Maine Women in History

What's a woman to do?
By Wayne Reilly
Staff Writer Bangor Daily News

Miss Clara Stimson was called the Lumber Queen of Maine a century ago. She owned sawmills in Smyrna Mills, New Limerick and Ashland. She managed timberlands. Her success enabled her to build one of the finest houses in Houlton.

"Miss Stimson is one of the ablest and most enterprising business women of New England, and has for many years successfully conducted a large timber and lumber manufacturing business in the face of keen competition," said the Bangor Daily News on Dec. 5, 1907. "She has had many interesting encounters with leading lumber barons of Aroostook, but so comprehensive is her knowledge of Maine’s lumber resource and so accurate is her estimate of men that she has seldom come off second best in her deals."

Clara Stimson was an unusual phenomenon. About a fifth of the work force in Maine were women a century ago, according to the U.S. Census. Nationally, about one in five women worked compared to nine in 10 men. Most working women were young and unmarried, their jobs considered only temporary. Career-oriented women like Miss Stimson were exceptional.

In an era when women couldn’t vote and were constrained by social and moral strictures as rigid as a bone corset, few crossed the line, as did Clara Stimson, into the vocational domain occupied by males. As oddities, their stories occasionally were told in the newspapers. Almost invariably, it was revealed they owed at least part of their success to a male relative. The idea of a member of the "gentler sex" making it big on her own in a man’s world was quite foreign to the times.

"I was obliged to go into the lumber business first because of the death of my father, who was extensively interested in sawmills and timberlands," Miss Stimson told a reporter. "I soon became interested in it for its own sake and have accomplished all I could."

http://bangornews.com/news/t/news.aspx?articleid=161018&zoneid=500


(COURTESY OF THE MAINE FOLKLIFE CENTER, ORONO)

(COURTESY OF MAINE MEMORY NETWORK)

(COURTESY OF HAROLD LACADIE OF OLD TOWN)

Maine Memory Network: http://www.mainememory.net/

Maine Women in History: Sarah Sampson
By BDN Staff
Bangor Daily News

Sarah Sampson was one of several hundred women from Maine who volunteered to care for wounded and sick soldiers during the Civil War. There was no professional training, so she had to rely on her experience in caring for ill and injured family members and neighbors in order to look after the soldiers who were entrusted to her and others like her.

Although the nurses were rarely present during battles, they were almost always on the scene within days, and often for weeks and months after the battle, caring for the injured and dying Maine men who were still in makeshift field hospitals located around the area.

Sarah narrowly escaped certain death when Confederate batteries along the James River in Virginia opened fire at a troop transport ship on which she was caring for wounded men.

In a letter written from Sarah Sampson (Mrs. Charles A. Sampson) to the governor of Maine on Aug. 17, 1863, she describes how she had been at Gettysburg for nearly four weeks after the battle, caring for the injured and dying Maine men who were still in makeshift field hospitals located around the area.

She also wrote an open letter to the people of Maine describing the work of members of the Maine Soldiers’ Relief Association on behalf of the Maine soldiers serving in the Civil War, which lasted from 1861 until 1865. This letter also requests assistance from its readers.

http://bangornews.com/news/t/news.aspx?articleid=161040&zoneid=500


(Photo courtesy of the Maine Historical Society)

The name "Dorothea Dix" still synonymous with social change
By Meg Haskell
Staff Writer Bangor Daily News

It’s easy to drive right past the woodsy little roadside park in Hampden that marks the birthplace of Dorothea Dix. And perhaps that’s the way she’d want it. By all accounts, Dix was averse to publicity and during her lifetime turned down several opportunities to have her name attached to hospitals and other institutions.

But more than 120 years after her death in 1887, the name of Dorothea Dix is still associated with one of the most important social reform movements ever undertaken: the humane and therapeutic treatment of people with mental illness.

"She was absolutely seminal in promoting the humane treatment of the mentally ill," said Carol Carothers, director of the Maine chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Carothers said Dix’s humanitarian influence still can be felt in the public debate over providing appropriate care to people with mental illness, both in residential facilities and in the communities where they live.

Dorothea Dix was born on April 4, 1802. Her father was an itinerant preacher and the family was poor. When she was 10 years old, she moved with her family to Worcester, Mass., to be near her paternal grandfather, a wealthy Boston physician named Elijah Dix. The elder Dix owned large tracts of Maine timberland, and in time the towns of Dixmont and Dixfield were established and still bear the family name.

