Buried Truths: A Father's Mistake

 

1/30/1985 Letter written by Mary Elizabeth Peerce

to Carol Anna Meyer (biological granddaughter)

Mary Elizabeth Knight entered the world in San Marcos, Texas, on March 15, 1905. She was the second child of Thomas Chittim Knight, a local laundryman, and Louisa Lucille Huffmeyer, whose family was known and respected in town. The early years of Mary’s life were stable and rooted in a small, connected community. Her siblings included older brother Thomas Huffmeyer Knight, younger sister Kathryn Louise Knight, and baby brother George Emil Knight.

But everything changed in 1917. Mary's mother, Lucille, died of peritonitis—a tragic but not uncommon fate in an era before widespread antibiotics. Their youngest child, George, had already died six years earlier at the age of three. With three surviving children left behind, Thomas Chittim Knight faced a crossroads. And it was then, amid grief and uncertainty, that a big mistake was made—one that would split the family and alter Mary’s fate forever.

At the age of 12, despite having a living father and a large extended family, Mary was placed in the State Orphan Home in Corsicana, Texas. The reasons remain murky, but the decision proved devastating. In the 1920 census, she appears as an "inmate," working in the orphanage laundry—a cruel irony considering her father’s own profession. She may have learned the skill from him, or maybe it was simply what she was given to do. Either way, it became her assigned role in a life defined by abandonment.

But the most devastating part wasn’t the hard labor, institutional life or the separation—it was the lie. Mary was told that her parents had died. She accepted this as truth and carried it with her for the rest of her life.

It wasn’t true.

Her brother Thomas was alive and serving in the U.S. Navy in 1920. He would live until 1981. Her sister Kathryn was never in the orphanage; instead, she lived with their maternal aunts—first with Mila Charlotte Huffmeyer Rugh in 1920, then with Catherine Barbara Huffmeyer Wallace in 1930.

And most striking of all, her father had simply… moved on. In April 1918, just a year after Lucille’s death, Thomas Chittim Knight remarried in Bristol, Gloucestershire, England. His new wife was Louisa Augusta Wade. Why he was in the United Kingdom during World War I remains unclear—perhaps for work, for the war effort, or for reasons known only to him. By April 1920, he and his new bride returned to the U.S. and started a new family. They had five children: Thomas Henry, Rose Dorothy, George Washington, Edward William, and Lucy Lillian Knight.

Why was Mary left behind?

That question was never answered. Whether it was due to the chaos of war, personal hardship, or a deliberate decision to start fresh, we may never know. But the damage was lasting.

Through it all, Mary remained alone—told a falsehood, placed in an institution, and forgotten by the very person who could have told her the truth. The big mistake wasn’t just the decision to place her in the orphanage—it was the failure to go back for her, to correct the lie, to reunite the family.

Whether it was caused by wartime confusion, personal crisis, or cold choice, the consequences were the same. A girl who should have grown up surrounded by siblings and family love instead lived her life with a hole where her history should have been.

Only decades later, through careful family research was the truth uncovered: Mary wasn’t alone. She had never been. But by then, the damage had been done. 

Mary’s story doesn’t end in silence.

In her adult years, Mary did eventually reconnect with her extended Huffmeyer family. Bonds were rebuilt, and she was welcomed back into the family fold. But the lie—the claim that her parents were dead—was never officially corrected or spoken of. No one came forward to explain what happened. The silence around her past remained.

Mary Elizabeth Knight lived and died carrying a version of her history that had been chosen for her—not by truth, but by omission. And although she found some fragments of belonging later in life, the mistake that tore her childhood apart was never undone.

This is her story. A story about how one mistake—left uncorrected—can echo through an entire lifetime. A story of loss, survival, and a single decision that left a permanent scar. Now, with the truth finally uncovered, her memory is honored as part of a greater family legacy—one that should never have been lost to her in the first place.