Mary Emmaline Smith

After 91 years of living life the way she wanted, on the move from one adventure to the next, Mary Emmaline Smith has found a place to rest. She died peacefully in her home in Chapel Hill, Tennessee on July 15, 2024. Born in Paducah, Kentucky on Feb. 5, 1933, Memma, as she was known since childhood, owned and worked ranches and farms across the Southern United States and in Mexico with her late husband Perry “Pete” Verasno Smith, Jr, with whom she raised three children.

Memma met Pete when they were both students at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida. It took Memma a little while for her to realize it was her that Pete was coming around to visit but once she did, it didn’t take them long to fall for each other.

Memma was only 20 and Pete was 21 when they decided to get married.

“You had to get married if you were going to do anything,” Memma said of why she and Pete married so young.

Memma was fiercely independent even as a young woman. When she set her mind to something, she was going to do it. And she certainly wasn’t going to do something just because someone else told her that was how it was “supposed to be done.” So, when her mother began planning a large, elaborate wedding, Memma was having none of it.

“My mother was just making the thing more and more and more and I just didn't want it,” Memma said. “So, we ran away and got married.”

On Feb. 17, 1953, Memma and Pete took a bus about 95 miles north to Folkston, Georgia where you could get a marriage license and get married the same day. From that day on, Memma and Pete were inseparable.

They moved into a tiny apartment in Gainesville and in the next few years bounced around Florida as the children arrived: Perry “Rusty” Verasno Smith, III born in Leesburg; Steven Luke Smith born in Ocala; Nena Gregory Smith born in St. Petersburg.

It also wasn’t long before Pete’s dream to own a ranch became Memma’s as well. The quest for a piece of land of their own to raise cattle and horses and children would take them from the swamps of Florida to the deserts of northern Mexico and everywhere in between. But the first of those ranches was in the hills of northwest Arkansas in the early 1960s.

We bought it and we were so happy and we thought we would just have cows there and everything would be fine,” Memma said.

It wasn’t until after they’d bought the ranch that they realized that they had “300 acres of rocks.” Memma laughed remembering how it was so cold that first year that the cows got sick. The boys had to run hot coals up to the pump house to keep it from freezing. Pete had to trade a shotgun to buy a wood burning stove for the house to keep them all warm.

They eventually had to sell that first ranch but it was not the last big gamble Memma and Pete would make. To list every place they moved to, every business started, classes taught, Country music celebrities befriended, horses bought and sold, would take more than a couple pots of coffee to recount. But the family did make its way back to Florida and onto some land they could lease on the banks of Lake Okeechobee.

The stories of cowboying on that ranch get retold whenever two or more Smiths get together. The time Pete fell into a gator hole. Or when Steve found a rattlesnake under his hat and then Pete, Rusty and Steve burned an entire length of fence trying to kill it. Or how Dirk, Memma’s favorite dog, would sit at the dinner table and eat from fork. Or how Memma let Nena and Steve lure baby gators out of the water with bobbers so that they’d learn that wherever you see baby gators, momma gators aren’t far behind. And on and on and on.

But perhaps their biggest gamble to make it big raising cattle was when Memma and Pete decided to sell everything but the horses and move to Mexico. The move wouldn’t work out as far as the ranching went, but for everyone in Memma’s family, the move would be monumental. Her children would learn a new culture, a new language and would eventually find love and start families of their own.

She and Pete would stay on the move, always looking over the next hill or around the next curve in the road for a new piece of land that could let them spend their days out in the woods and the fields with their horses and cattle.

Memma loved spending time in nature and around animals. Even when she was well past the age of working cattle or riding horses, she would stop on a backroad next to a pasture to talk to the cows that would come up and stare back at her.

Memma and Pete may have never made it big ranching but they more than made up for it with the fun they had and the love they shared. There are an endless number of stories of Memma and Pete refusing to live by “the rules.” They were never stuck in cubicles. They didn’t work “normal” jobs or hours. They always followed their hearts, even when there was no plan to follow. They took the first step and figured the rest out as they went. 

Memma taught her children and her grandchildren to be independent, speak up for what they wanted and to stand up for what was right. She may have now found a beautiful piece of land at Larkspur Conservancy where she can spend time around trees, flowers and animals, but her memory will continue to travel everywhere her children, grandchildren and great grandchildren go.

Mary Emmaline Smith is preceded in death by her husband Perry Verasno Smith Jr.; Father Philip Arthur Ritchie; Mother Myrtle Masko; Sisters Shirley and Grace; and Brother Phillip. She is survived by son Perry Verasno Smith III and wife Yolanda Smith and children Laura, Marco and Cristina, son Steven Luke Smith and Micaela Smith and children Christopher, Jacqueline, Nathaniel and Derek; Daughter Nena Gregory Smith and children Amanda and Nora; and 12 great-grandchildren.  A graveside service will be held at 10 AM on July 28, 2024 at Larkspur  Conservation at Taylor Hollow, 155 Bear Carr Rd, Westmoreland, TN  37186.

In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations be made to the charity of your choice.