Young Dolly, as she was called, eventually went to live with her grandparents in Boston and at the age of 14 opened her own school for girls. When her grandparents died, she inherited the family home and continued to work as an educator.

http://bangornews.com/news/t/news.aspx?articleid=161385&zoneid=500

Molly Nelson Archambuad
By BDN Staff
Bangor Daily News

Molly Nelson Archambuad, better known by her stage name Molly Spotted Elk, was a famous dancer and vaudeville star in the early 20th century. She was born Molly Alice Nelson on Nov. 17, 1903, on Indian Island. As a Penobscot Indian performer, Spotted Elk achieved fame for her beauty, intelligence and abilities as a dancer.

In 1928, film producer Douglas Burden offered her the leading female role in a silent film he hoped would challenge stereotypic views of American Indians. The script featured a love story within the context of an Ojibwa band’s struggle against winter starvation. Spotted Elk accepted the part eagerly and spent a year on location in the wilds of northern Ontario.

By the time the shooting was done, "talkies" were beginning to destroy public interest in silent films. Seeing this, Burden added a sound-synced prologue and a musical score based on Ojibwa musical motifs.

When "The Silent Enemy" debuted at Broadway’s prestigious Criterion Theater in 1930, critics lauded the film for its "authenticity," "superb acting" and "stunning cinematography." Nonetheless, as a silent picture released amid a flurry of talkies, it failed commercially.

Spotted Elk also appeared as an extra in several Hollywood classics, including "Last of the Mohicans" (1936), "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (Warner Bros., 1936), "The Good Earth" (MGM, 1937), and "Lost Horizon" (Columbia, 1936), but her heart remained in Europe.

Spotted Elk, also known as Molly Dellis, became a dancer on the Paris stage and studied at the Sorbonne, dug in dusty archives for documents about France’s first contact with the Penobscots, taught ballet and caught the eye of journalist John Stephen Frederic Archambaud. "He was just crazy about American cowboys and Indians," their only child, Jean, told Laura Redish and Orrin Lewis, authors of the text on the Web site Native Languages of the Americas. "He begged for an opportunity to interview her. Well, they met and they married."

http://bangornews.com/news/t/news.aspx?articleid=161019&zoneid=614

Mabel Antoinette Sine Wadsworth
By BDN Staff
Bangor Daily News

Mabel Antoinette Sine Wadsworth, a pioneer in the advancement of women's health care and birth control in Maine, was 95 years old when she died at her Bangorhome on Jan. 11, 2006. She was born Oct. 14, 1910, in Rochester, N.Y., one of six children of David Albert and Effie Maude (Harrison) Sine.

Her life's work helped inspire the Mabel WadsworthWomen's Health Center, a private, nonprofit facility that opened in 1984 in Bangorand still provides full-service health care to women.

"The work that she did for women around reproductive rights and delivery of service has been long-lasting," longtime friend Ruth Lockhart, executive director of the Mabel WadsworthWomen's Health Center, told a BangorDaily News reporter shortly after Wadsworth's death. "Her legacy lives on through the center and to those here who are devoted to her own principles."

Wadsworthmoved to Bangorin 1946 with her husband, Dr. Richard Wadsworth. She had just earned a nursing degree from the University of Rochester and had become intrigued by the ideas of Margaret Sanger, a national leader in women's reproductive rights. Mabel Wadsworthjoined the Maternal Health League, a volunteer organization patterned after Sanger's work promoting birth control education.

"Mabel really grasped early on that women would feel more comfortable talking with other women about issues such as sexual well-being and birth control and that those conversations didn't have to take place while wearing a hospital gown on a doctor's table," said Lockhart in a 2005 interview with the BDN.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Wadsworthrecruited many like-minded women to join her in a door-to-door campaign educating rural Maine women about birth control.

"It wasn't about feminism back in those days," Wadsworthsaid in a December 2005 interview with the BDN. "It was simply educating women that you really and truly could take a pill and not have any more babies. It took some convincing for a lot of them, but when they tried it, they found it worked quite well."

