Maria Sanford

Preface

No other Minnesota woman has been so widely knoAvn and so nniversally loved as Maria Sanford. Her life was filled with self sacrificing labor for others, and with earnest endeavor to forward every good cause. She was constantly conminnicating, through her o^vn vigorous personality, a zealous enthusiasm for education, for character-building, and for civic righteousness to all young people with whom she came in contact.

A great throng of those whom she has inspired will welcome a biography that will pass on to other young people a portion of her glowing spirit.

This story of her life has been written by one who Avas closely associated with Miss Sanford in the State University. The autobiography which was already begun, has been incorporated and much material has been furnished by friends and relatives.

The Regents of the University have encouraged the publication by personal assistance and have permitted the volume to be issued by the University Press.

iii iv MARIA SANFORD

The Alumni Association has appointed a special committee to further its wide distribution and sale. All proceeds are to be used for a Memorial for Miss Sanford.

The plan for the autobiography as well as the biography was conceived and has been successfully carried through by Mrs. David F. Simpson. Special thanks for accumulating material are due to Mrs.. Simpson, and Mrs. Frederick Kenaston of Minneapolis, to Mrs. Frederic Tryon of "Washington, to Miss Helen Wilder of Philadelphia, to the Minneapolis Journal for permission to reprint the copyrighted autobiography and to Mr. G. A. Hubner for permission to use the copyrighted frontispiece.

Assistance in revision and correction of manuscript has been rendered by Miss Elizabeth Lynskey and Mrs. Simpson. To all of these as well as to the author it has been a labor of love.

Alumni Committee.

Contents

Chapter Page

I. The Unfinished Autobiography . 1

II. A Connecticut Yankee . . .44

Chapter I The Unfinished Autobiography

I come of good, strong New England stock. My ancestors were among the first settlers of the town where I was born, Saybrook, Connecticut, called later, since the town was divided, Old Saybrook. Saybrook was named for Lord Seal and Lord Brooke of the London Company, who were sending over settlers to the New World. Lord Fenwick came with the first settlers to Saybrook, bringing his young bride, who, after about a year, succumbed to the hardships of the new country. Her Elizabethan tomb, which her stricken husband brought over and set up over her grave beside the fort, was one of the most marked antiquities of old Connecticut, but it had to give way to the necessities of commerce. When the Valley road was built it needed a terminal outside the bar at the mouth of the Connecticut River, and Lady Fenwick 's tomb and her remains were removed to the cemetery. My cousin, a physician, superintended the removal, and he found her skeleton entire except the flange of one toe. And the inner coil of her chestnut hair was still lustrous after about two hundred years in the grave. As Saybrook was situated at the mouth of the Connecticut River, the settlers thought it would be a city, and laid out the main street sixteen rods wide and two miles long, with a double row of elms shading the walk on each side of the roadway; a magnificent street still. So bravely our Puritan ancestors built for the future.

Yale College was first located at Saybrook, under the name of the Connecticut Colleague School. But in 1716 it had been found that the bar at the mouth of the river would hinder commerce; and New Haven, with its unobstructed harbor, was outgrowing Saybrook, and the college was removed to that city and named Yale College for a benevolent donor, Elihu Yale.

My father 's mother was Elizabeth Chapman. Her great grandfather, George Chapman, erected, about 1650, the first frame house in Saybrook. This structure, about twenty feet square, was so well built that it formed still the snmmer kitchen of the house in which I lived from my sixth to my eleventh year. George Chapman bonght his wife, Annie Bliss, from off ship when the London Company **sent over chaste young women to be wives of the planters '', who paid the passage of the girls and married them. This Annie Bliss became the mother of a notable race. Those whom I remember were tall, straight, fine looking, intelligent men with more of individuality and initiative than are given to most people. I was told, as a child, that my ancestors in two lands, the Chapmans on my father's side and the Clarks on my mother's for three generations went up to the general court (legislature) together when the people sent their best men.

My mother 's father, Ruf us Clark, enlisted in the Revolutionary army at seventeen years of age, and this gives me my membership in the D. A. R. He became a man much trusted and esteemed, was made deacon of the church and justice of the peace, and, I might say,, general counsellor. He Avas a great reader and had quite a library of his own, in those days when the Bible and the almanac were considered sufficient for everybody but the minister and the doctor; and he read all the books he could borrow.

