[2] On February 23, 1928, she married fellow Georgian Thomas E. Sheppard, a salesman for Beech Nut Packing Company, at the Headland Missionary Baptist Church in Chambers County, Alabama.
In 1936, they moved to Richmond and settled in what was then the relatively new suburban Ginter Park neighborhood, as development proceeded along the older streetcar line along the Brookland parkway.
[2] Their children included Edith Logan Sheppard Ott (1937-2014) and Sally Dunnington, and during World War II his widowed mother Annie also lived with the growing family.
[8] Eleanor P. Sheppard began her civic career as room mother of her daughter's elementary school, then with the Ginter Park Parent Teacher Association (PTA).
[10] She became the first woman ever elected mayor of an incorporated city in the Commonwealth of Virginia, and a photograph of her adjusting her hat on inauguration day was published worldwide.
[13] Although Sheppard never lost an election and described herself as shy and a "milquetoast", after the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution failed to achieve ratification in Virginia in the 1970s, one of her male successors, Philip J. Bagley, Jr., quipped that in Richmond the initials "ERA" came to mean "Eleanor's Running Again.