Bettie Rose Hardwick Bramlett Morris, 94, of Hartselle, Alabama, passed away peacefully surrounded by family on June 11, 2025, at the home of her eldest granddaughter and on the same farm she was born 94 years prior. Her funeral service will be Saturday, June 21, 2025 at 11:00AM at Lebanon Baptist Church in Falkville with Bro. Randy Ashley officiating and Peck funeral home directing. Visitation will be from 5:00PM ~ 7:00PM on Friday, June 20, 2025 at Peck funeral home. Bettie is preceded in death by her beloved husbands, Harold “Buddy” Bramlett (20 years of marriage), and her second husband, Harold B. Morris, ((35 years of marriage), her daughter, Jeannie Bramlett Alexander, and her great-grandson William Alexander, Jr. She is survived by her two children, Thomas Bramlett and Susie Bramlett Eckert, nine grandchildren, nineteen great-grandchildren, and two great-great-grandchildren.
Bettie was born during the Great Depression, to Rosa Ellen Parker Hardwick and Woodfin Lamar Hardwick Along with her four sisters and one brother, she embraced both traditional and non-traditional roles, mastering every chore with grit and grace. Gardening, cooking, pickling, sewing, and managing the farm were all things in Bettie’s repertoire, and a majority of that before her school day began. Expected to attend college, she graduated as a valedictorian after skipping a grade. But love redirected her path, and she married instead of enrolling in college that fall.
Throughout her life, Bettie took seriously the charge to cultivate (Genesis 2:15). She and her husband farmed, raised chickens, ran an electrical repair business and a hay baling for hire business while raising three children. Even after his death, she and her children continued all those endeavors except electrical repair. Bettie cultivated a robust garden well into her eighties, instilling a love of home-grown cucumbers and the best dill pickles to the 3rd and 4th generation. Ensuring nearly everything on the dinner table was grown or made by their own hands, “We raised everything but the iced tea,” she’d say proudly.
The local doctor admonished a young Bettie not to have more children than she could educate. But Bettie cultivated knowledge and curiosity as well as her garden: her children and grandchildren hold over 40 degrees and are skilled mothers, fathers, engineers, builders, designers, teachers, artists, and farmers. She cultivated love of community and the Nations: her children and grandchildren continue to farm on the land she was born, while others have settled across the US and around the world to continue the important work of cultivating.
Bettie had a deep love of reading, especially the Bible. When her eyesight failed, she turned to talking books provided by the Library for the Blind. Her favorite, without question, was the Bible — which she listened to in its entirety four to five times a year. Perhaps it was this devotion that led her to underline Amos 8:11 in her Bible: “a famine… not of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord.” Her gift for cultivating and preserving food was only surpassed by her preparation in storing up God’s word in her heart.
Above all, most important to Bettie was her faith in Jesus Christ. She was a long-standing member of Lebanon Baptist Church, where she became a member in 1948, and faithfully served in Sunday school, choir, and Vacation Bible School. We celebrate that Bettie’s citizenship is in Heaven, and she is now walking with Jesus (Philippians 3:20).
