Louise Florencourt

Ms. Wilhelmina "Louise" Florencourt, 97, passed away on July 31, 2023. A Funeral Mass will be celebrated on Saturday, August 12, 2023 at 11 AM in Sacred Heart Catholic Church. Burial will be in Memory Hill Cemetery. The family will receive friends at Williams Funeral Home on Friday, August 11, 2023 from 5 PM until 7 PM with a Prayer Service at 6:30 Wilhelmina Louise Florencourt, born in Savannah, Georgia, the second of four daughters of Frank Bernard Von Florencourt and Agnes Cecelia Cline never saw second in line again. First in her class at St. Agnes School in Arlington, Massachusets, first in her class at Arlington High School where she was speaker at her graduation and voted “most intellectual” in her class. A graduate of Radcliffe (Harvard) she continued to play the violin in the orchestra and was a member of Radcliffe’s first rowing team which organized to replace the Harvard rowing team who had gone off to war. Majoring in Government at Radcliffe, graduating with honors, led her to become one of the first class including women accepted to Harvard Law School and graduate as one of nine in 1953. Louise was a first. After graduation, Louise passed the Massachusetts Bar exam and joined the Boston Bar Association, where through 1955, she clerked for Judge John Spalding, Associate Justice to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. In 1955, Louise joined the Boston law firm of Morgan, Brown & Kearns, practicing employment law. In 1956, having joined the Interstate Commerce Commission legal staff in Washington, DC, Louise successfully briefed and argued numerous Sherman Antitrust and Wilson Tariff Act cases before the Chief Justice Earl Warren Supreme Court, on behalf of the Solicitor General of the United States, in the transportation, industrial and consumer products industries. In 1963, Louise joined the Federal Communications Commission legal staff, where she served as Director of the FCC Opinions and Review Board and the Administrative Law and Legislation Office, where she researched and authored Licensing, Fairness Doctrine, Equal Employment and Regulatory Adjudication rulings. In 1979, Louise joined the Federal Merit Systems Protection Board, as Director, Special Decisions and Special Projects, charged with preparing and conducting hearings, reviewing cases and conducting research, many of which were in the area of equal employment opportunity, where she served through 1992. Louise’s success and good times in the north never replaced her love for the south nurtured in her youth by the family’s trips from Boston every summer to be with the Cline family of aunts, uncles and cousins in Milledgeville. Louise, being one of the many visiting cousins felt first again as the Cline family rolled out the red carpet for all of us and pulled out all stops for entertainment, parties, trips to Atlanta, horse shows, horseback riding (which Louise excelled at) and the time of our lives at Andalusia, (then known as Sorrel Farm because of Dr. Cline’s sorrel colored horses). Trips to Atlanta to visit Uncle Bernard and have an eye checkup always included more social events at the Piedmont Driving Club, staying at the Georgian Terrace and shopping at Rich’s Dept. Store and having lunch at the Frances Virginia Tea Room. After retiring from more than 35 years of government service, Louise moved from Washington to Milledgeville to assist her aunt, Regina Cline O’Connor in forming and directing the affairs of the Mary Flannery O’Connor Charitable Trust, managing her cousin Flannery’s portfolio of copyrighted literary works and their derivatives in current writings and the visual arts. After Regina’s death in 1995, Louise served as executrix of Regina’s estate, continuing to direct the Flannery O’Connor Charitable Trust and with her literary agent, to evaluate derivative works, only recently relinquishing her directorship role. In 2001, Louise co-founded, along with her sister, Margaret Florencourt Mann, the Flannery O’Connor - Andalusia Foundation, encompassing the O’Connor house, outbuildings and farm, which in 1980, following a protracted effort and significant investment to stabilize the structures, was accepted and placed on the Federal Register of Historic Places. Both women served on the initial Foundation Board, intent on honoring and remembering Flannery’s works and home as a Southern writer. In 2017, Louise and the directors passed the Foundation, along with Louise’s Andalusia Farm acreage to Georgia College and State University, for their commitment and superior ability to preserve and manage these historic assets, and to establish a Visitors Center, which opened to the public in March of this year, shortly after being named as a National Historic Landmark. Louise was for decades a dedicated member of the once tiny, recently burgeoning downtown Milledgeville Sacred Heart Catholic parish, while also working for years with the Archdiocese of Atlanta to locate and fund a larger site appropriate for the future, closer to Andalusia, a project that remains a work in progress. Louise is predeceased by her parents, and sisters, Margaret Mann (Mrs. Robert W.) and Catherine Firth (Mrs. Richard E.). She is survived by her sister, Frances Florencourt, her niece and nephew, Catherine and Robert Mann, one grandniece, Olivia Mann, and three grandnephews, Nicholas and Harry Mann, and Bennett Hartnett. Memorial Contributions may be made to the GCSU Foundation for Friends of Andalusia, Campus Box 96, Milledgeville, GA 31061; or to Animal Rescue Foundation, P.O. Box 1032, Milledgeville, GA 31059; or to the Donor's Charity of Choice.

Louise Florencourt

January 24, 1926 - July 31, 2023