Verona Joyner Langford

Verona Joyner Langford
Verona Joyner Langford. Image Source: The Tecoan, 1935.

Upon her passing in 2000, Verona Joyner Langford (1914-2000, maiden name, Verona Lee Joyner), a native of Farmville, N.C., bequeathed to J. Y. Joyner Library $8 million, then recognized as the largest single gift ever given to the school. Throughout her life, Langford had devoted herself to teaching and community service, occasioning none of the fanfare often associated with major donors. While there had been hints that Langford planned to make a sizeable gift to ECU, the magnitude of her generosity only became apparent upon her demise, leaving the director of Joyner Library, Carroll Varner, “flabbergasted.” Honoring her munificence, ECU named the new clock tower in Sonic Plaza across from the library’s entrance after Langford and her husband, Fred Timm Langford (1911-1975), and the North Carolina Collection after her, both posthumously. Two portraits of Mrs. Langford now grace Joyner Library, one alongside a portrait of her husband and located just inside the entrance to the library, and the other of Mrs. Langford serving tea, in the library’s Verona Joyner Langford North Carolina Collection.

Sixty-five years earlier, in 1935, Mrs. Langford had graduated from East Carolina Teachers College with an A.B. in home economics. At ECTC, she had been a member of the Emerson Society, Delta Omicron Sigma, and the Y. W. C. A. After graduation, she taught home economics at high schools in Jacksonville, Washington, and Farmville. She also worked as a Pitt County Home Demonstration Agent, and later as the Eastern District Home Demonstration Agent for the North Carolina Extension Service. Her final years of professional service were spent as a home economics teacher at Benvenue High School in Rocky Mount.

In 1946, she married Fred Timms Langford, then a Greenville resident working with the Veterans Administration as a farm training officer. During WWII, Langford had served as an assistant professor of military science and tactics at N. C. State College. A native of Blythewood, South Carolina, Langford had graduated from Clemson College in 1934, and was thereupon commissioned as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Reserve. In 1937, he moved to North Carolina as a high school teacher in Farmville. In 1938, he was promoted to first lieutenant and the following year returned to active duty. In June 1942, he was assigned duty at N. C. State College in the school’s ROTC program. He remained in that position through the end of the war.

From the early 1950s until Mr. Langford’s passing in 1975, the couple lived in Rocky Mount where Mr. Langford taught vocational agriculture at West Edgecombe High School. During that time Mrs. Langford continued her work as a home economics teacher at Benvenue High and as a tireless leader in civic affairs. In addition to teaching and volunteer work, Mrs. Langford was a member of the Farmville Literary Club and the Farmville United Methodist Church. In 1999, one year before her passing, she donated a 48-seat chapel to the Farmville United Methodist Church in the memory of her parents, Thomas Eli Joyner, Sr. and Agnes Darnoldson Barrett (For more information about Mrs. Langford’s parents, see the Pitt County Chronicles, 1982, p. 436).

The Langfords had no children. Over the years, they invested regularly in Carolina Telephone Company which later became Sprint. In 1975, her husband passed away. Upon her passing in 2000, her stock in that company alone was worth $3 million, while her total worth had risen to $8 million. Before her death, Mrs. Langford had decided to bequeath a large measure of her wealth to her alma mater. Although funding for a merit scholarship was considered, Mrs. Langford wanted her gift to impact as many students as possible. A distant relative of James Yadkin Joyner, longtime N. C. superintendent of public education and the namesake of the main campus library, Mrs. Langford decided that giving to Joyner Library was the best way to make her gift reach as many students as possible.

Commenting on the gift, Chancellor Richard Eakin remarked, “This is a truly memorable occasion for East Carolina. The library is the soul of the university, and Verona Langford’s vision and generosity will help assure the success and discoveries not only of current students and faculty but also of future generations of teachers and learners. The roots and traditions of this campus are in the preparation of school teachers and this magnificent bequest is made even more special by years that the Langfords spent teaching the children of eastern North Carolina.”

Library director Varner added that the Langford endowment “is a wonderful and significant contribution to ECU students and faculty.” Income from the endowment has been used to supplement the library’s holdings in ways that uniquely benefit the overall undergraduate student body. As a teacher and benefactor, Verona Langford exemplified to an extraordinary degree the ECU ethic of service to others.

Sources

More from Digital Collections

Verona Joyner Langford Image Source: The Tecoan, 1933

Verona Joyner Langford. Image Source: The Tecoan, 1934

Fred Langford. Image Source: Annual of West Edgecombe High School, 1962

Verona Joyner Langford. Image Source: Bee Hive Yearbook, Benvenue School, 1960

Citation Information

Title: Verona Joyner Langford

Author: John A. Tucker, PhD

Date of Publication: 10/6/2020

To top