Elsie Barge

Elsie Thomas Barge was born in Cordele, Georgia and raised in Brookhaven, Mississippi,[1][2] the daughter of Thomas Cicero Barge and Laura Douglas Wilkins Barge. Her father was a businessman.[3][4] Both of her parents were from Georgia. Her grandfather James Madison Barge was a Confederate States Army veteran of the American Civil War. As a young woman, she performed with her younger sister Frances, a violinist.[5]

Barge graduated from Brookhaven High School in 1914.[6] She studied piano with Theodor Bohlmann of the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music,[7] and with Harold von Mickwitz and Rudolph Ganz in Chicago.[8]

Barge was a concert pianist and performed with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra under Eugène Ysaÿe.[9] She accompanied singers including Frances Ingram.[5][10] She was a piano teacher at the Chicago Musical College,[11] and at Stuart Hall in Virginia.[8] She ran a music school,[12] was a Baptist church music director,[13] and arranged and performed in musical programs in St. Petersburg, Florida, from 1928 into the 1930s.[14][15]

Later in life, Barge taught music in the schools of Brookhaven.[16] She was also a speaker for the Mississippi Agricultural and Industrial Board.[17] She organized the Fine Artists Series in Brookhaven, and founded the town's music club.[3] She was active in the Mississippi Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs,[18][19] and the Mississippi Federation of Music Clubs.[20][21] A scholarship to attend the latter federation's Transylvania Music Camp was named for Barge.[3]

Elsie Barge married twice, first to Scottish-born Chicago press agent Gardner Frederick Wilson in 1925.[1][22] They had a daughter, Patrycia (1926–2000).[23] She married again to chiropractor Morris Cook Hennington Sr.[24] Elsie Barge Hennington died in 1962, aged 64 years, at a hospital in Jackson, Mississippi.[16][25]