She Works Hard for the Money

The official history of Johnston County gives her exactly one sentence."The first woman to hold elected office was Luma McLamb, Republican Register of Deeds from 1928 to 1932."That's it. No paragraph. No chapter. One sentence in a list of firsts.But here's what that sentence doesn't tell you: she won in a county so reliably Democratic that Republicans controlled it for exactly four years in the entire twentieth century. She served through the stock market crash, and the bank failures, and the first three years of the Great Depression — keeping the county's records while her neighbors sold off land they couldn't afford to keep.And then the wave that brought her in went back out, and sixty years passed before another woman won a countywide election in Johnston County.One sentence. She deserves more than that.#Benson #election #depression