Groundsite Image Gallery
Mary Sampson Patterson Langston, Marker
Artist: Hughes, Langston
Height: 0.000"
Width: 0.000"
Mary Sampson Patterson Langston, Marker, Oak Hill Cemetery
Mary Sampson Patterson first married Lewis Sheridan Leary, who was killed with John Brown at Harper’s Ferry. Then she married Charles Langston in 1869.
Mary was born in North Carolina and educated at Oberlin College. In the 1860 U.S. Census, she is listed as a milliner in Oberlin.
She and Charles Langston married in 1869 and moved to a farm in Lakeview, Kansas, near Lawrence, in 1870. There she had two children, Nathaniel (1870) and Carolina (1873), Langston Hughes’s mother. The family moved to town in 1886.
After her husband’s death she supported herself and family by renting rooms in her house. Her grandson, Langston Hughes, lived with her much of his boyhood.
Hughes remembers her looking very much like an Indian, copper-colored with long, black hair, just a little gray in places(The Big Sea). He remembered her love of books.