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dorothea dix

Louisa May Alcott Shakes Off the Blues

One day in 1857, Louisa May Alcott walked to the Mill Dam in Boston’s Back Bay, stared into the Charles River and thought about throwing herself into it. She was 24, poor, discouraged and unable to find a job to help support her family.

Louisa May Alcott

Looking into the river, she talked herself out of suicide. In a letter to her family, she wrote that it

…seemed so mean to turn & run away before the battle was over that I went home, set my teeth & vowed I’d make things work in spite of the world, the flesh & the devil.

She resolved ‘to take Fate by the throat and shake a living out of her.’

A decade later, Little Women brought her fame and fortune. But not before her beloved sister died, the Civil War broke out and she developed a debilitating chronic illness.

Growing Up

Louisa May Alcott was born in what is now Philadelphia on Nov. 29, 1832, her father’s 33^rd birthday. Like Jo March, the main character in Little Women, she was the second of four sisters. Like Jo, she was a tomboy. “Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters,” she once wrote. Her mother, Abigail May, was the model for Marmee.

Louisa May Alcott wrote her father out of Little Women, sending the Father March character off to the Civil War. She probably knew Bronson Alcott, a 19^th century hippie, wasn’t quite ready for prime time.

Bronson Alcott abandoned his first career as a traveling salesman because he thought it would ruin his soul. He became a vegan and turned to teaching. He once lost all of his students after admitting a young African-American girl 25 years before slavery was abolished. Alcott also started a Transcendentalist utopia called Fruitlands in Harvard, Mass., but that, like so many of his ventures, failed.

Growing Up

When Louisa May Alcott was two, the family moved to Boston. Much of her life was spent in Concord, Mass., where she knew many of the household names of the 19^th century. William Lloyd Garrison was a close family friend after he, her parents and a few others formed the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. She knew Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass.

Elizabeth Peabody boarded with the Alcotts, and John Brown’s daughter lived with them after Brown was hanged. Nathanael Hawthorne was a neighbor who didn’t get along with her father, Henry David Thoreau was her schoolteacher and Ralph Waldo Emerson lived next door. Bronson Alcott’s teaching assistants included Margaret Fuller and Dorothea Dix.

For all that proximity to fame, the Alcotts struggled to survive. Alcott believed in the ‘sweetness of self denial’ — a convenient philosophy for someone who couldn’t support his wife and four daughters. Their poverty combined with Bronson Alcott’s ideas about nutrition meant their diet consisted of unleavened bread, porridge, potatoes, squash, rice, graham meal and water. Sometimes Louisa May and her sisters went hungry. One year, they ate apple pudding for their Thanksgiving dinner.

Art Imitates Life

Louisa May Alcott 1940 commemorative stamp

At an early age, Louisa May Alcott went to work to help support her family. There weren’t many jobs available to women then, and none of her jobs paid well. She worked as a companion to invalids, as a maid, as a seamstress, as a teacher, which she disliked. She later wrote a semi-autobiographical book about those jobs called Work, A Story of Experience.

In Work, Christie Devon, her main character, can’t find work and thinks about killing herself. Christie stands on a bridge, looking down at swirling black water, and says to herself, “I must go.” An old friend happens to pass by and saves her from herself.

In real life, Louisa May Alcott walked away from the Mill Dam and started going to Sunday meeting. She followed the Unitarian minister Theodore Parker, who preached a message of social activism. One Sunday, Parker preached a sermon called ‘Laborious Young Women’ in which he advised, Don’t be too proud to ask, and accept the humblest work till you can find the task you want.

Louisa May Alcott presented herself at his door. Parker wasn’t home, but his wife was. She put her in touch with a woman named Hannah Stevenson, who helped her find a job working four hours a day as a governess.

No More Sisterhood

The next year, her younger sister Elizabeth died and her older sister Anna got married. Louisa May felt her sisterhood was broken up, but she soldiered on. In 1860, she began writing for the Atlantic Monthly.

