COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) – Essie Mae Washington Williams stood Friday at the feet of a statue of her larger-than-life father, Sen. Strom Thurmond, who never publicly acknowledged her even though rumors followed him to his grave.

After Thurmond’s death in 2003 at age 100, Williams came forward to say she was the biracial daughter of the former segregationist, former South Carolina governor and nation’s longest-serving U.S. senator.

After decades of denial, Williams’ name was added in July to the list of Thurmond’s children engraved on the monument that includes the statue.

Williams’ mother, Carrie Butler, was a 16-year-old maid for the Thurmond family, and Thurmond was 22, when Williams was born in Aiken in 1925.

In addition to the statue, which she had seen before, Williams toured the inside of the South Carolina Statehouse on Friday, getting her first glimpse of a portrait of Thurmond that has hung in the Senate chambers since 1986.

“It’s a beautiful painting, beautiful,” Williams told her guide, state Sen. John Courson.

“He would wear me out,” Courson said, recalling a 1984 U.S. Senate re-election campaign trip when he was 40 and Thurmond was 81.

After a day of flying around the state, Courson told Williams, he was bushed and headed for home. Thurmond, meanwhile, “went and worked out in an athletic club, and I slept all the way back in the car.”

Courson offered Williams another view of her father from the window beside his portrait. Just outside is the nation’s first statehouse monument recognizing blacks from slavery to modern times.

The African-American History Monument was commissioned in 1999 – the last year Williams saw her father alive. Thurmond made one of the first contributions: $500.

Williams, 79, said her father helped her find connections for computer contracting work and fostered her son’s aspirations in medicine.

“He was always very helpful to all of us,” Williams said. “He’s the one that was responsible for my son being a doctor.”

AP-ES-05-20-05 2235EDT