52 Ancestors #3: Mary Ann Loveland, teacher, botanist, mathematician, daughter

Mary Ann Loveland was born on a farm in the small town of Norwich, Windsor County, Vermont, in 1853, the daughter of John Wheatley Loveland and Lucy Maria (Boardman) Loveland. Around Mary, the world was changing. The issue of slavery was tearing her country apart as she grew up in what had been the first area in what is now the United States to outlaw slavery. When Mary was 5, her mother died. The Civil War broke out when she was 8, and Reconstruction had yet to reach its abrupt ending when Mary headed to college at 16.

Mary went to what was then known as Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (now Mount Holyoke College), in South Hadley, Hampshire County, Massachusetts. I have written about Mount Holyoke here before; upon its opening in 1837, it was the first women’s college in America that had strong entrance requirements and its own endowment. Like all students at Mount Holyoke, Mary focused on academic subjects rather than domestic arts. On the 1870 federal census, 17-year-old Mary was enumerated both at home in Norwich and at Mount Holyoke in South Hadley. Her home enumeration does not mention that she is a student at all, so without further digging a researcher might never discover Mary’s story.

In 1874, Mary graduated from Mount Holyoke and became a teacher, heading first to Kalamazoo, Michigan, to teach at Michigan Female Seminary, which had been modeled on Mount Holyoke and came to be known as the Mount Holyoke of the West.  According to Michigan and the Centennial, Being a Memorial Record (published by S. B. McCracken in 1876), Mary taught botany and mathematics as part of a small staff of teachers, all of them single women. A synopsis of the curriculum was published by the Michigan Department of Public Instruction, wherein the principal expected some students to be able to complete the curriculum in three years rather than four based partly on the amount of prior mathematics instruction some of them were expected to have had. Based on the curriculum, it seems that mathematics was taught to first-year students and botany to second-year students. Mary spent at least one of her summer breaks furthering her education in a formal setting, taking a course on phaenogamic botany (the term used then for the botany of flowering plants) at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1877. Mary taught at Michigan Female Seminary until 1879, when she headed back to New England to teach at McCollom Institute in Mont Vernon, New Hampshire.

McCollom Institute, which had previously been known as Appleton Academy and no longer exists, was a co-ed private school; most of my information on it has been gleaned from History of the Town of Mont Vernon, New Hampshire, by Charles James Smith (1907), which has a large section on Appleton and McCollom. At the time Mary taught there, the small teaching staff was a mix of men and women. Mary had made quite a change from the Michigan Female Seminary. It seems perhaps it wasn’t a change for the better, as in 1880 she left McCollom.

In 1881 Mary made her most drastic move yet, heading to Hawaii Territory to teach at the girls’ boarding school in Kohala on the island of Hawaii, known as the Kohala Female Seminary. According to the Eighteenth Annual Report of the Hawaiian Evangelical Association, published in June 1881, Mary and another woman, “Miss E. Small” (I found reference elsewhere to her first name being Elizabeth), had arrived at the school in April 1881. Mary and Elizabeth had left Boston on January 31st.

Christian New Englanders had sent many missions to Hawaii Territory, and to this day descendants of early missionaries live on the islands. Kohala Female Seminary and a paired boys’ boarding school had been founded by two of them, Ellen and Elias Bond from Maine, who had sailed on the Gloucester from Boston in 1840 with the Ninth Company of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), the first American Christian missionary organization, arriving in 1841 after a several-month voyage. After Ellen Bond initially taught the girls in her home, Kohala Female Seminary was built starting in 1873, and Elizabeth Lyons, the daughter of one of Hawaii’s other early missionary couples (the Lyons family had sailed from Boston with the Fifth Company of ABCFM in 1831), became Kohala Female Seminary’s first principal. Elizabeth Lyons was still serving as principal when Elizabeth Small and Mary arrived to teach there. The Missionary Herald at Home and Abroad suggested that Elizabeth Small and Mary had gone to Kohala at the request of Elias Bond, though it is not clear to me whether he specifically requested them or just any interested teachers.