By 1862 she was officially a spinster. Approaching 30, she went to Washington, D.C., to work as a Civil War nurse. There she became ill with typhoid fever. She would never fully recover from what she thought was the doctor’s ministrations of mercury.

There was an upside: Her letters home about the Civil War hospital were published as Hospital Sketches and earned her critical recognition. She was then able to make a living writing novels under the nom de plume A.M. Barnard.

Little Women

Back home at the age of 36 she angrily began writing Little Women at her publisher’s request. She didn’t want to write a girls’ book, but she persevered. The book was hugely successful, enabling the Alcott family to live in comfort and Louisa to write best-selling novels for the next 20 years. Of the surprising success of ‘Little Women,’ she wrote, “It reads better than I expected. Not a bit sensational but simple and true, for we really lived most of it.”

Over the course of her lifetime, Louisa May Alcott produced 200 literary works, including children’s books, serious novels, pulp fiction and suspense novels. One, A Long Fatal Love Chase, was first published in 1995 and became a best seller.

Louisa May Alcott may have remembered her low moment by the Charles River when she wrote

Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead.

With thanks to American Bloomsbury by Susan Cheever and Eden’s Outcasts: Louisa May Alcott and Her Father by John Matteson.

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The Triumph and Tragedy of Franklin Pierce

Franklin Pierce was elected as the 14^th and possibly worst president of the United States on Nov. 2, 1852. During his presidency he confronted two divided houses: the growing friction between the North and the South and his wife’s unhappiness with his political career.

Gen. Franklin Pierce by Matthew Brady

His presidency began inauspiciously. Two months before he took the oath of office, President-elect Pierce and his wife lost their 11-year-old son, the third and last of their children to die. The Pierces took it hard.

Franklin Pierce

Handsome Frank Pierce was born in a log cabin on Nov. 23, 1804 in Hillsborough, N.H. His father, Benjamin, was a revolutionary war veteran who served as governor of New Hampshire.

Pierce first succeeded at law and then parlayed his charm, reputation and family connections into a political career.

He married Jane Means Appleton, the daughter of the president of Bowdoin College, Pierce’s alma mater. Their courtship lasted eight years and finally ended shortly after he won election to Congress. They held their wedding in 1834 at her family home in Amherst, N.H., and then left immediately afterward for Washington, D.C.

It wasn’t a great match. He was gregarious, vain, a drinker and a son of the frontier. She was shy, sickly, refined, a teetotaler and a proper daughter of New England’s theocracy.

Washington

Jane put up with his first session of Congress, but returned home to her mother in New Hampshire for the second. She had a reason: she was pregnant with their first child. Their son, Franklin Jr., was born in 1836, but he only lived a few days.

Jane Pierce managed another season in Washington. When her husband was elected to the Senate for the term beginning in 1837, she seemed less than thrilled.

Pierce succumbed to Jane’s wishes and quit the Senate in 1842. She had given birth to two more sons, Frank Robert in 1839 and Benjamin in 1841. Washington was no place to raise their children, she thought.

The Pierce Homestead, one of two presidential houses in New Hampshire where Franklin Pierce lived.

They moved to Concord, where Franklin pursued his legal career and dabbled in politics. He also managed to quit drinking for a while. But then their son Frank Robert died an agonizing death of typhus in 1843.

When the United States went to war with Mexico in 1846, Franklin Pierce accepted a commission as brigadier general. He returned from the war safely and as interested in politics as ever.

God’s Judgment?

Jane Pierce and son Benny

In 1852, the Democratic Party nominated Franklin Pierce for the presidency of the United States. When Jane heard the news, she fainted. Their remaining son Benny wrote a letter to her saying, “I hope he won’t be elected.”

Franklin Pierce came to agree with that sentiment even before he took the oath of office.

