Helen Jean Ledford

Helen Jean Farthing Ledford, 88, passed peacefully into life everlasting on January 22, 2025, at Novant Health Kernersville Medical Center after a battle with influenza A. This chick hatched out into the world on February 16, 1936, in Caswell County, NC and cheerfully chirped, “Hello, world! Here I am!” She was born to the late William Edwin and Allie Mae Davis Farthing and was raised on the family farm as the beautiful and precocious blue-eyed baby of 10 children. 

Helen, or Helen Jean, as her childhood peers knew her best, cherished her time and experiences growing up on the farm. She was a born artist and writer whose stories, illustrations, cartoons, and custom artwork of many kinds enthralled both children and adults throughout the decades of her life. With lightning-fast wit and a razor-sharp tongue, Helen was the life of every party and a supreme instigator and ringleader of frequent shenanigans. Spreading laughter was like oxygen to her, and she shared laughs with everyone she could. She never got rich by the world’s standards; she never cared about those anyway. Her wealth and joy lay in her vast collection of friends and family, whom she loved and who loved her. 

Helen graduated from Bartlett Yancey High School in Yanceyville, NC in 1954 and married her handsome beau, Jack, in 1955. She worked in textile mills during her early adulthood, and she told many times about being kicked out of art class at technical school in the 1960s when the instructor said his class would ruin her unique style. She drew illustrations for the Greensboro Daily News, and at times she appeared on local daytime TV in Greensboro to share her artwork with viewers. Throughout her life, she created countless one-of-a-kind cards, paintings, and drawings on commission and as gifts.

After moving to Oak Ridge at the beginning of the 1970s, she became a teacher assistant at Oak Ridge Elementary School, where she taught for many years and then volunteered for many more years after her retirement. For even more years, she taught children and teenagers in Sunday School. Her artwork was integral to her teaching as she illustrated stories and lessons and decorated classrooms and hallways to the delight of her students. In and away from school and church, Helen taught art lessons, wrote skits and song lyrics, painted murals, and drafted commercial signs by hand. Her former kindergarteners and other former pupils, many of whom are parents and grandparents now, still treasure the badges, custom-painted t-shirts, and Christmas ornaments she made for them in their likenesses. She made up a whole hilarious and secretive imaginary world, “Grandmaland”, to entertain her daughter and later her grandchildren and niece and nephew–complete with a full cast of ridiculous characters and customs and a peculiar dialect. Perhaps Helen’s most cherished and crowning piece of art is the baptistry painting that may still be viewed at her former home church, Rankin Baptist Church in Greensboro, NC, depicting her conception of the Jordan River.

For Helen, showing love was much more a matter of helping and giving than it was of saying the words. She could never see any human in need of friendship or support and look the other way. Some of Helen’s very best and most remarkable times were the decades she spent—starting in the mid-1970s in Oak Ridge, Stoneville, and the surrounding areas—ministering among farm workers and their families who had come mainly from Mexico and Central America. She and Jack opened their home and hearts for this purpose, and Helen received and loved each one as if they were part of her own real family. 

Helen partnered with some close friends and Spanish-speaking ministers to begin this lifelong ministry endeavor first through Union Grove Baptist Church in Oak Ridge. A number of current, local ministries grew out of the work that started with Helen befriending and serving migrant and immigrant families and organizing church and community support for them. She did this at times in the face of blatant opposition, for pure love of real people who were often seen and treated with little or no respect by others. Helen was not only a fearless organizer and advocate; she was a true friend and “mother” to thousands of God’s children far from their homelands, even leading some individuals to know her Lord through the scriptures as they sat across from her at her kitchen table. Her place within the hearts of so many within the immigrant and new American communities in and around Guilford, Rockingham, and Forsyth counties and beyond stands strong. 

She knew how to live the life of a true neighbor as her Jesus taught in John 10:30-37, and she often taught these very scriptures and exemplified this kind of life.

Helen was personally active in church mission programs such as Women’s Missionary Union, nursing home visitation, teaching English as a second language, ministry to international students, and mission trips to New York state, the Oglala Sioux people on their tribal reservation in South Dakota, and in the North Carolina mountains. She financially supported local, regional, and national Christian ministries, most notably her home church. She also was a longtime supporter of the National Kidney Foundation (NKF).

