Kate Noble Pleasants Minor (8 April 1857–30 December 1925), civic leader and Lost Cause memorialist, was born in Richmond, Virginia, and was the daughter of Virginia Cary Mosby Pleasants and John Adair Pleasants, an attorney who clerked in the Confederate States Department of the Treasury during the Civil War and worked for a life insurance company afterward. Her first name may have been Catharine, which ran in the Pleasants family, but she was always known as Kate. Nothing is known of her education, but she probably attended one of the schools for girls in the city. On 18 April 1877, in Richmond, she married Edmund Christian Minor, a Henrico County judge who had lost his right arm while fighting for the Confederacy. They had one son and five daughters, of whom three daughters lived to adulthood.
Confederate Memorialism
Minor began her career in civic activism when she still had young children in the house and women were forming memorial organizations to honor the Confederacy and the men killed during the Civil War. She joined the Ladies' Hollywood Memorial Association that cared for the graves of Confederate soldiers at Richmond's cemetery overlooking the James River. She served for more than a decade as corresponding secretary before stepping down in 1901, but later that year was elected a vice president. During this time Minor aided the successful campaign to convince the General Assembly to appropriate funds to maintain Confederate graves. In 1891 she was a member of the association's committee that met with Varina Howell Davis to request that Davis permit the body of her husband, former Confederate president Jefferson Davis, to be buried at Hollywood Cemetery. Minor was a charter member of the Confederate Memorial Literary Society when it was founded in May 1890 to preserve the mansion where Davis had lived during the war, and which later became the Museum of the Confederacy. She served as its corresponding secretary and from 1896 to 1904 was a vice president. Minor was also named to the committee that raised money to construct Battle Abbey (later home of the Virginia Museum of History and Culture) as a shrine to Confederate dead and later served on its Board of Lady Managers.
For many years Minor participated in a variety of efforts to memorialize Confederate leaders, including fundraising for a memorial window to Robert Edward Lee that was placed in Saint Paul's Episcopal Church, in Richmond, and to erect a large monument to Jefferson Davis on the city's Monument Avenue. She compiled and in 1893 published From Dixie: Original Articles Contributed by Southern Writers for Publication as a Souvenir of the Memorial Bazaar for the Benefit of the Monument to the Private Soldiers and Sailors of the Confederacy and the Establishment of the Museum for Confederate Relics. In 1912 she spearheaded the creation of the Confederate Memorial Literary Society's publication of Memorial Day Annual, 1912: The Causes and Outbreak of the War Between the States, 1861–1865, which was distributed to public schools to indoctrinate students with the Confederate perspective on secession. The following year she compiled An Author and Subject Index to the Southern Historical Society Papers, Vols. 1–38 (1913), a useful research aid to the materials documenting the Southern experience in the Civil War published in that series.
Social Welfare Activism
Minor belonged to the Saturday Afternoon Club, a literary group, and was an officer of the Woman's Club of Richmond, which became one of the city's most-prestigious cultural organizations after its founding in 1894. Like other Woman's Club members, Minor supported educational reform organizations. She was active in the work of the Richmond Education Association, which was founded in 1900 to improve local public schools for white and African American students, and she joined the Co-Operative Education Association of Virginia that coordinated statewide efforts on behalf of better funding for public education. Minor also supported the work of fellow Woman's Club member Mary-Cooke Branch Munford to establish a coordinate college for women at the all-male University of Virginia, which the General Assembly refused to authorize.
A charter member of the Virginia Conference of Charities and Correction when it was incorporated in 1901, Minor served on its executive council for more than a decade, including a term as a vice president in 1913. Intended to raise awareness and help coordinate the work of numerous charities and correctional facilities in the state, the conference's work led to the creation by the General Assembly in 1908 of the State Board of Charities and Corrections, the concept for which Minor was later credited with originating in Virginia. As a leader of the conference, she lobbied for state care for women described as feebleminded, a clinical diagnosis at the time for individuals with mild intellectual disabilities. The strength of her successful advocacy so impressed the superintendent of the Virginia State Epileptic Colony (later the Central Virginia Training Center), that its board named the new building for women at the Amherst County facility for Minor and a Richmond clergyman with whom she had worked.
Her concern for the welfare of children led Minor to become involved with a variety of organizations related to their care. She sat on the ladies' advisory board of the Children's Home of Virginia, after it was incorporated in 1900 to place homeless and neglected children in foster homes. She also served as a trustee of the Juvenile Protective Society of Virginia, which was incorporated in 1908 to establish homes providing educational and vocational opportunities for children in the criminal justice system and to lobby for legislation to protect dependent children. During the 1910s Minor advocated the establishment of new courts for juveniles, which the General Assembly approved in 1914. When the Virginia State Federation of Colored Women's Clubs established the Industrial Home School for Colored Girls (later the Barrett Learning Center, named for its first superintendent Janie Porter Barrett) in Hanover County in 1915, Minor was named to its board of trustees. On 22 January 1903, she addressed a committee of the state senate in favor of a law to regulate child labor, which the General Assembly approved. Twenty years later Minor organized clergymen and others in the city, including the Virginia Federation of Labor, to support adoption of an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to outlaw child labor.