I had leaves of an old account book of my grandfather's, and this is the way they read: One gallon of rum, one gallon of molasses, one pound of ginger, one gallon of rum, five pounds of sugar, one pound of saleratus, one gallon of rum. About every third item a gallon of rum, and this a deacon and a justice! Everybody drank in those days, and treated the help in the field and the minister when he came to call. My grandfather read of the temperance movement in England before it was started in this country ; and convinced of its importance, banished liquor from his household and took coffee instead to his laborers in the field. When some years after, the temperance movement was started in Connecticut, the workers, who were told of his practice, came to get my grandfather to sign the pledge. He told them he was heartily in sympathy with temperance and practiced it, but did not like to sign a pledge. They were disappointed, of course. The next day he was down street, and the temperance workers were laboring mth a man who was ruining himself and his family by drink.

**I think jest ez Deacon Clark does", he said, **I ken leave off, but I don't want to sign.''

* 'Where's your paper?" asked my grandfather, and gave them his name. He didn't want such hangers-on to his skirts.

My mother's mother, Lydia Bushnell Clark, was a very handsome woman, with beantifnl soft brown hair, sparkling bright eyes, clear complexion and full red lips. Her husband, my grandfather, was almost as homely as his wife was handsome. My mother told me that when she was a girl of sixteen, the youngest of five children, an old suitor of my grandmother, who had been twenty-five years out West (eastern Ohio) came to visit his old friends. She said that she was aware, as she was sitting by the fireplace, that he was looking at her very earnestly. Finally he said: ^^You don't look much like your mother." She said she knew how to take the compliment. If she didn't ** handsome much" somebody had bequeathed her a wonderful voice and a sweetness of disposition far richer than mere beauty. She sang soprano, and her voice Avas full, rich and clear. She would take the high tenor and carry it with perfect ease and accuracy. But it was not so much the range of her voice as its quality, what the elocutionists call its ^Uimbre", that was remarkable. It just took hold of your heartstrings.

My uncle, her brother, William Clark, was six years her elder. He was a school teacher, and I used to tell my little companions with pride that I had an nncle who had taught school forty years. I little thought that I myself should teach fifty-four years. In those early days teachers had to be severe to be successful, and my uncle was a very successful teacher. My mother went to school to him, and he was so much afraid of being considered partial to her that he was so strict (nobody could be severe with her), that she called him ^^Mr. Clark '^ at home. He told me, after mother's death, that when they used to go out into company together he was very proud of her, for everybody loved her so. But she always obeyed him as if he had been her father. Once they were invited to a party given to the congressman of that district, who lived in an adjoining town. There was a popular song at that time which my mother did not like; she thought it silly. She was urged to sing it at the party, but declined. When she Avas still urged. Uncle William said, *SSing it, Mary'', and she did. When she was through, the congressman said, much to her delight, *^I have heard better songs, but never a sweeter singer."

My father, Henry E. Sanford, was like the Chapmans, tall and straight, six feet in his stockings. His characteristics were strength, courage, energy and skill, and a good cheer which no misfortune could crush. He had wonderfully intelligent hands. He never wasted a minute. He learned the shoemaker 's trade and worked at it, giving his wages to his father, as was customary, until he was twenty-one. Then he worked for himself, and by the time he was twenty-five he had laid up enough to warrant his marrying. And he won a prize. The marriage was an ideal one. My mother and father were so proud of each other, so ambitious, and looked to the future with such confidence and hope ! I love to imagine those early prosperous years, when my father bought and paid for the comfort of a little house, which my mother's neatness and good taste, and their mutual affection, made a beautiful home.

But their love was not dependent on good fortune. In the darken years that followed, when loss and hardship came, there was never a flaw in their trust and devotion. Until the final parting, my mother always looked to my father for courage and wise direction, and he to her for inspiration and that graciousness wliich a strong man gains from a loving woman of refinement and delicacy. There was never any bickering between them. I remember all too well their very humble surroundings, their hard toil, their careful economy, but I do not remember — and I certainly should had it occurred, for I remember that when my father put up a stove-pipe we children kept out of his way — I do not remember a single sharp or unkind word, but always the gentle tone and the glance of love and sympathy.

I recall that when I was a very little girl father came home one night from his work. I do not know why this incident should be stamped on my memory except

''Set by some mordant of fancy It insists on its right to be there.''

