B. EARLE YANCEY

History of Georgia - Vol. II., S. J. Clarke Publishing - 1926

B.[Benjamin] Earle Yancey, member of the firm of Yancey Brothers, Atlanta, is well known as one of the city's younger business men, whose ability and enterprise finds expression in the growth and development of one of the largest business concerns of its kind in the south. His identification with Yancey Brothers began with the firm's inception, and his efforts have been a contributing factor to its progress ever since.

Mr. Yancey was born May 11, 1891, in Athens, Georgia, and belongs to one of the old and prominent families of the south, one that has been represented in America since the year 1642, when four brothers of that name, Charles, William, Joel and Robert, left their home in Wales and became members of the Virginia colony. Lewis Davis Yancey, a son of, one of those sturdy Welsh pioneers, became proprietor of a landed estate In Culpeper county, Virginia, about 1710. James Yancey, his sixth son, was an officer in the Revolutionary war, and later settled in Charleston, South Carolina, where he married a Miss Cudworth of an old Massachusetts family and was associated with Robert Goodloe Harper in the practice of law. The eldest son of James Yancey was Benjamin Cudworth Yancey, who married Caroline Bird, and one of their sons was William Lowndes Yancey, the grandfather of B. Earle Yancey, born August 10, 1814, and died July 27, 1863. William Lowndes Yancey was a national political figure and was recognized as one of America's greatest orators and reformers. o extended mention of this gentleman will be found on another page of this work.

B. Earle Yancey's parents were Goodloe Harper and Lucy G. (Dupree) Yancey, the former of whom was born in Montgomery, Alabama, and the latter in Lexington, Oglethorpe county, Georgia. Both are now deceased, the father dying in Atlanta, in 1924, and the mother's death occurring at Athens, Georgia, in 1893. Additional mention of Goodloe Harper Yancey and his family appears elsewhere in this work.

After the completion of his elementary education, B. Earle Yancey attended the Peacock Preparatory School in Atlanta and the Georgia School of Technology. For eighteen months he was an assistant in the United States patent office at Washington, D. C., then accepted a position with the sales department of the Swift Packing Company of Chicago, Illinois, remaining with that company for about a year and a half, when, in 1912, he went into business with his brother Goodloe H. under the firm name of Yancey Brothers. The growth and expansion of their business has been remarkable and now ranks with the foremost of its kind in the south, as distributors of contractors equipment, road building machinery and county supplies. They are also distributors for Georgia of the Holt Caterpillar Tractor line, and B. Earle Yancey is a director of the Associated Equipment Distributors of America.

He was married in Atlanta, December 6, 1913, to Miss Lulu Jack Harris, a daughter of Captain L. J. Harris, and they now have two sons, B. Earle, Jr., born August 16, 1916; and Jack Dupree, whose birth occurred August 19, 1920.

Mr. Yancey is a York Rite Mason, a member of the Chamber of Commerce, the Kiwanis Club, the Atlanta Athletic Club; and the Atlanta Automobile Association: His religion views are in harmony with the ,tenets of the Second Baptist church, of which he is an earnest member. His residence is at No. 5 Fairview road.