With Mary’s strong interest in botany, I imagine Hawaii Territory was a fascinating place for her to live. Unfortunately typhoid fever epidemics had been affecting the students of Kohala Female Seminary before Mary arrived. I don’t know whether these problems influenced her choice, but after a year or two Mary headed back to the mainland. Epidemics would continue to affect the students of Kohala Female Seminary, so perhaps she would have died if she had stayed.

To date I have found no evidence that Mary taught again. According to Genealogy of the Wheatley or Wheatleigh Family, 1356-1902 (published by Hannibal Wheatley in 1902), Mary returned home when her stepmother became ill, and then stayed with her elderly father after her stepmother died in 1892, helping him as he went blind. While the book has very few citations and I have proven many of the “family-tradition”-type early items incorrect, Mary was alive when it was published and her father had only recently died, and judging by the detailed information about Mary’s work life that I was able to verify in other sources, I believe that Mary may have provided the information on her family herself and that she also may have personally known the author. Hannibal Wheatley wrote, “Mary A. Loveland at the age of 49 has never been married. She is thorough and earnest in whatever she finds to do.” I tip my hat to Hannibal for doing his best to include detailed information on everyone in the tree, including people who died without descendants and the later descendants of daughters, things that remained rater uncommon in 1902 and which some people still don’t do today.

Hannibal Wheatley wrote that Mary’s father John had been mostly self-educated through home study and that John had sent Mary and her little sister to Mount Holyoke. John’s self-education appears to have influenced Mary as she continued to take courses after finishing college and, according to Hannibal, also hired a private tutor to learn foreign languages.

According to the 3 August 1912 issue of the newspaper Spirit of the Age (published in Woodstock, Vermont), Mary was entertaining “Mr. and Mrs. Cushman and Miss Martin of Providence, R. I.” in Norwich at time of publication. A number of graduates of Mount Holyoke lived in Providence, but I am not positive to date whether these were friends of Mary’s from school or from another period of her life.

While it is likely that Mary was the Mary A. Loveland who wrote a piece about Florida’s birds and plants for the October 1922 Joint Bulletin No. 8 of the Vermont Botanical and Bird Clubs, to date I cannot say for sure. I hope that in her retirement she enjoyed a trip to Florida with a friend as the author of the piece did. I found mention of Mary A. Loveland in a few other digitized Joint Bulletins; one lists Mary as “Mrs.” but on a list of members in another she is called “Miss.” While it seems most likely that the “Mrs.” was an editorial error (or perhaps editorial assumption), it is also possible there were two Mary A. Lovelands associated with Norwich at that time and interested in botany.

Mary died in Norwich in 1930 at age 77, primary cause “Senility” with the secondary cause of “Old age.”  Her occupation was cryptically given as “Retired” and her residence in Norwich was incorrectly given as “all her life.”

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NOTES

The research distilled into this post would have been much more time-consuming and possibly more difficult if not for digitized copies of college publications verifying Mary’s work history and that she had taken at least one class at Harvard; the publications gave a foundation upon which to search for further information. In particular, the publications of Mount Holyoke Female Seminary and then Mount Holyoke College provided detailed information on Mary’s work life and movements. (For graduates who married, they also include information about spouses and any children, and for graduates who had died, they include the year of death and sometimes also the place of death.) In 2012 my article titled “Using School Records” was published in The Indiana Genealogist; regardless of whether readers seek out a copy of my article, I encourage readers to explore how school records can add additional richness and detail to their genealogical research.

To date no enumeration has been found for Mary on the 1880, 1910, nor 1930 federal census. Since she lived alone late in her life, it is possible that she died between the official 1930 enumeration date and the day the enumerator actually visited her neighborhood in 1930, but that still doesn’t account for why she appears not to be enumerated on the 1880 and 1910 federal censuses.