A Legacy of Giving Emy Evans Blair ’52 and Duane Blair both valued education and through their generosity made sure others benefited as well. —By Sara Baxter
Emy Evans Blair ’52 and Duane Blair throughout the years as students in the late 1940s/early 1950s (right), together in the early 1970s (above), and at holiday party before Duane’s retirement in April 2003 (top right). Photos courtesy of Kim Fortenberry Siegelson ’84
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If you were to look around Agnes Scott College—at the buildings, the classrooms or even the students—it would be hard not to see some evidence of the generosity of longtime philanthropists and Agnes Scott supporters Emy Evans Blair ’52 and Henry Duane Blair. Throughout their lifetime, the Blairs gave millions of dollars in gifts to the college for specific causes and scholarship funds— some of which they created—as well as to The Fund for Agnes Scott.
“Emy would call us and ask, ‘What do you need?’” says Betsy Bilbro Huey ’97, director of leadership giving at Agnes Scott, who knew the Blairs for more than 12 years. “Sometimes she would have an idea, and other times she had enough faith and trust to let us put her gift where it was needed.” Though her love of the college ran deep, Sarah Emma “Emy” Evans Blair did not come to Agnes Scott by choice. Emy’s mother, Sarah McCurdy Evans, a 1921
alumna whose own mother also attended Agnes Scott, chose the college for her. The deal was Emy had to stay a year, and then she would be allowed to transfer to another college if she liked. Emy never took her mother up on that offer. Her boyfriend was at Emory University at Oxford, and she did not want to go too far from him. And it turned out Agnes Scott was the right place for her. “She loved her time at Agnes Scott,” says Karen Fortenberry