In the late 1990s, Helen began writing features about notable local residents, local history, and her own personal experiences for the Northwest Observer. She also wrote similar articles for the Caswell Messenger, her original hometown newspaper. She conceived of and drew the illustrations that appeared alongside these stories, and she had a following of fans of her storytelling. In 2014, she began a time of touring with her first book, Helen Jean Stories–a collection of her written memories and drawings–and continuing with the subsequent release of a second collection and two of her children’s books, which she wrote for her daughter as a little girl. Helen continued writing and publishing until failing eyesight and general health made it more difficult in the last couple of years of her life. A final collection she had prepared has yet to be released.

Besides being just a general and utter hoot from the crack of dawn to midnight–and loving doing it, some of Helen’s greatest joys were children and grandchildren; doing mission work “en el nombre de Jesucristo”; keeping prayer lists full of people and meticulously bringing them before the Lord each day, reading books and magazines, dispensing often sought-after advice, helping and making special gifts for friends and neighbors; taking notice of the tiniest details of her natural surroundings, like a tiny inchworm or the first red buds on the maple trees in the dead of winter; watching wild animals including birds, deer, butterflies, bunnies, and bears; tending plants and flowers in her yard and home, especially admiring cedar trees and daffodils; walking fast along the ocean on the sands of Topsail Beach, NC; fresh summer corn and strawberries; cooking up a pot of soup or pinto beans with some “good ol’ cornbread” baked in her trusty cast iron frying pan; following the movement of weather, sun, and seasons—and she especially loved ducks. She longed for springtime, annually predicting and pointing out each sign of its coming and arrival, especially the triumphant appearance of her daffodils, which she called “buttercups”, defiantly pushing their green heads above ground, through snow, toward the cold January sky. She lamented the growing loss of habitat in recent years for animals and their gradual disappearance from her yard, particularly tadpoles, tree frogs, honeybees, and her favorite monarch butterflies whom she tended and took in for hatching from their cocoons for many years as a personal enjoyment and a teaching activity.

This space cannot hold an exhaustive account of all that Helen was, did, and enjoyed. A strong woman of faith, resilience, and humor, perhaps one of the most unquestionably consistent traits about her was that even in her most difficult times, Helen thought mainly of others.

In addition to her parents, Helen is preceded in death by her husband Jack James Ledford, her specially beloved son Mark Edwin Ledford, and her infant son Jack James Ledford Jr., as well as by her older siblings Eldridge, Roy, Sadie, Virginia, Louise, Wilbur, Jewell, W. E. aka Bill or Dubby, and Ethel, all of whom she greatly missed. 

Helen is survived by her daughter Lenore Morales and her husband Charles aka “Dallas” of Raeford; her beloved grandchildren Jesse Harris and her husband Zvi, and Nathan Morales and his wife Katharine, who all called her G-Ma; and by numerous nieces and nephews including those who saw her as a second Mama especially in recent years: Mike Wilkins (Phyllis) and Julie Hogan (Mike). Also surviving are two special daughters Katrena Dalton of Oak Ridge, NC and Sandra Broadnax of Kernersville, NC, a special son Pastor Luciano Covarrubias of High Point, NC, and countless other “children” and “grandchildren” living around the world whose names, if all listed here, would surely run far over the end of this page. She deeply loved all of her offspring, whether born by flesh or by heart.  

Helen treasured the additional helpers who not only assisted her at home but who also became dear friends and family over the past several years: Christine, Karen, Adriana, and Rhina. The family expresses their heartfelt thanks to them for their love and care.

A celebration service will be held at her home church, Central Baptist Church in Oak Ridge, NC, on Saturday, February 15, 2025, at 11a.m. The family will receive friends before the service between 10a.m. and 11a.m., as well as for up to one hour after the celebration service concludes. A graveside service at Yanceyville Municipal Cemetery in Yanceyville, NC will follow at approximately 3:30p.m. Friends are invited to attend in both locations as they may be able.

In lieu of flowers, donations in memory of Helen may be directed to the following causes: the Central Baptist Church Missions Fund (Central Baptist Church, PO Box 

533, Oak Ridge, NC 27310), or the National Kidney Foundation (www.kidney.org).