Carrie Burbridge
Born in Alabama around 1888, Carrie Burbridge led a busy life moving to different states around the country including California and Illinois. Carrie was born in Alabama where her parents William Mitchell and Mary McDowell were born and lived there for approximately forty years. Carrie had two sisters, Mary and Pearl, and one brother, William. In 1900, at age twelve, Carrie was living with her older brother William in a house that they were renting which was unusual since her parents were still alive. During this time, Carrie was attending school and could read and write. Her brother, on the other hand, was a servant who was unable to read or write. In 1923, when she was thirty-four years old, Carrie married a local clergyman in a Baptist church. Little is known about Carrie and Ernest’s kids; however, in 1930 Carrie, Ernest, and Roscoe picked up everything and moved to Santa Monica, California. This could have been as a result of the Great Depression, or because of some other contributing factor. However, by 1933, Carrie, Ernest, and Roscoe had moved near Ernest’s home in Illinois, because when Ernest passed away on August 16, 1933, he was buried in a cemetery in Harrisburg, Illinois. For a while, nothing was known about the lives of Carrie or Roscoe until Roscoe Burbridge was drafted into World War II on August 26, 1941, as a Warrant Officer. While Carrie was possibly still living in Illinois, her brother, William, passed away in Auburn, making a newspaper headline. Sometime after Ernest and William died, Carrie moved back to the Auburn-Opelika area because by 1958 she made an appearance in the Opelika Newspaper on a list of registered voters. Carrie Burbridge lived out the rest of her life in Alabama until she died on December 28, 1964, at the Tuskegee Institute. It is possible that Carrie died at the John A. Andrew Memorial Hospital where the Tuskegee Syphilis Study was currently ongoing; however, there is no further correlation between her death and any of the awful events ongoing at the hospital during this time.
Contributed by Hannah and Coan from Auburn High School