Apple-Newton Family of North Carolina Archives:
The Posthumous Online Home of Dr. Robert Lee Newton and Winnie Apple Newton

Winnie Marie Apple was born in Rockingham County, North Carolina on June 8, 1926. She was one of eleven children, nine of whom survived infancy and grew up working the Apple family tobacco farm. She would go on to graduate as valedictorian of her high school class. She earned her nursing cap from Duke University during the World War II years. While at Duke, she met Robert Lee Newton (“Bob”) and they married soon thereafter.

Winne would become the mother of four children with Bob, all the while developing a reputation as a beloved Baptist minister’s wife during their tenures at Millbrook Baptist Church (then in the countryside north of Raleigh from 1948 into the 1950s), Memorial Baptist Church in Buies Creek (late 1960s-early 1970s), and at First Baptist Church of Blowing Rock (1972-1980). Winnie was also a prominent member of First Baptist Church in Raleigh (1980-2014), serving with Bob as a leader of the influential Pathfinders Sunday School group and as a deacon.

Friends and family knew her also to be a thrifty and inventive home maker, a great-grandmother, and a lifelong lover and writer of verse. She is a central subject of Diana Newton’s documentary film memoir, The Ties That Bind.

Winnie died in November 2014 from complications due to Alzheimer’s Disease at the age of 88 and is interred next to Bob at Woodlawn Memorial Park in Durham, North Carolina.

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Featured Poem

O Family Tree
Winnie Apple (c. 1976)

O family tree, O family tree
Thou tree most fair and lovely
The sight of thee at our hearthside
Speaks hope and gladness far and wide.

O family tree, O family tree
Thou hast a wondrous message
Thou dost proclaim our family's birth
God bless us all our days on earth.

[Inspired by German holiday carol,
"O Tannenbaum"]

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Source: RLN Archives (rln104.11)