Just after the election, Benny, 11, was crushed to death in a freak train accident. Wood fell on the boy’s head and Pierce picked him up, not realizing he was dead until he took off his cap. The boy’s head was like jelly.

Pierce never got over it. He didn’t take the oath of office on the Bible because he believed his son’s death to be God’s judgment for his political campaigning.

One-Term President

Franklin Pierce went to the White House as a doughface, a northerner with southern sympathies.

Two divisive decisions made him a one-term president. He signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act and supported the Ostend Manifesto, which justified the use of force in seizing Cuba. Both were ways to expand slavery. He also enforced the Fugitive Slave Act.

Franklin Pierce

When he ran for president in 1852, he didn’t have a campaign slogan. When it came time for re-election his opponents did: “Anybody but Pierce.”

Legend has it that as he left office he told reporters, “There is nothing left but to get drunk.” His reputation was destroyed, at least in the north, when he declared his support for the Confederacy. He was shunned for the rest of his life, though his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne stood by him.

Franklin Pierce died on Oct. 8, 1869, of cirrhosis of the liver.

If you enjoyed this story about Franklin Pierce, you may also want to read about his fight with Dorothea Dix over the mentally ill here. Or you might enjoy reading about Jane Pierce here, or about how Franklin Pierce discovered the body of Nathaniel Hawthorne here.

This story was updated in 2022.

Image: Franklin Pierce Homestead By User:Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20697770

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Sarah Bagley Avenges the New England Mill Girls

A powerful Massachusetts politician in 1845 learned the hard way not to mess with the mill girls – and especially not with Sarah Bagley.

Sarah Bagley

To the mill girls of antebellum New England, Sarah Bagley stood taller than the reform leaders of the day. She meant more to them than Horace Mann, Susan B. Anthony, Dorothea Dix, or Sojourner Truth.

She was one of the earliest and most important advocates of working women’s rights. Like another Lowell native – Jack Kerouac, a century later – Sarah Bagley refused to be stuck in a second-class life.

But newspaper editor and state Rep. William Schouler viewed Sarah Bagley as a greedy troublemaker. The two adversaries confronted each other at the Massachusetts State House. Too late did Schouler didn’t realize how formidable an opponent he faced.

Sarah Bagley

Sarah Bagley was born on a farm in Candia, N.H.,, sometime in April 1805 or 1806. After her family fell on hard times, she moved to Lowell, Mass., in 1835 to work in the Hamilton Mills. She was 28, older than most of the mill girls.

Her conflict with newspaper editor and politician William Schouler began with her involvement with the Lowell Offering.

In the early days of the great textile mills in Lowell, mill girls got decent wages. However, they worked long hours and were supervised closely.

french-canadian-textile-workers-lowell-mill

Lowell textile mills

When they did have free time, the mill girls took advantage of Lowell’s many cultural offerings: libraries, concerts, improvement circles and lectures. One mill girl came from Maine to work in Lowell just so she could have access to books.

Lowell Offering

A local clergyman started the monthly publication called the Lowell Offering in 1840 to publish poems and fiction by the culture-crazy mill girls. By then, working conditions in the mills were deteriorating. So Sarah Bagley wrote a story for the Offering called Pleasures of Factory Life. Those pleasures, she wrote, resembled angels’ visits: ‘Few and far between.’

In October 1842, state Rep. William Schouler bought the Offering. He was also the editor of the Lowell Courier, a friend to the factory owners. The Offering stopped publishing Sarah Bagley’s criticisms.

In November 1842, the Hamilton Mills management tried to force the mill girls to work two looms instead of one. They walked off the job, and management fired and blacklisted them.

There was a depression on, and a thousand textile workers left Lowell between 1842 and 1844. They were fed up with wage cuts and heavier workloads. By 1844, conditions had improved so that male workers received raises. Women did not.

