02/01/2025
Frances Manning Chambers Dawson
Frances Manning Chambers Dawson, 82, of Scottsboro, Alabama, died January 27, 2025. For more than 30 years Frances served as stated clerk of Robert Donnell Presbytery, a position which she performed with great care and from which she derived even greater joy. She was a member of the Scottsboro Cumberland Presbyterian Church until the presbytery started a new church in Madison. She was there until her health no longer allowed her to make the hour drive each week. It was then that she joined her next door neighbor, elder Rhonda Hess, going to the Goose Pond Cumberland Presbyterian Church which she eventually made her home.
Frances was born June 4, 1942, in Athens, Alabama, to Wellington Chambers, Jr., and Martha Manning Chambers. She attended Florida Southern College in Lakeland, Florida from September 1959 to June 1960, before entering Athens College (now Athens University) in Athens, Alabama, from which she graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in June 1963. In September 1963, she was admitted to the graduate school of the University of Miami. From September 1964 to March 1965, she spent long periods in the Everglades studying parasites in sunfish which became the subject of her master’s thesis. She was granted the degree of Master of Science from the University on June 8, 1965.
She then returned to Athens and held an associate professorship in biology at Athens College. There she met her husband of more than 57 years, Charles Cook Dawson, Sr. While Charles was in law school in Birmingham, Alabama, she worked at University Hospital in various positions including the pathology lab. The Dawsons came to Scottsboro in 1969, where Charles practiced law for 50 years.
She was best known as a piano instructor, organ and piano accompanist at various churches and groups, and office manager in her husband’s law office. She was a member of the Scottsboro Music Study Club. A voracious reader, she completed advanced foreign language (including several terms of classical Greek) and international cultural studies during summer programs at The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee.
Mrs. Dawson was, for a number of years, the guiding force behind many of the social aspects of the Jackson County Bar, serving as its treasurer and secretary and first non-lawyer ever named to those positions. She devoted herself to supporting her husband’s civic activities, including The Gideons International, Kiwanis International (where she routinely sold the most pancake breakfast tickets year-after-year), and the Boy Scouts of America.
Her love of all animals was well-known, but cats were first in her heart among the animal kingdom. She particularly delighted in christening them with great names – literary, classical and biblical – such as Dorian Gray, Agamemnon, Antigone and Manoah.
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Since 1829, the Cumberland Presbyterian has been the publication of record for the Cumberland Presbyterian denomination.