She went on to become the first president of the Maine Family Planning Association, and in the early 1970s, Wadsworthwas instrumental in helping pass legislation that mandated teenagers' rights to confidential contraceptive services.

http://bangornews.com/news/t/news.aspx?articleid=162336&zoneid=614

Mary Caffrey Low
By BDN Staff
Bangor Daily News

Mary Caffrey Low was born March 22, 1850. In 1871, Low became the first female student to enter Colby College, and by 1873, had been joined by four more women. Her status prompted Colby College to describe her as the "grandmother of coeducation at Colby," according to the college Web site.

Colby’s first five women students — Low, Elizabeth Gorham Hoag, Ida Fuller, Frances Elliott Mann Hall and Louise Helen Coburn — founded Sigma Kappa Sorority on Nov. 9, 1874. Low’s name was the first on the sorority’s rolls, and she was the first to preside over an initiation, according to a history of the sorority. She also was the first woman to be invited to join the Phi Beta Kappa academic honor society.

At age 25, Low became Colby’s first female graduate and one of a handful of women at the time who had earned Bachelor of Arts degrees. In a complete break with traditions of the times, Low delivered the valedictory address for her graduating Class of 1875 in Latin. She had edged out Leslie Cornish as valedictorian. Cornish later became a justice of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court.

Mary Low married Leonard D. Carver, the state librarian in Augusta, and she became a schoolteacher. Her interest in library science led her to devise the first systematic catalog of the Maine State Library. She assumed her husband’s library position after he died. She was also active in the protest against formation of a separate women’s division at Colby. However, the division was approved by the board in 1890 and had the effect of segregating women into different laboratory courses, and separating men’s and women’s competitions for class prizes.

In "The History of Colby College," Ernest C. Marriner wrote, "No small part of the agitation that arose later in regard to the retention of women in the College was prompted by the fact that they persistently ran away with the honors."

In 1890, the president of Colby initiated a plan to divide women and men into separate classes at the college. Low, along with Louise Coburn and 17 other women who had graduated from Colby, sent a petition protesting the move. The letter declared, "The issue is not whether men and women can recite together, whether men and women shall study this or that. It is simply the issue whether the men are willing to take the risk of having women surpass them in scholarship." Although Low wrote the letter, she wrote it in a way to make it appear that Coburn had, since Coburn came from a prominent family and Low did not. In the end, Colby did not go back to being officially coeducational until 1969.

http://bangornews.com/news/t/news.aspx?articleid=161695&zoneid=614

Mary Lane McMillan
By BDN Staff
Bangor Daily News

Mary Lane McMillan, an artist and illustrator, and her husband, George McMillan, a musician, established the McMillan School of Fine Arts Vacation School at their summer home in Rome, Maine. The home on Crystal Springs Camp Road was used during the 1920s and 1930s as a camp for vacation session students from their residence-studio school in New Rochelle, N.Y.

George taught piano and Mary taught sketching and painting.

The New Rochelle school was established in 1913.

According to the 1933 McMillan School of Fine Arts brochure, "The Vacation School is located in the small town of Rome, fifteen miles from Oakland, Maine, a village on the Maine Central Railroad ... The School buildings, including our Camp-home, are removed from state roads and set among hills and trees on the shore of Great Pond, [the] largest of seven of the Belgrade chain of lakes ... Fees cover board and room, occasional use of row-boats, canoe, power-boats and camp facilities provided for the enjoyment of resident-students."

Summer sessions lasted 14 weeks beginning the third week of June and ending the second week of September.

Mary had a successful career first as an art teacher at Polytechnic College (now Texas Wesleyan University) in Fort Worth, Texas, from 1906 to 1912; then as a book and magazine illustrator in New York from 1912 through the 1930s.

Her illustrations appeared on the front covers and with stories published in Life, McCall’s, Every Week, American Magazine, Judge, Pictorial Review, The Designer, Harper’s Bazaar, The Saturday Evening Post, Woman’s Home Companion and Christmas Magazine.

She also wrote and illustrated Christmas pageants that were published in several of these magazines.

Mary Lane McMillan began spending time in Maine in 1922 where she enjoyed painting in "The Afterglow," the garden at the McMillan camp. She taught outdoor sketching and painting in mediums including pencil, charcoal, pen and ink, watercolor, pastels and oils.

http://bangornews.com/news/t/news.aspx?articleid=161727&zoneid=614

Jane Jeffrey
By BDN Staff
Bangor Daily News

Jane Jeffrey (later Ricker) was a British citizen who served as a nurse with the American Red Cross at a U.S. Army hospital in France during World War I.