In December 1844, Sarah Bagley met with five other women at the Anti-Slavery Hall in Lowell to organize the Lowell Labor Female Reform Association. They defied the prevailing belief that women who organized were reprehensible, and they fought for safer workplaces and the 10-hour day. the women elected Sarah president, and she persuaded the group to buy a small, militant labor publication, The Voice of Industry.

The Lowell Labor Female Reform Association quickly grew to 600 members. It had Massachusetts branches in Waltham and Fall River, and New Hampshire branches in Manchester, Dover and Nashua.

The Whip of Necessity

Sarah Bagley led the mill girls in a petition drive for safer working conditions and shorter hours. She wrote – and spoke – for the cause with power. Typical of her rhetoric was this:

Is anyone such a fool as to suppose that out of six thousand girls in Lowell, sixty would be there if they could help it? Whenever I raise the point that it is immoral to shut us up in a room twelve hours a day in the most monotonous and tedious employment I am told that we have come to the mills voluntarily and we can leave when we will. Voluntarily! … the whip which brings us to Lowell is necessity. We must have money; a father’s debts are to be paid, an aged mother to be supported, a brother’s ambition to be aided and so the factories are supplied. Is this to act from free will? Is this freedom? To my mind it is slavery.

The mill girls’ petitions, with 2,139 signatures, led to one of the earliest legislative hearings on factory conditions. But to the dismay of the mill girls, Rep. William Schouler chaired the committee.

Schouler may have tried to intimidate the mill girls by insisting they testify before the committee – something women had never done before.

Cringing Servility

Mill girls

The mill girls, undaunted, told the committee of too-short meal breaks and dangerous air polluted by cotton dust and smoke from oil lamps. The committee took their testimony, visited the mills and talked to the mill agents. The committee finally concluded ‘the remedy is not with us.’ The remedy was in ‘a less love for money, and a more ardent love for social happiness and intellectual superiority.’

The furious mill girls accused the committee of ‘cringing servility to corporate monopolies.’ They passed a resolution:

That the Female Labor Reform Association deeply deplore the lack of independence, honesty and humanity in the committee to whom were referred sundry petitions relative to the hours of labor. – especially in the chairman of that committee; and as he is merely a corporation machine, or tool, we will use our best endeavors to keep him in the “city of spindles,” where he belongs, and not to trouble Boston folks with him.

The fall election was coming up, and the mill girls made good on their threat. They worked hard to discredit Schouler. When the results came in, Schouler had lost. The mill girls thanked the voters for ‘consigning William Schouler to the obscurity he so justly deserves.’ Schouler then took his wrath out on Sarah Bagley in the pages of the Courier.

More petitions resulted in more hearings, but no action from the Legislature. But public pressure was so great on the mill owners they finally shortened the workday in 1847 by 30 minutes to 13 hours. In 1853, the workday was shortened to 11 hours. By 1874, the 10-hour workday was the law in New England.

Another First

By then, Sarah Bagley had gotten a job in Lowell as a telegrapher, probably the first in the United States. In 1847 she moved to Springfield, Mass., as a telegrapher. She was devastated to find out she earned three-quarters of what men earned. That year she also published a book, Biography of Self-Taught Men.

She returned to Lowell, worked briefly in the Hamilton Mills and continued to speak about reform – women’s rights, prison reform, health care and working conditions. Then she fades from the historical record. According to some accounts, at 45 she married widower James Durro or Durnough, a homeopathic physician. Sarah took up homeopathy, caring primarily for women and children. The couple moved to Brooklyn and manufactured homeopathic medicines. James Durro died in 1871. The date and circumstances of Sarah Bagley’s death are unclear.

With thanks to The Belles of New England: The Women of the Textile Mills and the Families Whose Wealth They Wove by William Moran. This story about Sarah Bagley was updated in 2022.

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Dorothea Dix and Franklin Pierce: The Battle for the Mentally Ill

Before she led the Union Army nursing corps during the Civil War, New England’s Dorothea Dix led the most ambitious reform efforts for the care of the mentally ill ever attempted in the U.S.

