Whatever happened on that summer morning in 1915, what followed is less disputed.

Essie Dunbar lived for another forty-seven years after the alleged burial.

She remained in the Blackville area.

She appears to have continued to live the kind of constrained, quiet life that characterized the existence of many Black women in the rural South in the first half of the twentieth century.

The 1955 Augusta Chronicle article describes her, at the age of seventy, as picking cotton and receiving a welfare check.

This is not the portrait of a woman who had parlayed her extraordinary experience into any kind of exceptional circumstances.