Born: 7 January 1884, United States
Died: 1 October 1970
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Elfrida De Renne
The following is shared from The New Georgia Encyclopedia, which allows the use of protected materials for noncommercial educational purposes.
Having acquired the title to Wormsloe House in 1931, Elfrida Barrow moved there in 1938. By that time Barrow had printed verse in Harriet Monroe’s magazine Poetry and other publications, and she had also published some historical pieces in the Georgia Historical Quarterly and coauthored Anchored Yesterdays (1923, with Laura Palmer Bell) and Georgia: A Pageant of Years (1933).
In 1953 Barrow incorporated the Wormsloe Foundation, one of whose activities was the publication of historical works. In the De Renne tradition, these were principally primary materials such as the colonial journals of Peter Gordon and William Stephens. Also following tradition, she associated these books with the De Renne estate, calling them the Wormsloe Foundation Publications. The first volume, E. Merton Coulter’s Wormsloe: Two Centuries of a Georgia Family, appeared in 1955; the twenty-first volume, a history of the De Renne family, was published in 1999.
In the last years of Elfrida Barrow’s life, the Wormsloe Foundation purchased the rich manuscript collection of Keith Read of Savannah and presented it to the University of Georgia Library. Shortly before her death, the library also acquired the majority of the De Renne family papers from her brother’s estate.