My father leaned over my mother's shoulders and said tenderly, **Been ironing today, MaryT' (ironing was always hard for her) and kissed her. And the radiant smile that lighted up her face obliterated all signs of care and weariness.

My father never felt it a hardship to go out of his way to do the little delicate things that pleased mother. His hours of labor were long and hard, but he never sat down to the table in his shirtsleeves, and when he was running a farm, I think he would have gone without a meal any time rather than sit doAvn to the table without changing to his slippers, because he knew mother noticed and disliked the odors of the barnyard and stable.

They each loved to do what the other liked; and the same spirit extended to us children and to neighbors and friends. My father and mother were both deeply reli,gious but never bigoted. Father was superintendent of the Sunday school and leader of the choir and always the minister's right hand man.

My parents were poor, but there Avas no sordidness in their poverty. I never heard my father plead poverty when the contribution box was going round. There was a bright, genial hospitality in their home. My mother was an excellent cook and could make the plainest and simplest food attractive, and kinsfolk and strangers loved to visit them; and distinguished guests, usually lovers of music, who sometimes came, not only said but showed that they wanted to come again.

Is it strange that having come from such a home, I believe with almost the enthusiasm of a zealot in the happiness and beauty of the homes of the poor? Those so-called homes where squalor and vice and disease and degradation thrive, mil, I believe, be abolished by social progress; but in the homes of self-respecting, hard working poverty, there may and should be as much refinement and courtesy and tender love as in a palace. I believe we should bring up our boys and girls to expect to make such homes, and to prepare for them by tender care of their mothers and sisters at home, and to save the time and money they spend at the movies in preparing themselves to enjoy and make others enjoy music and books and pictures that give delight to the home. And I want our young couples to feel that a single room, with a bed in the wall, and a kitchen in a closet, and a bathtub under the table, a place from which they are obliged to go out every night for entertainment, is not the nucleus of a true home; that the plainest house in the suburbs, where there can be trees and flowers and children, where there will be burdens and duties and simple hospitality, is far better for the present and infinitely superior for the future happy home. But I am getting ahead of and away from my story.

Some time in the first seven years of his married life, my father went to Georgia and set up a shoe store, and he was successful. But the years of 1836 and 1837 were not only years of financial panic, but also of anti-slavery agitation and of great prejudice in the

South against Northern people. Somebody sent my father anti-slavery newspapers. He never saw them. They were taken out of his office and distributed among his customers. All at once his business fell flat. He could sell nothing, he could collect nothing, for even in the best days Southerners, at that time, paid their bills only once a year. He came home to do the best he could by his business creditors. He sold the place he and my mother loved so well, moved his family into part of his father's house, and when he had thus raised all that he could, there still remained a debt of a thousand dollars, for which he gave his note; and of which, I rejoice to say, he paid every cent. It was a heavy burden for a man mth only his hands and courage, and with a delicate wife and little children to care for, but he bore it with unwavering cheerfulness. He might have taken advantage of the bankrupt law, but he said proudly : * * No man shall ever look me in the face and say I wronged him out of a penny." My mother was in perfect accord with this course, but it was very hard on her. My grandfather's house was not fitted for two families. My father's mother had died years before; and the stepmother who took her place, though kindly at heart, was a little sharp with her tongue, and mother was always sensitive lest she should infringe on others' rights and privileges. And with little children it was not always easy to be sure. It was just three months before my birth that, when the last things were placed on the load, my mother bade farewell to the home of so much happiness, and with her two little girls walked up to my grandfather's house. A prominent man of the town met her on the way. He said to his wife when he ,got home, ^*I hope I may never see another woman look as Mary Clark looked today," calling her by her maiden name, which they all knew and loved.

