 Katharine was the oldest of six children of a prosperous local businessman, Zachary T. Smith and his wife, Mary Susan Jackson.Katharine was well educated and attended the State Normal and Industrial School, now known as the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, in the fall of 1897.After a typhoid epidemic broke out 1899, Katharine transferred to Sullins College in Bristol, Virginia where she graduated in 1902.