Letitia Pate Whitehead Evans (21 February 1872–14 November 1953), business leader and philanthropist, was born in Bedford County and was the daughter of Cornelius Pate, a dry goods merchant and farmer, and his second wife, Elizabeth Stagg Pate. Known as Lettie, she grew up surrounded by a nurturing family and attended private schools in Bedford and Lynchburg. On 8 November 1894 in Bedford County she married Joseph Brown Whitehead, of Mississippi. They lived in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where he practiced law. They had two sons.
Coca-Cola
In 1899 her husband and another Chattanooga attorney, Benjamin F. Thomas, conceived the idea of bottling the increasingly popular drink Coca-Cola, which was then available only at fountains in stores. Improvements in bottling technology enabled their enterprise to succeed, and bottled soft drinks became a lucrative staple of American consumerism. In 1900 the partners created separate bottling companies and divided the national market. J. B. Whitehead joined John T. Lupton to establish the Dixie Coca-Cola Bottling Company (later Atlanta Coca-Cola Bottling Company), in Atlanta, Georgia, to serve the southeastern region, and two other bottling companies in the southwestern and western regions. The Whitehead family moved to Atlanta in 1903 and became prominent in business and society before J. B. Whitehead died of pneumonia on 27 August 1906 while visiting in Virginia.
After her husband's death, Lettie Whitehead became chair of the board of Whitehead Holding Company and president of the Whitehead Realty Company, which managed the family's businesses. Continuing her husband's charitable efforts, she gave $5,000 in his memory in 1909 towards the construction of the Joseph Brown Whitehead Memorial Hospital on the campus of the Georgia School of Technology (later Georgia Institute of Technology), in Atlanta.
On 2 December 1913 Whitehead married Arthur Kelly Evans, a civil engineer and retired Canadian army officer from Toronto. He became ill en route from Atlanta to New York, where they planned to be married, and was operated on in a Lynchburg hospital, where they married instead. Evans and her husband lived at Malvern Hall overlooking the Homestead Resort in Hot Springs, Bath County. They visited England regularly before World War II and hosted parties, benefits, and numerous distinguished American and English visitors before his death on 21 May 1948.
Evans became a close friend and business associate of Robert W. Woodruff, who in 1923 became president of the Coca-Cola Company. In March 1934 she joined its board of directors, becoming one of the first women to serve on the board of a major America corporation. Woodruff bought Evans's bottling company with Coca-Cola Company stock, which significantly increased her wealth and financial interest in Coca-Cola. The transaction allowed her the freedom to focus on philanthropic work.
Philanthropy
As a member of the Georgia Federation of Women's Clubs, Evans had advocated the construction of hospital facilities for children at state educational institutions. She gave generously to several schools and hospitals in Georgia, including the Berry Schools for girls and boys, Tallulah Falls School, and the Scottish Rite Hospital for Crippled Children. A devout Episcopalian, she helped finance the construction in 1924 of a new sanctuary for Saint John's Episcopal Church, which she had attended while growing up in Bedford. Near her home in Hot Springs, she helped support the Boys Home of Virginia in Covington and the Hot Springs Valley Nursing Association (later Bath Community Hospital). In 1929 Evans funded the preservation of the customs house in Yorktown, an important historic landmark, for which the Federation of Huguenot Societies of America awarded her the Cross of the Huguenots. During World War II Evans donated gold worth more than $50,000 (Canadian) to the Queen's Canadian Fund for Air Raid Victims. In May 1941 she offered the balance of her London bank account to the Wings for Britain Fund to purchase a Spitfire fighter plane and requested that it be named "Virginia." She also helped purchase ambulances for France and became a trustee of the American Hospital of Paris.
Evans's elder son, Joseph Brown Whitehead, died in 1935. Much of his wealth funded the Joseph B. Whitehead Foundation, an organization he had established in his father's memory. Her younger son, Conkey Pate Whitehead, died in 1940. His will authorized the creation of the Lettie Pate Whitehead Foundation (to begin operating after her death) to benefit indigent Christian women in nine southern states, including Virginia. In memory of her son, Evans provided money to the hospital at Emory University for the construction of the Conkey Pate Whitehead Memorial Surgical Pavilion. It opened in 1946 with diagnostic laboratories, operating rooms, an emergency clinic, and rooms for patients. In January 1947 Atlanta's Woman of the Year organization recognized Evans's philanthropy with a special citation.
Evans was the first woman to serve on Emory University's board of trustees. She also served on the board of nearby Agnes Scott College and provided the funds for a new dining hall there that was named in her honor. For almost a decade she sat on the board of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, to which she donated a Salvador Dali watercolor and a seventeenth century tapestry among other gifts. During her lifetime Evans gave more than $150 million to more than 130 organizations, and in 1945 she established the Lettie Pate Evans Foundation, which continues to fund educational and cultural organizations, primarily in Georgia. After her death the Foundation also administered the Lettie Pate Evans Restricted Fund, which distributes her bequests to fourteen beneficiaries in Georgia and Virginia, including the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Bruton Parish Church, the Protestant Episcopal Theological Seminary in Virginia, Episcopal High School, Washington and Lee University, and the College of William and Mary, which completed the Lettie Pate Whitehead Evans Graduate Housing Complex on its campus in 1992. Westminster Canterbury, a Richmond retirement community, was built with aid from the Lettie Pate Evans Foundation and includes a sitting room named for her with original and reproduction furnishings and art from Malvern Hall. In May 1998 Georgia Institute of Technology renamed its original 1888 building the Lettie Pate Whitehead Evans Administration Building. That same year, she was named a Georgia Woman of Achievement for her many contributions to her adopted state. By 2014 the Restricted Fund had distributed more than $962 million to her named beneficiaries.
Letitia Pate Whitehead Evans died at Malvern Hall in Hot Springs on 14 November 1953. Following a funeral service in Bath County, she was buried with her first husband and their sons in a family mausoleum in Richmond's Hollywood Cemetery.
Sources Consulted:
Biographies in The Lamp: News of Westminster-Canterbury House 4 (Winter 1980): 2, Lettie Pate Evans, 1872–1953 (induction program for Georgia Women of Achievement, Macon, Ga., Mar. 1998), and Lucy Newton Boswell Negus, The View from Malvern Hall: Westminster Canterbury Richmond and the Philanthropy of Lettie Pate Whitehead Evans (2006), esp. 3–26 (several portraits); Marriage Registers, Bedford Co. (1894), Lynchburg (1913), Bureau of Vital Statistics, Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia; Lynchburg News, 3 Dec. 1913; Lettie Pate Whitehead Evans Family Papers, 1881–1982, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Ga.; obituaries in Atlanta Journal and Atlanta Constitution, 15 Nov. 1953, New York Times, Richmond News Leader, and Richmond Times-Dispatch, all 16 Nov. 1953, and Fifth District Georgia Nurses' Association, District Meter 10 (Jan. 1954): 1, 4; funeral account and editorial tribute in the Atlanta Constitution, 16 Nov. 1953; editorial tribute in Atlanta Journal, 16 Nov. 1953; bequests listed in Atlanta Constitution, 20 Nov. 1953; summaries of bequests in Atlanta Journal and Richmond News Leader, both 20 Nov. 1953.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Kelley M. Ewing.
How to cite this page:
Kelley M. Ewing,"Letitia Pate Whitehead Evans (1872–1953)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2016 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Evans_Letitia_Pate_Whitehead, accessed [today's date]).
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