In my young womanhood I was subject to deep depression, and my mother said to me: **It is no wonder to me, when I recall how I suffered in the months before you were born." Fortunately for me my father's spirit triumphed in me. I outlived the days of darkness and have been able, until bowed by the weight of years, like my father to square my shoulders to heavy burdens, and not only stand erect but keep a cheerful spirit. But I was doomed in the beginning to add to my parents' trouble. I was born under a cold star; in Connecticut, in December, the eighteenth or nineteenth. It was near midnight, and nobody ever knew whether before or after. I have chosen to celebrate the latter day. The old fashioned houses were built with great beams resting for support on the chimney. It was so cold that in the effort to keep my mother's room warm by a fire in the fireplace they set the house on fire, and when I was a week old, mother and child had to be removed. But this was not the worst. When I was six weeks old my mother was taken with fever, and I had to be weaned. I would have no substitute for the mother's breast and opened my mouth and screamed. By all reports, my voice was strong even then. There were no trained nurses in those days, and even if there had been my parents could not have afforded one, and I wore out the strength and patience of aunts and cousins who waited from day to day to see me starve to death. At last an old woman back in the woods consented to take the baby who wouldn't eat and would cry all the time. When they were trying to feed me with a spoon I snatched the cup and drank — a rather novel proceeding for a baby less than two months old — ^but I have always liked to have a way of my own. After a week or two, my grandfather, in going to the woods, went out of his way to see the baby and came home sayin,g, ^^I do believe that child is determined to live." I nsed to tell my father and mother laughingly that they could have spared me then, for their hands were full. * I surely ought to do some good in the world after such a disastrous beginning.

As soon as my father could settle up his business affairs, he went to Meriden, Connecticut, to work for his brother, who had an auger factory there. My father took charge of a room. The men worked ten hours, and father had to open up and get things ready before the men came, and straighten out and close up after they had gone; so that he had nearly eleven hours. And he received a dollar and a half a day. I was six months old when father moved his family to Meriden, a distance of about forty miles. He hired a little house. It was dirty and dilapidated, but there was a beautiful big willow tree in front of it. Father fixed up the house, and mother made it neat, and they were very happy in it. There my first memories began.

I remember how the doctor took my head between his knees and pulled out a back tooth with turnkeys. The idea of putting that savage instrument into the mouth of a little child!

And they had no way of dulling the pain except with sugar plums that the teacher who came in gave me if I would stop crying. My father had gone to choir rehearsal when the pain in my tooth became unendurable ; and my sister, ten years old, walked in the dark the long two miles and a half after the doctor. I am very sure she was neither reluctant nor afraid. Perhaps the experiences of those days gave children stronger nerves.

What wonderful changes have taken place in the compass of my memory! I remember our first stove. It was called the ^^ Franklin'' stove after Benjamin Franklin, who invented it. It was really a castiron fireplace, set out in the room and connected to the chimney by a stove - pipe; but it had the great advantage that we could get all around it. I remember our first cookstove. It was a curious affair; just a firebox with a hearth and covers and the flue that was supported by the back leg, and an oven in the stovepipe. But, crude as it was, it was a great improvement; for before that time the cooking had been done in the fireplace by means of a crane and pothooks supporting the kettles over the fire. It was back-breaking work, and it is not strange that so many men buried two wives and sometimes more. The baking was done in the big brick oven, and for this it was necessary to have dry wood. Green wood would sizzle and at last burn on the hearth, but for the oven the wood must be dry ; and it was counted one of the evidences of a man 's provident kindness that he kept on hand a good supply of dry wood for the oven. As we used to sing in our childish plays,

*'You must prove constant and prove good, And keep your old woman in oven wood."

By the way, this form of expression, **my man'' and ^^my woman" and often ^'my old woman" was common in those days when husband and wife spoke of each other. It was remarked by the neighbors that my mother always said ' ' Mr. Sanford" when she spoke of father, and we were a little proud, as children, that we never said or heard at home, in speaking of the neighbors, ' ' do^\ai to Spencer 's " or ^ ' Ingham 's ' ', but always down to ' ' Mr. Spencer 's " or '' Mr. Ingham 's", and even ^^doAvn to Mr. Sheffield's store." We never, as children, called our cousins who were young men and women simply Azuba, Rufus, and Lydia Ann, but always Cousin Azuba, Cousin Rufus, and Cousin Lydia Ann.

I dwelt upon this because some children today seem to think it smart to be careless of the handles of their words. "When they come to be men and women they will be very glad if they have early learned deference for their elders, both in speech and thought. The time spent in learning habits of courtesy yields big interest, not only in the esteem of others, but in the delight in one's own soul.

