Beneath the ornately carved ceiling of Sweet Briar's Mary Helen Cochran Library, on the left side of the main hall, is a simple glass-topped display case.A portrait of Charles A. Dana, benefactor of the library's Dana Wing, hangs on the wall behind it and casts its reflection on the glass.

Inside the case is a Chinese outfit — a two-piece, gray and black silk ensemble with intricate embroidery. Elaborate ribbons stitched with pink and blue flowers and butterflies adorn the sleeves and neckline of the blouse. On the chest, there is a round, swirl design.

The black, narrowly pleated skirt is similarly decorated with embroidered flowers and butterflies, as are a pair of tiny slippers, although they are stitched with beige thread and not blue and pink.

A note in the case indicates the clothing was found in the College archives in 2006, and reads, "Worn by Miss Ada Beeson on the occasion of her marriage to Mr. Wilmoth A. Farmer."

Beeson and Farmer were Methodist missionaries, the note continues, and the dress was donated by a Mrs. William Ogden. "We didn't even know we had it," Lisa Johnston, head of library public services, said last summer, adding the note contained the only clues to the items' provenance.

Ada Beeson FarmerAn online search by college relations found that Ada Beeson Farmer, born in 1871, was a missionary in China from 1902 until her death in 1911. She also is the subject of a book, "Ada Beeson Farmer: A Missionary Heroine of Kuang Si, South China," published in 1912 by her husband.

Between pages 110 and 111 of the book is a photograph of the couple in their wedding attire. The bride, seated to her husband's right, wears the outfit currently on display in the library. The swirl design on her blouse - identical to that on the item at Sweet Briar - is readily visible in the black and white photograph.

But one mystery remained: Who was the donor, Mrs. William Ogden?

For several months, the investigation stalled. Then, on Feb. 4, Ethel Ogden Burwell, a 1958 Sweet Briar graduate, called the college relations office and unraveled the mystery.

Burwell said her brother, family genealogist Ross Ogden, had seen a story on Sweet Briar's Web site that mentioned Ada Beeson Farmer and the wedding dress, which led her to call Cochran Library, then college relations.

Mrs. William Ogden (nee Ethel Farmer Hunter) was her mother, she said, and the missionary Wilmoth Farmer was her grandmother's oldest brother. "Uncle Will," as Burwell called him, was devastated after his wife's death in 1911.

Although he had been a Methodist missionary, Farmer converted to Catholicism, thankful for the compassion he'd received from the Jesuit priests in China after his wife died. He returned to the States to study to be a Jesuit and then went back to China as Father Francis Xavier Farmer, where he served until 1949 when the Communists took over.

Wilmoth Farmer. Photos provided by Ethel Ogden Burwell ’58."He got the last boat out," Burwell said.

"I loved Uncle Will," she said, adding she still has letters from him, at least one of which reveals the priest had a sense of humor. After doctors told him he needed to lose weight before heart surgery, he wrote of biking and called himself "Fat Monk on Bike."

As for the dress, according to Burwell it ended up in the hands of her mother, who donated it to the College in 1979 or 1980. Burwell's daughter, Ethel Burwell Dowling '82, delivered it to the College for her grandmother.

Dowling said her grandmother was looking for a home for the dress and thought of Sweet Briar because her daughter and granddaughter were alumnae. "She had a fondness for Sweet Briar, and it was a women's item," Dowling said.

For awhile, she added, it was displayed in the room above the library's circulation desk.

John Jaffe, who has been at Sweet Briar for 30 years and serves as Cochran Library's director, remembers seeing the dress in a cardboard box sometime in the 1980s. At the time, he said, he talked with the Sweet Briar Museum's director about displaying it there, but there was no room for it in the collection.

He does not recall it being displayed in the library until after Johnston rediscovered it in 2006.

Until recently, Burwell knew nothing of any of this.

"I don't remember anything about this and truly think I did not know of it because if I had I surely would have looked for it all my many times on campus over these last twenty-eight or so years," Burwell, a emeritus trustee on Sweet Briar's board of directors, said. "I wonder when it was taken down and boxed up."

Perhaps a little of the mystery continues.