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George Rountree Jr.

Years after 1962 when I had found Lawyer Rountree in his office, on my mission seeking affirmation of myself from him, Minnie Evans told me about the first time she had ever seen him.

It was 1904, and Minnie was eleven years old, when she went to the Rountree home with Mama Mary, her grandmother, Mary Croom Jones Robinson, who was delivering some finished work that Mrs. Robinson a seamstress, had done for the Rountree family. There, Minnie remembered, she saw George Rountree, Senior, come down the stairs carrying his newborn son, to show him proudly to Mama Mary and Minnie.

How the friendship of Minnie and Lawyer Rountree grew during the many intervening years I never learned, But grow it surely did.

It was he who gave to Minnie the big brass bowl (photograph) with figurations remarkably similar to elements often found in Minnie Evans' art. But he told me that he gave her the bowl because he had already noted the similarities! One time, when I asked him to share his thoughts about M.E.. I recall that he said "Minnie is a mystery".

It was he who reported to me in May 1967 that "she is presently engaged in a painting . . . depicting various Gods and Godesses of Greek Mytholoogy, but it is certainly all mixed up." And he added that "she is very much interested in getting a book on mythology", said he had tried to find Edith Hamilton's MYTHOLOGY without success, and suggested that I send it. My husband, definitely the major book person in our family acted on that suggestion and the book was in Minnie Evans' hands very soon. In letter to us both, of June 11, she wrote: "Mr. Starr I was very glad to receive the book, it refresh my memory I have painted a large picture of mythology I don't know why but I had to do it."

Minnie always loved history, not only her family history, but stories of the Bible, and stories of Greek mythology. I never learned how or when she first heard stories about Greek mythology, I think it must have been in school, with a rarely aware teacher. I do know that when I sent her a postcard from one of our travels abroad, with a depiction of Janus, that she had already incorporated such a doublefaced figure in a picture, and identified it as Janus.   (slides of her Janus, and her "Mythology".)

At another time in another letter in 1967, Mr. Rountree wrote me these thoughtful words about M.E. and her art.