Booker Taliaferro Washington was born in 1856 at Hale's Ford, Virginia, in Franklin County on Burroughs Plantation, was freed in 1865, and moved with his family to Malden, Virginia. In 1872 he walked most of the way to Hampton, Virginia, where he gained admission to Hampton Agriculture Institute for Freedmen, graduated in 1875, taught school in Malden from 1876 to 1877, attended Wayland Seminary for eight months in 1878, and taught at Hampton Agriculture Institute for Freedmen from 1879 to 1881. In 1881 he accepted appointment as the first president of Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute. He married Fannie Norton Smith in 1882 in Charleston, Kanawha County, West Virginia; their daughter Portia Marshall Washington was born in 1883, and Fannie died in Tuskegee, Macon County, Alabama, in 1884. He married Olivia A. Davidson in Tuskegee in 1885; their son Booker T. Washington Jr. was born in 1887, their son Earnest Davidson Washington was born in 1889, and Olivia died that year at Massachusetts General Hospital. In 1892 he married Margaret "Maggie” James Murray. In 1895 he delivered his most famous speech in Atlanta, Georgia, and in 1896 became the first African American to receive an honorary Master of Arts degree from Harvard University. Washington was also the first principal and teacher at Tuskegee Institute, the first African American man asked to speak from the same platform as whites in his Atlanta Exposition address, and the first African American to dine at the White House. He died at Tuskegee in 1915. Later honors included the Booker T. Washington Memorial Half Dollar minted from 1946 to 1951, his depiction on the U.S. Half Dollar in 1951 and 1954, his appearance on a U.S. stamp in 1940 as the first African American so honored, and the naming in 1942 of the liberty ship Booker T. Washington as the first major ocean-going vessel named for an African American.