Lillie Ladd
Lillie Ladd (1879-1981) was the grandmother of Howard H. Baker Jr. and the first woman to serve as sheriff in Tennessee.
Early Life
Born Lillie Matilda Cox on July 11, 1879, “Mother Ladd,” as she would later be known, was originally from Oliver Springs, Tenn. She was the daughter of Abraham Cox (1812-1884) and Annie M. Davis Cox (1834-1925).
Family
Cox married Chris Ladd (1876-1927) of Oliver Springs in 1898, at the age of 19. They had five children: Son Gillis (1899-1901), daughter Dora Ann (1901-1934), daughter Myrtle (1903-1992), son Joe William (1906-1915) and daughter Frankie (1908-1959).
Dora Ann Ladd would marry Howard Henry Baker Sr. — the future U.S. Congressman from Huntsville — on Feb. 11, 1925. Their oldest child, Howard H. Baker Jr., was born in 1925 and would go on to serve as U.S. Senate Majority Leader and as President Ronald Reagan’s White House Chief of Staff.
1927 Jailbreak
Chris Ladd was the elected sheriff of Roane County, Tenn. in 1926. Nine months later, in 1927, he fell ill and sought medical care in Illinois. While there, the Ladds received a wire that there had been a jailbreak back home in Roane County; as many as 20 prisoners had escaped.
Mother Ladd caught a train back to Roane County to see to the men’s capture. She would later say, “I had an idea where two of them might be and I got a young man I knew to drive me to where I figured they’d be hiding out.”
Ladd parked at the men’s hideout and kept honking her horn until two of them came down the hill to talk to her. She talked them into giving themselves up.
“Now you sit down here boys and let me talk to you,” she later said that she told the men. “Listen, there are lots of the deputies who would love to kill you, and they’re up here scootin’ around in these mountains right now, and they’ll kill you if you don’t come back with me to the jail.”
When she got back to town, Ladd wired her husband to inform him of the men’s capture. The Western Union employee tipped off a reporter, and there was a half-page story about the men’s capture in the next day’s Chattanooga Times newspaper. Chris Ladd read the story before his wife had even returned home. And because the two ringleaders had been captured, the remaining escapees decided to give themselves up. Mother Ladd became a celebrity in the process.
Sheriff of Roane County
Chris Ladd died on June 24, 1927. After his death, Roane County Court appointed Mother Ladd to serve out the remainder of her husband’s term. She agreed to the assignment, and kept law and order with a .38 pistol in her purse. She was notorious for keeping the Roane County Jail full of moonshiners and other ne’er-do-wells, but resigned the job after three months, saying that being a sheriff was not her calling. Her brother-in-law, Frank Ladd, was appointed to replace her.
Move to Huntsville
Mother Ladd’s life was filled with tragic deaths. Her first child had died in 1901, at the age of two. A second son, Joe William, died in 1915, at the age of eight. Her husband died in 1927. And, in 1934, her oldest daughter died of peritonitis at the age of 32.
Young Howard Henry Baker Jr. was just eight years old when his mother died. Ladd moved from Oliver Springs to Huntsville, Tenn. to care for the young boy and his younger sister, Mary Elizabeth.
UT Housemother
Ladd lived in Scott County for several years, then moved to Knoxville, Tenn. and took a job as the first housemother of the Lambs Chi Alpha fraternity at the University of Tennessee. It was there that she earned the nickname Mother Ladd. On one particular occasion, a burglar entered the fraternity. When he tried to enter her room, she fired her gun twice through the door, forcing him to flee.
“I just started shooting right through the door,” she said. “Oh, how he scrambled. I didn’t know but what I had killed him. We found splinters all through the room where I had shot through the door. They were selling papers on the streets in Knoxville that said, ‘Extry, Extry, Housemother Shoots Burglar.'”
In 1941, Ladd married Rhinehart Patrick Mauser (1880-1948).
Politics
Ladd was a diehard Republican. When she married Mauser in 1941, she admitted that he was a Democrat and a Methodist, while she was a Republican and a Baptist. “I will go to his church but I will never change my politics,” she said.
Ladd’s father fought for the Union Army during the Civil War and she was fond of saying, “Thank God, he was on the winning side, the Republican side.”
When her grandson, Baker, ran for president in 1980, he joked that his grandmother wanted him to run for sheriff.
“She told me if I really wanted to run for president she would support me, but she said, ‘Son, if you don’t run for president, run for sheriff,'” he said. (She responded: “I didn’t say no such a thing. Howard Henry made that up.”)
Death
Ladd fell ill on April 5, 1981. She was admitted to Blount Memorial Hospital in Maryville, Tenn., suffering from pneumonia. She died two weeks later, on April 20, 1981. She was buried at Berry Highland Memorial Cemetery in Knoxville, Tenn.
At the time of her death, U.S. Sen. Howard H. Baker Jr. said of his grandmother: “She was very, very close to me. But it is difficult to be overwhelmed with sorrow because Mother Ladd had such a joyous and productive life. Rather than be sad, I prefer to think of how delightful she was when we were together.”