Meta Turley Goodson graduated from Randolph-Macon’s Woman’s College in 1908. She was a member of the Gamma Chapter of Sigma Sigma Sigma.
Goodson is on the bottom right in this photo of the RMWC Panhellenic Council .
In 1912, she compiled a directory of the sorority’s members.
In 1913, she served as Editor Pro Tem for the February 1913 issue of the Triangle of Sigma Sigma Sigma. The editor, Lucy Lykes Downey, married J. J. Eaton on November 14, 1912. Goodson served as maid of honor and also took her friend’s place and served as editor for an issue.
Goodson’s hometown was Morristown, Tennessee. She earned a Master’s of Arts at Columbia University in 1916 and a Library Science degree from Columbia in the early 1930s.
Throughout her life she was involved in civic organizations including the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Hamblem County Chapter of the Association of the Preservation of Tennessee Antiquities, an organization she help to found in 1952.
In 1925, Hamblen County’s first library was established by the community women’s organizations. Talk of starting a library had begun more than a decade before when the local women’s organizations discussed the possibility of a community library. The community tried to be the recipient of a Carnegie Library. Goodson was the community member who investigated this possibility. In 1925, a women’s clubhouse was acquired and a library was started in this building. For a membership fee of $1 per year, each patron could borrow books. The city gave $100 to this effort. The women’s organizations involved in this project were identified as the Ladies Reading Circle, Somo Sala Circle, Sam Davis U.D.C. and Samuel Doak D.A.R. Goodson served as Chairman to the Library Board from 1947-50.
In 1959, the Morristown Library location moved from the Women’s Clubhouse to an old Bell South Telephone and Telegraph Company building on West Second North Street.
Morristown-Hamblen Library when it opened in 1969
In 1965, Goodson gave a gift of $350,000 for the building of a new library, but she stipulated that the City of Morristown and Hamblen County should provide operating costs.
Ground was broken in May 1967, but Goodson did not live to se the library completed; she died suddenly on July 30, 1968. Some in the community thought the library should be named in her memory and the movement acquired some steam. The library board finally agreed to abide by Goodson’s wish when she made the donation, and not name it for her. There is a plaque in her memory on display in the library and, in 1987, her nieces commissioned a local artist to paint a portrait of Goodson that is on display in the main room.
