8, 13 Dec. 1906, 9 Nov. 1907, 20 May 1937 (portrait); writings include 1908 speech to the Woman's Civic Betterment Club and MS memoir "From Hoopskirts to Airplanes" (copy), both Roanoke City Public Library, "The Woman's Civic Betterment Club of Roanoke," Virginia Realtor 1 (Sept. 1926): 35–36, and "History of the Woman's Club of Roanoke," Virginia Club Woman 1 (Mar./Apr. 1929): 3–4; obituaries in Roanoke World-News, 21 Jan. 1944, and Roanoke Times, 22 Jan. 1944.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Kelley M. Ewing.
How to cite this page:
Kelley M. Ewing,"Sarah Cobb Johnson Hagan Cocke (1865–1944)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2006 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Cocke_Sarah_Johnson, accessed [today's date]).
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