Background
Mary Hemenway was born on December 20, 1820 in New York City, New York, United States, of old New England ancestry, the daughter of a shipping merchant, Thomas Tileston, and of Mary (Porter) Tileston.
Mary Hemenway was born on December 20, 1820 in New York City, New York, United States, of old New England ancestry, the daughter of a shipping merchant, Thomas Tileston, and of Mary (Porter) Tileston.
Mary Hemenway went to a private school in New York, and at home “was reared, ” as she said, “principally on household duties, the Bible, and Shakespeare. "
After the Civil War Mary Hemenway helped the establishment of schools on the southern seaboard for both whites and blacks. Later, she made gifts to Armstrong at Hampton and Booker Washington at Tuskegee for the further education of the freedmen. In the course of her welfare work for soldiers’ families during the war she had discovered that many of the soldiers’ wives did not know how to sew; accordingly, in 1865 she provided a teacher and materials for systematic instruction in sewing in a Boston public school. The experiment brought good results, and the instruction was taken over by the city. In 1883, she started an industrial-vocation school in Boston and two years later, in 1885, she opened a kitchen in a public school, the first venture of its kind in the United States. After three years the city assumed the cost of the kitchen, and cooking as well as sewing became part of the program of public education.
Next, for a year, she furnished a hundred Boston teachers free instruction in gymnastics, using the Swedish system as best adapted to schoolrooms. In order to interest the public, she promoted in 1889 a conference on physical training, held in Boston, which led to the introduction of gymnastics into the city’s public schools, by action of the School Committee, and was influential in stimulating nationwide interest in the cause of physical education.
In 1876, in order to save from destruction the Old South Meeting-house, famous for meetings of Revolutionary days, she gave $100, 000 - a quarter of the total sum required - her hope being to make the old church a center for the cultivation of patriotic idealism through education in history. Prizes were offered for essays by high-school pupils, historical lectures were given the Old South Leaflets, a series of reprints of historical “sources” edited by Edwin Doak Mean, were issued, and the young persons who had competed for prizes were organized into a historical society. At a time when the history of the United States had no place in the school curriculum, the “Old South work” was almost unique. Such scholars as John Fiske and James Kendall Hosmer furthered Mrs. Hemenway's plans and were helped by her to publish lectures and biographies.
Her interest in American history was further evidenced by her promotion of the Hemenway Southwestern Archaeology Expedition begun in 1886 under Frank Hamilton Cushing of the United States Bureau of Ethnology and continued after 1900 under Jesse Walter Fewkes of the Bureau. The collection made by the expedition are kept in the Hemenway Room at the Peabody Museum at Harvard; the results of its investigations are set forth in five volumes, A Journal of American Ethnology and Archaeology (1891 - 1908), edited by Fewkes and published at Mrs. Hemenway’s expense.
Her will provided for the support of her various enterprises for fifteen years, during which time her trustees were able to put them on a permanent basis.
A queenly woman without affectation or condescension, Mary Hemenway combined in her philanthropic work enthusiasm with effectiveness. Her interests included strengthening education in the South, improving homemaking skills amongst girls, as well as promoting knowledge of the American past. She is famous for founding the Boston Normal School of Cooking in 1887, which after her death became the Mary Hemenway Department of Household Arts in the State Normal School at Framingham. She also established the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics in 1889, which twenty years later became the Department of Hygiene and Physical Education of Wellesley College.
She was a member of James Freeman Clarke’s Church of the Disciples.
On June 25, 1840, Mary Tileston married Augustus Hemenway, a successful merchant, and thereafter she was identified with Boston, Massachusetts. Her husband died in 1876.