Dix argued that a land grant system, similar to the one that created state universities, should be used to create mental hospitals across the country. And she very nearly succeeded, were it not for New Hampshire’s only U.S. president, Franklin Pierce, and his insistence on catering to southern slaveowners above all else.

Dorothea Dix

These two New Englanders would not seem to be natural opponents on the issue, but they came to loggerheads nonetheless in the swirl of politics in the 1850s. Slavery and even a hint of abolitionism dominated the terms of virtually all debate.

Dorothea Dix

By any measure, Dorothea Dix led a remarkable life. Born in Hamden, Maine, to a semi-invalid mother and an alcoholic Methodist preacher for a father, she fled at the age of 12 to live with her wealthy grandmother in Boston and her great aunt in Worcester.

While her mother and father floated around New England, Dorothea Dix worked at teaching and writing. But soon after her grandmother’s death, she found her true calling as a social agitator. Following a trip to Europe, where she became acquainted with the reform movement to improve the conditions of the mentally ill, she brought the issue home with her.

The treatment of indigent mentally ill people in New England and throughout the country was abominable in the 1830s. Asylums barely existed and most often the mentally ill were housed in segregated quarters in jails or poorhouses. Lacking any training or understanding of mental illness, the jailers often treated their charges no better than animals.

Dorothea Dix struck upon a straightforward and effective means of change. She simply traveled the country touring the facilities and described what she saw. She seemed to understand government’s penchant for commissioning studies in lieu of taking action, and she appointed herself to study the conditions of the indigent mentally ill.

Pits, Pens, Outhouses

In state after state, beginning in Massachusetts, she documented mentally ill people living in underground pits, pens, outhouses and attics. She simply explained how they lived lacking clothes, heat and decent food.

Her reports shamed even the most recalcitrant legislatures into taking action, and in the 1840s insane asylums led by doctors began springing up throughout the country. Building on the techniques that had worked on a state level, Dorothea Dix took her case to Washington.

Sympathetic congressmen in 1848 provided her with an office in the capitol. There she launched a six-year effort to pass a law that would grant 10 million acres of federal lands to build asylums. The idea was relatively simple. The land would be used to construct hospitals on, or sold to raise money for the hospitals.

A stark depiction of the lives of the mentally ill created sympathy in Congress. After four attempts at passage, she finally won overwhelming support for the bill in 1854.

Congress at that time was preoccupied primarily with the question of slavery. One of the reasons Dix was able to procure passage of her proposal was that she was not an abolitionist. She believed African-Americans were inferior to whites, and found the New England abolition movement to be tedious. She supported the American Colonization Society, which wanted to send slaves to Africa.

Franklin Pierce

On the surface, she would seem like the ideological soulmate for New Hampshire-born President Franklin Pierce. Pierce was the northeasterner chosen by the Democrats to be their presidential candidate. His Yankee background appealed to the North and his sympathy for slave owners appealed to the South. He was the perfect choice: While critical of slavery, he did nothing about it.

Franklin Pierce

The Dix land grant bill nearly made it into law. Millard Fillmore, president until 1853, had spoken in favor of the concept. But the bill was successfully stifled during his presidency. Westerners did not like the law since it would sell some of their public lands to support asylums in other states. They managed to slow its approval.

But the real opposition came from southern politicians. Southern Democrats hung their arguments in favor of slavery on the concept of state’s rights. Critics of the Dix plan, notably Jefferson Davis, argued that the bill infringed on state’s rights. If it passed, nothing would prevent Congress from passing a similar law to free slaves. Then Congress could sell western lands to compensate slave owners and provide property for the freed slaves.

30 Asylums

Before his election as the president of the confederacy during the Civil War, Davis served in the U.S. Senate from Mississippi. He fought fiercely against the Dix bill. As Pierce’s Secretary of War, he could also agitate against the land grant bill.

