Mary Mathews Adams

as Mary Mathews Barnes

Mary Mathews Barnes' signature

Mary Mathews Adams (neé Mary Jane Mathews; later, Mary Mathews Smith, Mary Mathews Barnes, Mary Mathews Adams; October 23, 1840 – December 11, 1902) was an Irish-born American writer and philanthropist.

Early years and education

Mary Jane Mathews was born at the hamlet of Granard, near Dublin, Ireland, October 23, 1840, the oldest child of John Mathews (d. Staten Island, April 1, 1869), a Protestant who married a Catholic woman whose maiden name was Anna Reilly (d. Brooklyn, ca. 1850). All of the children —Mary Jane, Robert, Anna, John, and Virginia Scott (born in New York City)— were reared in the Catholic Church but all save the youngest left the church early in life. Emigrating to the US about 1846, when Adams was six year old, the family grew up in Brooklyn.^[1]

When she was 12 or 13 years of age, Adams became a student at Packer Collegiate Institute, which she left in 1855 at the age of 15, without graduating.^[1]

Career

Family tradition has it that she was a school teacher when but 17 years old; the records show that from 1862 to 1868 she taught in Public School No. 15, Degraw Street, Brooklyn.^[1]

In the autumn of 1869, she was married to Cassiua M. Smith, of Canandaigua, New York, and two years later went with him to Atchison, Kansas, where her only child was born, who lived less than a year. The husband appears to have died in 1876, whereupon his widow returned to Brooklyn, where she taught in the Juvenile High School.^[1]

On November 7, 1883, she took for her second husband, Alfred Smith Barnes, then prominent as a publisher and philanthropist; his first wife (nee Harriet Burr) had died in 1881, leaving him five sons and three daughters. Mr. Barnes, a man of large wealth, died at his Brooklyn home February 17, 1888.^[1]

Upon July 9, 1890, his widow was united in marriage at London to Charles Kendall Adams (d. July 26, 1902), then president of Cornell University, which institution had received liberal gifts from Mr. Barnes, during the bestowal of which she had first become acquainted with the president.^[1]

After her marriage to Mr. Barnes, when she was 44 years of age, she became the mistress of a fortune, distributing numerous benefactions. During this marriage, she was personally concerned in aiding several worthy institutions which had won her favor — prominent among them being the Home for Incurables and St. John's Protestant Episcopal Hospital, in Brooklyn. As Mrs. Adams, her helpfulness was chiefly manifested in behalf of worthy students, both at Ithaca and Madison, who were struggling against financial odds. Mrs. Adams not only gave to the California State Historical Society on the occasion of her removal to California, her own extensive private library, but with her personal jewels endowed the Mary M. Adams Art Fund ($4,000), to be used in the purchase of either art books for the society's library or objects of art for its museum. What property she had remaining at her death — not large, for her interest in the Barnes estate was in the form of an annuity — was, like her husband's, willed to the University of Wisconsin, for whose welfare she strove throughout the last decade of her life.^[1]

For years, she had a large class of women who met weekly at her house for the purpose of listening to her interpretations of Shakespeare, and of reading under her able guidance his immortal delineations of character. She was the author of 30 or more well known hymns, many of them incorporated in song books; of a score or more songs and ballads, several of which have been set to music, and of many lyrics and sonnets. Of her songs the most popular are "The Birds in the Belfry," "Songs that Words can Never Know," and " The Spring Will Soon be Here Again."^[2] Adams was a poet whose numerous odes and sonnets won the commendation of several distinguished English and American critics. But it was her Shakespearian study, in which she won repute. Her published works were: Epithalamium (N. Y. and London, 1889); The Choir Visible (Chicago, 1897); and Sonnets and Songs (N. Y. and London, 1901).^[1]

Having for several years been in poor health, she died in Redlands, California, on December 11, 1902.^[1]

References

Bibliography

• Moulton, Charles Wells (1890). The Magazine of Poetry. 2 (Public domain ed.). Charles Wells Moulton. 
• University of Wisconsin (1903). Memorial of Charles Kendall Adams: Late President of the University of Wisconsin (Public domain ed.). The University. 

Attribution

• This article incorporates text from a work in the public domain: C. W. Moulton's The Magazine of Poetry (1890)
• This article incorporates text from a work in the public domain: University of Wisconsin's Memorial of Charles Kendall Adams: Late President of the University of Wisconsin (1903)