Mary Hope Lacey Butler

Mary Hope Lacey Butler, 86, wife of Chalmers McNair Butler, passed away peacefully with family by her side on Wednesday, March 26, 2025, in Clemson, South Carolina.

Born on October 11, 1938, in Nacogdoches, Texas, Mary was the daughter of the late Trammell Calhoun Lacey and Janice Burroughs Lacey.

Mary was always a proud native Texan and had many fond memories of growing up in East Texas (yes, East is capitalized, she would say) with her older brother, Cal. Perhaps her favorite memory of early childhood was of her and Cal riding their horses to school every day. Even then, riding a horse to school was no longer the norm, but she and Cal did so happily, leaving the horses outside the schoolhouse where they would patiently graze until the end of classes.

After graduating from Nacogdoches High School, Mary enrolled at Rice University in Houston, where she excelled academically and flourished socially. Those who knew her always described her as exceptionally smart, savvy, and capable of holding her own with all sorts of people and in navigating anything life threw her direction. Throughout her college years, Mary was regarded as a leader. As a freshman, she was the president of her dorm and was later elected president of the Jones College for Women, president of Pi Delta Phi, the National French Honor Society, and selected to be a member of the Elizabeth Baldwin Literary Society. In 1960, she graduated and received her Bachelor of Arts in Romance Languages, achieving membership in Phi Beta Kappa and honored as one of ten outstanding seniors at Rice.

Following graduation from Rice, Mary chose to pursue a graduate degree at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She graduated one year later in 1961 with a Masters of Arts in French. While at Madison she met Chalmers Butler, a PhD student in electrical engineering, who would eventually become her husband of 59 years. It has been said by those who knew Mary most intimately that she had the difficult challenge of finding a man who was as smart as she was, or at least smart enough, to be her husband. In Chalmers, she found just that and yet it still took three years of courtship, a period that many who knew Mary and Chalmers at the time have described as a period where Chalmers had to draw upon his “formidable skills of persuasion.”

In March of 1966, Mary and Chalmers were married in Nacogdoches and then began their life together in Oxford, Mississippi, where Chalmers was the Chairman of the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Mississippi. Mary taught French at the university, but her other role was in assisting Chalmers in his relentless effort to attract new, quality faculty members and visiting nationally-known lecturers to the electrical engineering department. All were entertained in the modest Butler faculty housing, and Mary created a memorable impression. To this day, friends and colleagues at the university give Mary great credit for playing a significant role in Chalmers’s accomplishment of transforming an unaccredited electrical engineering department into a nationally-recognized center of research in just six years.

On Christmas Day of 1971, Mary gave birth to the couple’s first and only child, a son, Hardy, and Mary shifted from teaching French to being a full-time mom.

In 1985, after a brief, two-year stint in Houston where Chalmers had worked at the University of Houston, the family of three moved to Clemson, South Carolina, where Chalmers would spend the remainder of his career as a professor at Clemson University, his alma mater. The Clemson community provided a wealth of horticultural and other cultural opportunities that suited Mary well. She became involved in numerous activities and developed a large circle of friends. Her true passion was spending time in her yard, gardening, landscaping, and exploring the beauty of all that nature had to offer. Throughout the southeastern United States, there are plants in gardens, yards, and flower beds that originated from her yard or a garden she tended to. She loved to share her love for plants and flowers by giving away plants to anyone who she thought would take an interest. For many years, she was the unofficial but faithful caretaker of “the triangle” in front of her home in Clemson, which was a neighborhood common area where she would carefully plant hundreds of tulip bulbs each year for the enjoyment of everyone who entered the neighborhood.

She gave countless hours of her time to volunteer work, tirelessly working the soil and planting flowers, trees, and shrubs at the South Carolina Botanical Garden; serving as a faithful member of Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Clemson; advocating for at-risk school-age children as part of the Adopt-a-Cub program; and always seeking out ways to support those in the community who were less fortunate or just needed a helping hand.

She was a strong supporter of Clemson Community Care, the Clemson Child Development Center, and a broad range of arts and humanities that were affiliated with Clemson University and the surrounding communities, including Friends of the Brooks Center for the Performing Arts, the Utsey Chamber Music Series, Clemson Little Theatre, and many more. All was done quietly, modestly, and without fanfare.

Above all else, Mary loved her family. She always put family first and was a devoted wife, mother, and grandmother. Being “Mimi” to her granddaughters was her greatest joy in recent years, and she was so well-suited to be a loving grandmother. She is survived by her loving husband, Chalmers Butler; her son, Hardy Butler, and his wife, Rachel, of Chapel Hill, North Carolina; her cherished grandchildren, Elizabeth Anne and Caroline Haden; and her brother Trammell C. Lacey, Jr. (Kathryn) of Montecito, California.

A funeral service will be held on April 1, 2025, at 3:30PM at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Pendleton, South Carolina, 328 E Queen St, Pendleton, SC 29670, with burial to follow in the Church cemetery.

A reception will be held after the burial on April 1, 2025, at Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Clemson, South Carolina, 193 Old Greenville Hwy, Clemson, SC 29631.

In lieu of flowers, memorials may be made to VIA Health Partners at www.viagiving.org/donating or to the South Carolina Botanical Garden at https://iamatiger.clemson.edu/giving/scbg.