She was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for bravery in 1919, one of a handful of women to be so honored. She was wounded when a German shell burst in the evacuation hospital where she worked. She was seriously injured in the attack.

After the war, she married Alvan Bolster Ricker of Poland, Maine. Her bequest in 1962 established the library in Poland Spring.

The construction allotment from the bequest was $60,000 plus funds in trust for its perpetual operation and maintenance. The library was to be called the Alvan Bolster Ricker Memorial Library and Community House in memory of Alvan B. Ricker, husband of Jane and grandson of Wentworth Ricker who constructed the Mansion House in 1797 to start the famed Poland Spring resort.

http://bangornews.com/news/t/news.aspx?articleid=161791&zoneid=614

Kate Furbish
By BDN Staff
Bangor Daily News

Kate Furbish was born Catherine Furbish in Exeter, N.H., on May 19, 1834, to Benjamin and Mary Lane Furbish. When she was barely a year old, the family relocated to Brunswick, Maine, where she developed a passionate interest for wildflowers.

Like many young women of her time, Kate pursued a genteel education, which included painting and the study of French literature; she even spent a year in Paris perfecting her painting. In 1860, however, a serious interest for science gripped Furbish after she attended a series of botany lectures in Boston by George L. Goodale, later a professor of botany at Harvard. Furbish did her part during the Civil War by rolling bandages, but most of Maine’s growing season found her in the fields and forests, looking for plants she had not drawn or cataloged.

The bulk of Furbish’s work of collecting, classifying and drawing the flora of Maine was done between 1870 and 1908. A self-taught field botanist of boundless energy, Furbish spent much of the rest of her long life immersed in work, often going alone on extensive and sometimes dangerous collecting trips throughout the state. By 1880 she had earned respect among well-known naturalists, including the eminent American botanist Asa Gray. In 1894, Furbish also helped to found the Josselyn Botanical Society of Maine and she served as president in 1911. She also published articles in American Naturalist. In 1908, Furbish bequeathed her collection of paintings and drawings to Bowdoin College. She gave her more than 4,000 sheets of dried plant specimens to the New England Botanical Society. They are housed at the Gray Herbarium at Harvard.

She died at age 97 on Dec. 6, 1931, the oldest resident of Brunswick at that time. Her name gained fame in 1976 when the wild snapdragon, named the Furbish lousewort, was rediscovered after having been believed to be extinct. This discovery helped stall and eventually stop the building of the Dickey-Lincoln dam and reservoir on the St. John River. The dam would have flooded 88,000 acres of northern Maine forests.

http://bangornews.com/news/t/news.aspx?articleid=161893&zoneid=614

Abbie Burgess Grant
By BDN Staff
Bangor Daily News

From 1854 to 1875, Abbie Burgess Grant served as an assistant lighthouse keeper at Matinicus Rock Light Station on Matinicus Rock, an isolated, rocky island about 15 miles off the coast of Maine.

Abbie Burgess was born in 1839 and moved to Matinicus Rock with her family after her father was appointed keeper in 1853.

Capt. Samuel Burgess taught his 17-year-old daughter to fill the lanterns atop the twin towers with oil, trim the wicks and clean the lenses. He soon felt comfortable enough to leave her in charge for several days while he journeyed to the mainland for supplies.

In 1856, Capt. Burgess set out on such a trip, at which time one of the largest storms of the 19th century hit Matinicus Rock. The storm raged for about one month, as young Abbie independently tended the lights in addition to caring for her sick mother and siblings.

Abbie Burgess kept Matinicus Light until 1860 when a new keeper was appointed. She stayed on as assistant keeper until she married the keeper’s son, Isaac Grant, and moved to Whitehead Light Station in 1875, where she served as keeper for more than 15 years. Whitehead is the third-oldest station in Maine, and is located on the west side of Penobscot Bay, guiding ships toward the coastal communities of Rockland, Camden, Belfast and Searsport.

The U.S. Coast Guard later honored her by naming a Keeper Class buoy tender the Abbie Burgess (WLM-553).

Abbie Burgess Grant is buried at Forest Hill Cemetery in South Thomaston, near Spruce Head and the Whitehead Light.

http://bangornews.com/news/t/news.aspx?articleid=161949&zoneid=614


Abbie Burgess Grant image is from the United State Coast Guard Historian's Office and is in the public domain.