Community and Political Activism
Minor's husband was a judge of the city court of law and equity when he died on 9 September 1903. In November she went to work in the Virginia State Library (later the Library of Virginia). Librarian John Pendleton Kennedy arranged for her to attend a six-week course in cataloging and other library work in Albany, New York. Minor then began arranging and providing finding aids to some to the 325,000 archival records in the library. She also compiled, with Susie B. Harrison, A List of Newspapers in the Virginia State Library, Confederate Museum, and Valentine Museum (1912). Minor headed the serials division until 1906, when she took charge of the reading room and was in effect head reference librarian until she retired in December 1915 to travel abroad.
For more than two decades Minor worked to establish a public library in Richmond. She sponsored a resolution in March 1901 at the Woman's Club in favor of Andrew Carnegie's offer of $100,000 to establish a library if the city would contribute $10,000 per year for its upkeep, which the city failed to do. In 1907 Minor held meetings in her home in an effort to establish a library for children. She continued to advocate a municipal library and in 1923 she was named to the Richmond Public Library Board, which was charged with helping develop a city library and locate its site. The dedication of the new library building took place on 15 December 1930. One of four tablets in the library on the wall of the Kate Pleasants Minor Reference Department recorded her contribution: "This tablet is here placed in recognition of the years of faith and effort on the part of Mrs. Kate Pleasants Minor and her fellow laborers that finally secured for the citizens of Richmond the benefits of a free public library." In the spring of 1911 she helped found the Know Your City Study Club that conducted weekly public meetings on such topics as history, government, and civic matters of importance to Richmond's residents.
During the first World War Minor devoted much of her time to efforts on the home front. Minor was named chair of the Organization Department for the Virginia Women's Committee of the Council of National Defense. She traveled across the state to raise awareness and money for the War Library Fund to provide libraries in training camps for service members and also helped direct food conservation efforts as chair of the Women's Cooperating Organizations in Richmond.
A committed supporter of votes for women, Minor joined the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia after it was founded in 1909. She was appointed to the league's child labor committee in December 1911. She was also a member of the Richmond Equal Suffrage League and served on its executive council in 1918. Minor could not participate in canvassing to enroll supporters of the federal woman suffrage amendment that Congress approved in June 1919 and sent to the states for ratification, but she expressed her joy "for our chance to vote for the next President!" in a letter to Richmond suffragist Kate Lee Langley Bosher. At the state league's annual convention later that year Minor participated in a series of short lectures under the general theme "Concerning Woman Suffrage—What Is the Matter with Virginia?" with remarks entitled "Mothers of the Old South Want It!"
After ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in August 1920, Minor helped with the Equal Suffrage League's programs to show women how to fill out their ballots before the November election. She was the founding president of the Woman's Democratic Club of Richmond, which quickly gained 1,600 members before becoming the Democratic Club of Richmond, with both male and female members, in December. Minor was elected vice president while a man served as president. She attended at least one of the meetings to organize the Virginia League of Women Voters and later chaired its Committee on Child Welfare. In December 1920 she was elected a vice president when the Richmond league was founded and was later a member of its board of directors. In April 1922 Minor was among the Richmonders who traveled to Baltimore to attend the Pan-American Conference of Women and the third national convention of the League of Women Voters. She was a delegate to the state and national Democratic Party conventions in 1924.
Minor remained active into her sixties. Elected president of the Richmond Housewives League in 1920, she served until March 1922. She was named a member of the Virginia Commission on Interracial Cooperation early in the 1920s. A longtime member of the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (later Preservation Virginia), Minor was also part of an unsuccessful attempt by another group to purchase Thomas Jefferson's Monticello estate for the commonwealth of Virginia in 1923.
Kate Noble Pleasants Minor died of pernicious anemia at her Richmond home on 30 December 1925, and was buried alongside her husband in the city's Hollywood Cemetery. Saint Paul's Episcopal Church erected a memorial plaque bearing the words, "Inspired by the love of Christ to eager leadership in Church and Community. For the help of the heavy laden, and for the awakening in many of the will to serve the common good."
Sources Consulted:
Self-reported birth date and birthplace in passport application, 21 Feb. 1917, General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.; birth and death dates, and cause of death, on Death Certificate, Richmond City, Bureau of Vital Statistics (BVS), Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia (LVA); full name and life dates on gravestone, Hollywood Cemetery; Marriage Register, Richmond City, BVS; minute books and correspondence in Hollywood Memorial Association Records, Confederate Memorial Literary Society Collections at Virginia Historical Society, Richmond; second quotation in Minor to Mrs. [Kate Lee Langley] Bosher, 4 June 1919, Adèle Goodman Clark Papers, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond; civic activities documented in Richmond newspapers, 1900s–1920s, including Richmond Times-Dispatch, 17 Feb. 1924 (with brief biography and portrait); photograph of Richmond Public Library plaque with first quotation in Dictionary of Virginia Biography files, LVA; Elizabeth Wright Weddell, St. Paul's Church, Richmond, Virginia: Its Historic Years and Memorials (1931), 567–568 (third quotation); obituaries in Richmond News Leader, 31 Dec. 1925, and Richmond Times-Dispatch, 1 Jan. 1926; editorial tribute in Richmond News Leader, 31 Dec. 1925.
Image courtesy of Virginia Historical Society, Confederate Memorial Literary Society Collection.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Emily J. Salmon.
How to cite this page:
Emily J. Salmon, "Kate Noble Pleasants Minor (1857–1925)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2019 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Minor_Kate_Pleasants, accessed [today's date]).
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