With his wife dead and out of the way, Richard Ward, 35-year-old Camden county man who had a sensational love affair with a neighbor girl some months ago, married the girl in the case the other night and the two set out in the same Ford in which they eloped once before: set out for some new place in which to begin life all over again.
The story of Ward is one of the most unusual ever recorded by this newspaper. Ward, a quiet, sober, religious-minded, industrious young farmer with an invalid wife and two children, deserted his family on the night of Nov. 15, 1923. He went away in a Ford coupe. He took with him Mattie Simpson, a 24-year-old girl of his neighborhood, who had been active in church work with him. The girl, Mattie Simpson, was the daughter of Mrs. Nicholas Burgess. It is said she never had a beaux in her life. She was a plain, modest, homely retiring sort of a girl a fine housekeeper; a loveable neighbor and a serious church worker. They said she was homely of face, but men hinted that she had a form divine and was physically designed for anything but the dry and unromantic spinsterhood to which she seemed to be doomed.
Mattie Simpson lived just across a narrow swamp from Ward’s place and the two saw much of each other, with pine thickets and much underbush all around. But instead of dallying and waiting for the invalid wife of Ward to die, the couple got away on the night of Nov. 15th under a pretense of going to prayer meeting. No trace of them could be found and no one picked up the rewards offered for their capture.
But on the morning of Dec. 24, six weeks after their elopement, the pair came back, weeping and penitent. Ward took the girl straight to the home of her mother and stepfather and begged them to forgive her and take her back. They did. Then Ward went to his wife who was ill and thought dying of a broken heart. Mrs. Ward received her truant husband with open arms and forgave everything. Then on Jan. 9, 1924, less than three weeks after her husband’s return, Mrs. Ward died. On Thursday, Jan. 30, just three weeks after his wife’s death, Ward took the girl Mattie Simpson to wife. And they went away in the same Ford coupe of their earlier experience.
Ward had two children by his deceased wife, a little boy 7 years old and a baby of 2 years. He took the little boy along with the new wife and left the baby with the parents of its dead mother. Before leaving his old home as Shiloh on his new matrimonial venture, Ward is said to have cleaned up some little debts about the neighborhood and to have paid back all but $50 of the $500 that the girls had taken from her stepfather when she ran away with him last November.
From the front page of The Independent, Elizabeth City, N.C., Friday, February 8, 1924
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