This is a Message Board Post that is gatewayed to this mailing list. Surnames: Brown of Greenville, Spartanburg, & Anderson Classification: Birth Message Board URL: http://boards.ancestry.com/mbexec/msg/rw/UeB.2ACI/3877 Message Board Post: An Undesired Baby.---A few weeks ago attention was attracted by the appearance on our streets of a good looking, poorly dressed white woman with a fine baby apparently three or four months old. She came from Fairfield, she said, and seemed to be under the impression that babies were in demand in this market as she began to express a desire to dispose of her’s, avowing her willingness to give it to anybody who would take it. She sat a corner of Avenue and Main streets an entire day exposing the peculiar merchandize, but nobody appeared to want it. Reporters and other unsophisticated persons surmised that the infant probably had a father, but were naturally shy of enquiring as to his whereabouts. The woman finally went to Mrs. Humphreys, where she left her baby while she went to work at the Camperdown mill, where she was given employment for several days. On Wednesday night she left, ostensibly to go to the postoffice, but she was seen no more, and yesterday ! morning a postal card was found under the door at the Camperdown Factory office, saying: “Mrs. Humphrey: Please take care of my Richard Ross, or find some one else who will take care of him better than I can. Tell Mr. Scruggs to pay my wages for board. Yours, Mary Brown.” Miss Mary Brown seems to be a decidedly cool young person. No one has been able to ascertain anything of where she came from or went to. She was apparently about twenty – five years old, and looked like a country girl of the poorer class. Her possession of the infant never seemed to embarrass her in the least, and she always had the air of feeling that there was nothing at all unusual or suspicious in the fact of a young woman appearing at the street corners with a baby and offering to give it away to any applicant. Richard Ross is quite a handsome and well developed youngster, and will doubtless do well if properly cared for. _______________ Greenville Daily News. August 19, 1881.