Friday Family Photo

Before she was married, my grandmother Mary painted in oils. She probably had private lessons, because I think the school in Ashton, IL would have been too small to offer art. In one of her account books from the 1890s I found notations for art supplies and studio rent. This painting of iris hangs in my aunt's home. I can only remember three of her paintings framed and hanging in the farm house, but they were wonderful, so there must have been many leading up to those that weren't kept or framed.

In Grandma's little community of Ashton, IL (her family lived on a farm, but that was the school district), at 25 and unmarried, she was considered an "old-maid." Her deepest desire was to be a teacher, but not only were married women kept out of the classroom, but so were single women whose father could support them, or so she told me. Mary lived at home and worked as her father's bookkeeper and managed the house (her mother had died in 1898). The median age of women at marriage in the United States was twenty-two in 1890, but for college educated women the median was over twenty-five. My grandparents (he'd been off on an adventure in the northwest but they knew each other from college days) were married in September 1901, when Mary was 25 and Charles 27. The young couple did not see a future in Illinois managing any of her father's property and so they moved to Wichita, KS after their marriage where he had relatives.

Grandfather Charles' sister and brother-in law, Alice and J. Edwin Jay lived in Wichita where Uncle Edwin was on the Faculty of the Friends' University. Charles opened a feed store, the West Side Mill, at 811 West Douglas. They bought a house at 2007 Hancock where Mary earned money by renting rooms to students from the Friends' University (she later did this in 1934 at the University of Illinois during the Depression). She audited some classes at the University until her first pregnancy began to show and appearing in public was considered unseemly. They returned to Illinois after the deaths of their second son in 1907 and of her brother Ira in 1908 to help her father.

I like to think she may have continued her painting in Kansas, but I just don't know. She was a bit of a health nut and probably thought (correctly) the fumes from the linseed oil, turpentine and oil paints weren't safe during her pregnancies and then stopped altogether.