The Sanford Brush & Palette Club is honored to have had Miss Ruby
as a member for many years, and to have been chosen as a recipient of endowments
from the Ruby and Ernest Worthy Lands Trust.

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Ruby Vann Crumpler McSwain, known to all as ‘Miss Ruby,’ motivated through her service to others and driven daily to impact many people for generations to come, was a Lee County artist, multi-venture entrepreneur, and North Carolina philanthropist. Born on March 31, 1918, in Sampson County, NC, and settling in Sanford, NC after her marriage to Ernest P. McSwain in 1945, Ruby was a member of the Sanford Brush and Palette Club, a devoted  member of Sanford’s First Baptist Church, supporter of the Temple Theatre, board member for the Lee County Enrichment Center, and advanced many other North Carolina organizations through her legacy endowments.

Despite the difficult loss of her spouse, Ernest, in 1976, Ruby’s ambition to become an artist led her to continuing education arts courses at Meredith College. Her artistic aspirations gave proof that a life, at any juncture or season, can be enriched and reinvigorated through the arts, and endowed Ruby with the confidence to join the Sanford Brush and Palette Club as an exhibiting painter of various mediums for many years. This new chapter would be the provenance of her growth as a mixed media painter and supporter of the arts within North Carolina.

Encouraged by her own growth as an artist, Ruby continued to promote the arts through her endowed scholarships at Meredith College, as well as her longtime service with the North Carolina Museum of Art’s Board of Trustees. Most notably, she created a substantial endowment to fund the growth of the Museum Park. Spanning over 160 acres, the Park intersects her life-long interests of land conservation alongside the Arts.

From a small office in The Fireplace, her Sanford decorative arts and antiques store, Miss Ruby would continue to work until she was 95 years old. With the walls around her adorned with her own paintings, she often remarked that she would ‘love to live forever.’ Ruby understood the key to making that lasting, timeless impact in her community was to seek out others that shared a similar vision. With that in mind, Miss Ruby firmly believed in the advancement of rural communities through their collaboration with educational institutions. 

After Miss Ruby C. McSwain’s passing in 2015 at the remarkable age of 97, her legacy carries on in Sanford through the efforts of the Ruby and Ernest Worthy Lands Trust. Their various need and merit-based scholarship endowments at numerous North Carolinian educational institutions offer advancement with first priority given to students of Lee County, NC, opening doors for Lee County students of all backgrounds. The Ruby and Ernest Worthy Lands Trust earnestly endeavors to carry on Miss Ruby C. McSwain’s wish to ‘live forever’ through benefitting and sustaining her various beloved communities, such as the Sanford Brush and Palette Club, and impacting the lives of artists, of every circumstance and background, that are inspired to do the same.

by Lyndsey Blackmon

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