Marshbanks, who once met Campbell’s founder as a boy, was a ‘walking encyclopedia of Campbell knowledge’
Burgess Marshbanks Jr. lived 100 of his 102 years of life in Buies Creek (those other two years he spent overseas serving his country during World War II). He attended both elementary school and college at Kivett Hall, and he even recalls meeting the founder of what is now Campbell University, J.A. Campbell, who gave Marashbanks a quarter when he was a young boy.
“It was the most money I’d ever seen at the time, it being the Great Depression,” he said recently. “I thought I was really well off with a quarter.”
A walking encyclopedia of knowledge for the school he held dear to his heart, Burgess Marshbanks Jr. died on Friday, surrounded by his three daughters, Lynn, Alice and Ann Marie.
Born in Buies Creek (back then, it was Buie’s with an apostrophe), he was the son of Lottie Marshbanks and Burgess Marshbanks Sr. He and his three sisters grew up on a family farm near Buies Creek Academy, which became Campbell Junior College when Marshbanks turned 3. His father was a professor and eventually a vice president of the school, which Marshbanks attended for two years before going to Wake Forest College for his four-year degree and Emory University for his doctorate in dentistry.
He served in World War II as a dentist for the U.S. Army Air Corps’ 79th Fighter Squadron and established a dental practice in Lillington, where he worked until retirement. He was a life member of the North Carolina Dental Society and the American Dental Association. Marshbanks and his wife Mary Jane were also founding members of Memorial Baptist Church in Buies Creek. Both were involved in numerous church, civic, educational and denominational boards and committees.
Coming from a family that emphasized the importance of higher education and one with strong, accomplished women, Marshbanks told his daughters that they could achieve anything they wanted and not to let anyone tell them otherwise. Burgess and Mary Jane were supporters of Baptist Women in Ministry, Campbell University, Mars Hill University and Friends of the Harnett County Library, among other organizations. Most of all, they were dedicated to serving God through their church.
Marshbanks was an active oral historian and mentor at Campbell University after retirement. Well into his 90s, he supported student-led interviews and underscored the importance of preserving local history. At one of the early Academic Symposiums hosted by Wiggins Memorial Library in 2013, Marshbanks and his wife attended a student’s presentation that highlighted interviews they’d performed with communication studies students.
“These are super, super students, and it makes me feel good about our country when I know this kind of leadership is on the way up. These are top-notch young people,” he said then.
After the presentation, Marshbanks shared why it was important for scholars to collect oral histories: “I had a really, really good friend whom I once heard say the age-old truth: ‘If you don’t know where you’ve been, you aren’t going to know where you’re going.’”
Marshbanks was featured by the Fayetteville Observer in 2015 for taking up a new hobby in his 90s: barn quilt painting. He and Mary Jane created 28 colorful designs prior to the story, many of which were given to friends and neighbors in Buies Creek.
He said he saw himself more as a “craftsman” than an artist, and said he took up the hobby not to sell his creations, but to give them away (that’s where the real joy came from, he said).
“I had a lot of people that I wanted to do something for,” he said. “People who have been very, very kind to me.”
Burgess Marshbanks Jr. was predeceased by his parents; his sisters May Marshbanks, Mildred Johnson and Nancy Bales; and most recently by his beloved wife, Mary Jane Marshbanks. He is survived by his three daughters — Lynn Marshbanks, Alice Marshbanks and Ann Marie Benjamin — and 10 grandchildren.
The family asks that memorial contributions be made to Memorial Baptist Church, P.O. Box 485, Buies Creek, North Carolina 27506.