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Part of the American
History & Genealogy Project |
Mary Lyon 1797 ~ 1849
Mary Lyon's Grave
Born in Buckland, Franklin County,
Massachusetts, February 26, 1797, and died March 5, 1849. She
grew up as a simple country girl of that time, learning the
household arts of spinning, weaving, netting and embroidery, her
school advantages being the most limited, but at the age of
twenty she entered Sanderson Academy, at Ashfield, as a pupil.
Being imbued with a deep religious spirit, she worked among the
pupils for their conversion.
Her work spread among the people of
Ashfield, Buckland and Derry. Ipswich was the scene of her
earliest labors. Until 1790 girls were not admitted to the
public schools of Boston, and from 1790 to 1792 they were
allowed to attend only in the summer months. There were more
than one hundred colleges for young men in the state of
Massachusetts, when in 1856 she was granted the first charter
for "a school for the systematic higher education of women,"
Mount Holyoke Seminary. She raised the thirty thousand dollars
deemed requisite to obtain this charter. Her purpose was as
philanthropic as her impulses were religious, and she sought to
increase the usefulness of women as well as to bring them to
Christ. During the first six years of her presidency of the
seminary, not a graduate or a pupil left the school without a
deep religious faith.
Her intense consecration to the spiritual work made her
essentially a missionary, and it was her desire to spread the
words of Christ through the far distant lands. She organized the
first missionary society in Buckland in her early years. She
never would consent to receive any salary as president of the
seminary, but consecrated all the moneys received, except two
hundred and fifty dollars a year, to the missionary work. Hardly
a class went out of the seminary which did not have among its
number one or two, or even more, missionaries ready for the
field.
Her monument stands today in the grounds
of the Mount Holyoke Seminary, and her works live after her. She
stands as one of the earliest pioneers for the higher education
for women.
Women of
America
Source: The Part Taken by Women in
American History, By Mrs. John A. Logan, Published by The Perry-Nalle
Publishing Company, Wilmington, Delaware, 1912.
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