
Ruby Thewes was an American farmer who lived in Cold Mountain, North Carolina during the 1860s.
Biography[]
Ruby Thewes was born in Cold Mountain, North Carolina, the daughter of farmer Stobrod Thewes. Her father was abusive towards her, beating her and even abandoning her on a mountain on one occasion. Her father had better use for her as a farmhand than as an educated girl, pulling her out of school to help on the farm. After her father joined the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War, Thewes was hired by Sally Swanger to help Ada Monroe maintain her Black Cove farm in 1864, and Thewes insisted to Monroe that she would be an equal on the farm, with the right to eat at the same table at the same time, and to share all of the work with Ada. The two came to develop an unlikely cross-class friendship, and they sheltered Swanger after her husband and sons were killed by the Confederate Home Guard. Ruby later reconciled with her reformed father after she and Monroe gave him shelter on his desertion, and Ruby fell in love with her father's bandmate Georgia White. She participated in Monroe and her lover William P. Inman's showdown with the Home Guard after the latter had tortured White into giving up Stobrod and Inman's location, shooting one of the Home Guardsmen before being shot and wounded. After Inman killed all of the Home Guardsmen before being fatally wounded, Thewes returned to the farm with Monroe, and, over the next few years, she married White and lived in peace with her father and friends at Black Cove.