12/25/2025
🤍💫
She buried twenty-four babies of her own, one small grave at a time, in the rocky soil of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Born around 1844 in North Carolina, Orlean Hawks Puckett married at sixteen and built a hard, isolated life near Groundhog Mountain, Virginia. In 1862 she gave birth to her first child, Julia Ann, and for seven months she knew joy—until diphtheria took her baby. Then it happened again. And again. Some babies lived hours. Some days. Some never breathed at all. None survived long enough to call her Mama.
In an era with no answers, no medicine, and no mercy, Orlean carried a grief most people would not survive. Today we believe Rh disease caused the losses, but she could only bury her children and keep going. And then, around age fifty, when a neighbor went into labor and no one else could help, Orlean stepped forward. In that moment, she turned unimaginable loss into purpose.
For the next fifty years, she walked miles through mountains and storms, never charging a penny, delivering babies in dirt-floor cabins with only her hands, her knowledge, and fierce determination. She delivered more than one thousand babies. She never lost a single mother. She never lost a single child.
The woman who lost everything made sure no other mother had to. That is not just survival. That is transformation. That is choosing love after devastation, again and again, for a lifetime.
