Page:The part taken by women in American history.djvu/479

442 Born in old Kentucky, her ancestry goes back through a long line of the best, bravest and the most distinguished men and women that this country can boast, including such names as that of Lawrence Washington, Colonel Joshua Fry, Augustine Warner, Dr. Thomas Walker, etc. Her father, the Reverend Lewis "Warner Green, was one of the most eloquent and scholarly divines of his generation, and was at one time president of Hampden Sydney College, Virginia, and later of Centre College, Danville, Kentucky. Up to his premature death at the age of fifty-six, he was recognized as one of the intellectual and spiritual leaders of the old South, who by sheer force of brains and character, so largely directed and dominated our national life up to the time of the Civil War. The home life of the youthful Hypatia could hardly have been more propitious for the development of those charms and graces of mind and character, which have gained for her so unique a position in the history of womankind, than was that of the beautiful and accomplished Miss Julia Green.

At the age of nineteen her romantic and sheltered girlhood was brought to an end by her marriage and migration across the almost trackless prairies, to take up her abode among the prairie dogs and rattlesnakes of central Illinois. Here for a score of years she threw herself heart and soul into her self-appointed tasks of inspiring and helping her husband, who rapidly became one of the financial, political and intellectual "master builders" of this great region, and of making her home a center from which radiated countless refining and ennobling influences on every side. The good old Southern way in which these hospitable Kentuckians entertained friends and relatives for weeks and even for months at a time, was for years the talk of the countryside.

On her husband's sudden death in the midst of his brilliant business career, she found herself forced to take his place at the