Photo from the North Carolina Manual, 1984
In 1992, five members of the Tennille family established an endowment in the classics department honoring Margaret Rose Tennille (1917-2014).
Margaret Rose was born in Hopewell, Virginia, in March 1917. When she was six years old, her family moved to Winston-Salem, where she later attended Salem College for two years. In 1939, she married Norton F. Tennille and together they raised three sons. In 1961, she began a long career in public service when she became the administrative assistant to the mayor of Winston-Salem, a post she held for more than a decade.
In 1975, Margaret was elected to represent Forsyth County in the North Carolina General Assembly. Margaret served five terms in the state’s House of Representatives, rising to eleventh in seniority by the time she stepped down in 1984. Eight years later, her sons, Norton F. Tennille Jr. ’62 and Ben F. Tennille ’67, and her grandchildren, Margaret W. R. Tennille ’92, Norton Tennille III and Alexander G. Tennille ’95, created the Margaret Rose Tennille Fund in Classics in her honor. The endowment fund provides resources for faculty and students to pursue scholarship in the classics department.
Since its creation 23 years ago, the Tennille Fund has supported the classics department in numerous ways, including providing the department’s Ullman Library with its first online catalog. This new catalog made the library’s impressive 10,000-volume collection of classical literature in Greek and Latin widely accessible for the first time. The Tennille Fund also provides research support for faculty and graduate students in the department, such as procuring digitized copies of obscure manuscripts from archives around the world or purchasing books needed for literary research. Undergraduates also benefit from the Tennille Fund’s classroom support, which has provided archaeology fieldwork classes with surveying supplies, drawing materials and computer software to help prepare field sketches for study.
