Sibyl Pool letter, MSS.3752

Abstract: Letter from Secretary of State Sibyl Pool to a constituent.Scope and Content Note: The collection contains a letter from Sibyl Pool, Alabama Secretary of State from 1944-1945, to Mr. E. E. Newton of Evergreen, Alabama. The letter is in response to their meeting the previous week.Biographical/Historical Note: Sibyl Murphree Pool, daughter of Benjamin and Annie Mae Mills Pool, was born on 7 October 1901. She grew up in Linden, Alabama, where she attended and graduated from the Marengo County public school system. She graduated from Alabama College for Women (now the University of Montevallo) and then attended Livingston State Teacher's College. After college, she returned to Linden and taught violin for two years in the local high school.Sibyl left the classroom to become the director of the Marengo County Farm Bureau and secretary of the Linden Chamber of Commerce. In 1936, while working with the Farm Bureau and Chamber, she was elected by the Marengo County Democratic Executive Committee to fill a two-year vacancy in the Alabama House of Representatives. She won re-election to full terms in 1938 and 1942. It was during her second full term that Governor Chauncey Sparks appointed Sibyl as Secretary of State. In 1946, she became the first woman in Alabama history to be elected to a statewide office, carrying sixty-three of Alabama's sixty-seven counties. She was elected State Treasurer in 1950, and in 1954 was elected to the first of four terms on the Alabama Public Service Commission.As her health declined, Sibyl retired to her cattle farm in Linden, where she died of a stroke on 30 October 1973