Eleanor Rose Bennet

Eleanor Rose Bennett was born on a quiet spring morning in Savannah, Georgia, the second of four children to Robert and Mae Collins. From her earliest years, Eleanor had a gift that couldn't be taught — she made everyone around her feel like the most important person in the room.

She studied education at the University of Georgia, where she met a young architecture student named Harold Bennett at a campus dance in 1963. They married the following summer in a small ceremony by the Savannah River, surrounded by family and the smell of magnolias. It was, by all accounts, the happiest day eithe…