Ultimately, Pierce sided with the southern slave interests, as he generally did, and vetoed the law. In the aftermath, Dorothea Dix returned to Europe to work on promoting the interests of the mentally ill there. She would later lead the Union Army’s nursing corps throughout the Civil War, where she generated controversy as well.

But at the end of her life, she could look on more than 30 insane asylums that her movement inspired as part of the first effort in the country to provide a humane setting for the indigent mentally ill.

Pierce, of course, is widely remembered as the president who started the tradition of the White House Christmas tree.

This story about Dorothea Dix and Franklin Pierce was updated in 2021.

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Anna Lowell Woodbury, The Forgotten Cambridge Chef Who Pioneered Industrial Education

Few remember Anna Lowell Woodbury, the blueblood who spent her life tending to sick soldiers and teaching poor women — including poor African-American women — to support themselves.

She never drew attention to herself, though she was a scion of New England’s famous and wealthy Lowell, Jackson and Cabot families. Anna Lowell Woodbury doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry.

And yet she was a pioneer of the industrial arts movement. She founded the first cooking school for the children of freed slaves, despite the hostility from the southern city of Washington, D.C. She published a cookbook of Boston recipes seven years before Fannie Farmer got around to it.

Educators around the country knew of her work, and she became the first acting president of the National Industrial Association.

Anna Lowell Woodbury

Anna Lowell Woodbury was born in Boston on Aug. 3, 1833 the daughter of Charles Russell Lowell, Jr., and Anna Cabot Jackson. Her paternal grandfather was a prominent Unitarian minister, while her mother’s father was Patrick Tracy Jackson, a founder of the Lowell and Waltham mills. Her uncle, poet James Russell Lowell, was her father’s brother.

James Russell Lowell

Anna’s father ran his his father-in-law’s coal mining company, but went bankrupt in the financial panic of 1837. Her forceful mother opened a school and wrote books on education to support the family.

When the Civil War broke out, her two brothers immediately signed up as Union soldiers. Her favorite brother, Lt. James Jackson Lowell, died early in the war at the Battle of Ball’s Bluff.

Anna organized the Union Hall Association, which found work for the wives of soldiers by getting government contracts for uniforms and bandages. She put her mother and Mrs. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., in charge and went off to train as a nurse under Dorothea Dix.

Dorothea Dix

War Nurse

In Washington, D.C., Anna Lowell ran the special diet kitchen at Armory Square Hospital, an old hotel that stood at the site of the National Air and Space Museum.

Anna Lowell’s fellow lady nurses included Louisa May Alcott, the niece of New Hampshire Sen. John P. Hale and the daughter of a wealthy New York judge. It was hard, overwhelming work. Alcott lasted only six weeks.

Ward K, Armory Square Hospital

In 1864, Anna’s only other brother, Brig. Gen. Charles Russell Lowell, died at the Battle of Cedar Creek. She couldn’t be spared to attend his funeral in Cambridge, Mass., and she worked through her grief in Washington. Her fellow nurses gave her a photo album as a tribute shortly after his death.

When the war ended, Anna Lowell married a prominent doctor in Washington, Henry Woodbury. It didn’t last, and after two years they separated. When he died in 1905, Woodbury left her $10 from his estate valued at $40,000.

Back Home

Gen. Charles Howard, then a Freedman’s Bureau commissioner, asked for help finding work for the former slaves then crowded into Washington. The Bureau wanted to send newly enfranchised women to Cambridge if there was a place for them.

Anna Lowell Woodbury led a committee of Brahmins to start a school to teach housekeeping to freed slaves and get them jobs. The school received 200 requests for domestic help before it opened its doors in a rented Cambridgeport building. Most of the women didn’t stay long for job training, preferring to work right away, according to The Newetowne Chronicle.

Through today’s eyes, the idea of a wealthy white women teaching African-American children to be servants seems at best condescending. But the Post-Civil War Era offered few opportunities for ex-slaves, and African-American leaders like Booker T. Washington saw training for the jobs available as a necessary survival tactic.