Going back to the stoves — ^When I was young there was no fire in the churches. Women carried little foot stoves : a copper box about ei^ght or ten inches square, cased in wood, in which they carried a pan of hot coals; and at noon they went to the near neighbors' and replenished it. The children wriggled and kept themselves warm, and the men — they were accustomed to cold. Wlien some of the neighboring parishes had installed stoves the matter was brought up in the church in Saybrook. A few of the older people were **dead sot" against it; but the young people prevailed, and the stoves were put in. It was in December; but the first Sunday after the stoves had been installed was warm and pleasant, and so they built no fire, a fact that was not known by the congregation generally. In the middle of the sermon one of the bitter opponents of the stove got up and walked out. He Avas followed by a second and then by a third. ^^Conldn't stand the heat of them stoves", they said. *'Knew I couldn't stand the heat of them stoves.'' The ridicule when they came to find out that no fire had been built silenced opposition forever.

Our houses were lighted, when I was young, with tallow dips and sometimes by whaleoil lamps ; and how they did smell ! Finally there came the brilliant light of kerosene oil. It was a great improvement, so far as eyesight was concerned; but the cleaning of the lamps, in a careful household, was a tedious and unpleasant task. Where the housewife was careless the oil would run down from lamps and be transferred from her fingers to her food. I remember teachers bewailed their experiences in such households. One friend of mine said of one such family, ^'They eat kerosene oil all the time. They don't know it isn't good." If the woman of that day could have seen one turn a button and flood the room with electric light, perfectly clean, she would have thought the millenium was surely coming.

The hardest of all the tasks of the household was soapmaking. The big barrel had to be got in, and the grease and the potash and the lye from a barrel of wood ashes all supplied. It required skill, and it was hard work, especially when the soap didn't come, and they had to stir it hour after hour with a big stick. It was considered the woman's privilege to be cross on the day she made soap. I remember one of our neighbors saying that when his wife made soap he always threw his hat in when he came home, and if that came out spitefully, he concluded it was judicious to hang around awhile before he went in himself. But my father always contrived to find time to make soap for my mother. The means of transportation of those days was very crude. Very few people had carriages or carryalls; but most rode in open wagons, sometimes with and often without springs. The stage coach, as everybody knows, was the means of public travel. My father used to insist, after the railways came into fashion and were considered by most so dangerous, that they were far safer, in proportion to travel, than the old stage coach. He said that when he was coming home from Georgia they would often start on a dangerous road with a driver who came out of the tavern ^^half seas over." The man would whip his horses into a gallop at the top of a mountain, and the stage would sway over to the edge of a precipice; only a kind Providence and the sure-footed horses keeping them from a sudden death.

I remember the building of what I think was the first railway in the United States. It was the switch back at Mauch Chunk, in Pennsylvania, for taking coal out of the mines by gravity. But I believe the first road for passengers was between Hartford and New Haven. I remember the hordes of Irish that built it; I remember their little dump carts and their dirty children. I remember how, in the middle of the night, the men and women used to come howling home from a wake, drunk and quarreling. But the grandchildren of these same Irish are the prominent and honored citizens of Meriden today. So let our present foreigners keep good heart. The Scandinavians are already coming into their own; but the Italians and the Poles and the Russians, if they wdll but stand stanchly by our American institutions and keep their children in school, may hope to see their grandchildren the wealthy and responsible citizens of Minneapolis in the decades to come.

My home was about three miles from the church, and in those days everybody except very little children went to church. My father hired a sitting for my mother in a neighbor's wagon ; but of my earliest recollection, when I was about three years old I walked with my father. My mother was too scrupulous about infringing upon others ' rights, when one sitting was hired, to have taken her little girl upon her lap. And so I walked; and when I was tired my father took me in his arms. I count this experience one of the valuable ones of my life : the close association of my father and the early formed habit of enjoying a long walk. This habit certainly contributed much not only to my happiness but to my health and vigor. All along the years, whenever I didn't have household duties, I would take freely a wall^ of five miles before breakfast, and enjoy it.

In regard to the church, there were some curious customs in those days. One was that a mother or some elder woman sat at the end of the pew, and the girls next to her, and after them the boys next to their father. I remember a wealthy man, a deacon of the church, who had a large family of children. His wife was usually at home with the baby, and he would come with eight or nine little fellows. The boys and girls would come crowding into the church, and at the door of the pew he would sort them out, pushing in this girl and pulling out that boy until he had them all arranged with due decorum. The only exception to this rule was that the youngest, even if it was a girl, could sit next to its father so that it could lay its head on his lap and go to sleep.