Notes
229 Notes uvWWVU Chapter One. Preparation for the Journey 1. Zilpah Polly Grant Bannister (1794–1874). John F. Ohles, ed., Biographical Dictionary of American Educators (Westport: Conn.: Greenwood Press,1978),reports that at Grant’s school, “grades were not stressed, and there were no academic prizes or honors. Students were taught to love the pursuit of knowledge.They received a formal and systematic preparation for careers as teachers. Interested in the needs of the West, she entered into a loan program designed to prepare Ipswich students to serve as missionary teachers” (84–85). 2. Shortly a er Maria Cowles and Harriet Wheeler studied under her in Ipswich, Mary Lyon (1797–1849) founded Mount Holyoke College, the first institution of higher education for women.She wanted to make Mount Holyoke affordable,so students did the domestic work. A er attending laboratory classes taught by Amos Eaton at Amherst,she insisted that science play an important role in the Mount Holyoke curriculum.Marilyn Ogilvie and Joy Harvey, eds.,The Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science: Pioneering Lives to the Mid-20th Century (New York: Routledge, 2000), 815. 3. LD 7093.38 I6 MS 0556 Ipswich Female Seminary Collection,Series 2,Box 1,Folder 4: Ipswich Female Seminary pamphlet,8–9,quoted by permission of Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections. 4. Quote in J. N. Davidson, In Unnamed Wisconsin: Studies in the History of the Region Between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi to which is appended A Memoir of Mrs.Harriet Wood Wheeler (Milwaukee: Silas Chapman, 1895), 232. 5. This letter is addressed “Dear Brother and Sister, ” but a note at the top explains that it was written to Rev.Henry Cowles and that the original was given to Oberlin College by Cowles’s n o t e s 230 granddaughters. The Oberlin College Archives has no record of the letter, however. It is quoted here by permission of the Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections, which retains a copy of it in LD 7093.38 16 MS 0556 Ipswich Female Seminary Collection, Series 7, Box 1, Folder 12: Maria Cowles Letter, March 29, 1831. A er attending the Ipswich Female Seminary,Maria Cowles served as an assistant teacher at Oberlin College from 1837 to 1838.In 1835,the Oberlin Collegiate Institute was the first American college to allow women on their faculty.Lucille Addison Pollard,Women on College and University Faculties (New York: Arno Press, 1977), 108–109. In 1837, four young women were admitted to the freshman class at Oberlin; in 1841, three of them received bachelor degrees,“the first recorded women to accomplish this task and receive this award. ”Frances Juliette Hosford,Father Shipherd’s Magna Carta: A Century of Coeducation in Oberlin College (Boston: Marshall Jones, 1937), 31. The Reverend Henry Cowles was a professor at Oberlin. His wife, Alice Welch Cowles, another former student of Mary Lyon’s,was“the first president of the Oberlin Female Moral Reform Society” and in this capacity urged women at Oberlin to dress modestly and avoid public speaking.Linda L.Geary,Balanced in the Wind: A Biography of Betsey Mix Cowles (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1989), 38. 6. Mary Holiday was born in 1812 to a white trader, John Holiday, and the Ojibwe woman he married. Her intelligence also impressed her teachers at the Mackinaw Mission School on Mackinac Island. Keith R. Widder, Battle for the Soul: Métis Children Encounter Evangelical Protestants at Mackinaw Mission, 1823–1837 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1999), 114. Mary Holiday’s religious orientation also seems compatible with those of Lyon and Grant; Caroline Williams Rodgers reports that Mary told her,“We must pray from our hearts as we felt,if we hoped to have God hear us. ”Quoted in Widder,Battle for the Soul,159. 7. Benita Eisler, ed., The Lowell Offering (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 16. 8. Records indicate that Betsey Chamberlain lived in Lowell as early as 1831,alternating between there and Newmarket. She joined Lowell’s First Congregational Church on March 6, 1831. Judith A. Ranta, The Life and Writings of Betsey Chamberlain Native American Mill Worker (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003), 7. She contributed essays to the Offering that argued that the mill workers deserved better working conditions. Eisler, Lowell Offering, 208–210. 9. Eisler, Lowell Offering, 32. 10. Burnap was pastor of the Appleton Street (Orthodox) Congregational Church from 1837 until 1852. Crowley, Illustrated History of Lowell, 91...
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