Return to Washington

Around 1880, Anna Lowell Woodbury rented a plain, three-story brick house at 1228 N St. NW, in Logan Circle. It had the words “School of Cookery” on the western façade. That first year, the school taught 12 girls plain cooking and the elements of good housekeeping, while “trying to elevate their intellectual and moral standards,” the Boston Transcript reported.

A typical house in the Logan Circle neighborhood. Image courtesy Google Maps.

Her mission was to teach the basics of cooking with recipes that were attractive, interesting and useful. They can be found in Lessons in Cookery (view it here). One lesson teaches how to prepare beef tea and other food for the sick, about which Anna Lowell Woodbury knew a great deal.

Anna Lowell Woodbury as a Civil War nurse. Photo from the collection of Carol Bundy.

By her own account and newspaper reports, Anna Lowell Woodbury opened the first mission school of cooking to a hostile reception. Cookery schools, she said, were viewed with great distrust. But perhaps it was teaching African-American children that did not go over well in that southern city.

It cost $10-$15 a year to teach each student, but tuition was free. Woodbury quietly financed the school. She had help from renters on the upper floors, donations from Bostonians, paid classes for advanced students and the sale of cakes and breads from the school’s ovens.

The public schools in Washington, D.C., began to teach women to cook. By 1888, eight years after it started, the School of Cookery and its teachers taught 900 students.

The News Spreads

Woodbury started getting letters about her work as news of it spread throughout the country. She then held a meeting at her home in Washington to form the National Industrial Association, which promoted vocational training in the schools. The Civil War had left many poor widows and orphans who needed a way to support themselves.

Anna Lowell Woodbury became the NIA’s acting president and ran its first annual meeting in 1888. The next year, she published her Lessons in Cookery manual for Washington’s public schools.

African American schoolgirls with teacher, learning to cook on a wood stove in classroom, 1899. From the Library of Congress, Frances Benjamin Johnston collection.

(You can get it on your Nook here or your Kindle here.) Reading the book gives you a good sense of the school’s methods. It starts with instructions on how to make a fire. Then it has a recipe for Tip-Top biscuits “to show the pupils how to mix and handle dough lightly and quickly.” A recipe for sugar cookies then follows a lesson on blacking a stove.

Impact

The Boston Evening Transcript praised the cooking school in a story on June 13, 1898. The newspaper reported that it had done more in proportion to its means than any other institution to elevate the poor and unfortunate.

The National Industrial Association was among the earliest, if not the earliest, associations in the United States to promote of industrial education, wrote Isaac Edwards Clark in his book Art and Industry (1892): Industrial and manual training in the public schools.

Silently but unobtrusively, the National Industrial Association spread the gospel of vocational education throughout the country, Clark wrote.

Woodbury, probably unintentionally, also spread New England cooking to the South. Lessons in Cookery had recipes for Boston brown bread, New Bedford pudding and codfish balls. Read some recipes from the cookbook here.

Anna Lowell Woodbury died on June 5, 1906, and is buried with her family in Mount Auburn Cemetery.

End Notes

With thanks to Anna Lowell and the Mystery of a Civil War Nurse’s Photo Album, by Dever Powell, Atlantic Monthly, Feb. 2, 2012.

Learn more about Cambridge history by visiting the website of the Cambridge Historical Society. Anna Lowell Woodbury’s brothers are buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, a National Historic Landmark. Read Charles Russell Lowell’s biography by Carol Bundy. In Washington, D.C., the site of the Armory Square Hospital is now the National Air and Space Museum, just across the National Mall from Julia Child’s Cambridge kitchen in the National Museum of American History. This story about Anna Lowell Woodbury was updated in 2022.

Images: Armory Square Hospital Washington, D.C. Patients in Ward K of Armory Square Hospital. United States Washington D.C. District of Columbia Washington D.C, 1865. [August] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2018667080/.

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