Sarah Elizabeth Hubbard Bradley (April 18, 1875 – June 23, 1931)

Sarah Elizabeth Hubbard was one of five children. Her father, Henry Clay Hubbard, had served in the Union Army during the Civil War. He married Mary Elizabeth Spurling after the war. The Hubbards lived in a three-room log home on a small farm near Clark, Randolph County, Missouri.

Sarah, known as “Bessie,” attended a rural school near Clark. The one-room school’s teacher was John Smith Bradley. The two fell in love and were married at the Hubbard farm on May 12, 1892. Bessie gave birth to their first child on February 12, 1893. They named him Omar after a local newspaper editor. A few years later Bessie’s sister, Emma, the mother of two, died of tuberculosis. The Bradleys opened their home to their nieces Nettie and Opal. In 1900, Bessie gave birth to her second child and named him Raymond Calvert. He died two years later of scarlet fever.

In 1908, John Smith Bradley died at the family home in Higbee. A few months later, Bessie moved to Moberly. She became a professional seamstress, took in boarders, and enrolled her son in high school. On Christmas Day 1910, Bessie married John Robert Maddox. Maddox was a poor farmer and father of two boys whose wife had died. The two remained married for the next twenty-one years. On June 23, 1931, Bessie suffered a fatal stroke. She was buried next to her first husband and infant son in Log Chapel Cemetery, Higbee, Missouri. Omar Bradley wrote of her: "My mother, blue-eyed, strong-minded and entirely gray-haired before she was twenty, was an unfailingly cheerful and resourceful women."

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