For 2023, I’m writing responses to the 52 Ancestors in 52 Days prompts provided by Amy Johnson Crow on her ”Generations Café” website and Facebook page.
I’m writing about my 2nd great-grandmother Mary Ann Botts (1838-19113) again this week. I wanted to write about different ancestors for the 52 Ancestors challenge, but I keep coming back to Mary Ann.
My first hint that Mary Ann had gone to college was in her brief Find-A-Grave biography. It said, “She attended Knox College 1858-1861, Galesburg, IL, and became a teacher.” That surprised me. Although her grandfather was a preacher (and thus we can assume he was an educated man), there is no indication that anyone else in the family went to college. Certainly not the women!
But here was Mary Ann, 20 years old, reportedly in college. What was this all about?
First, let me tell you a little about Knox College. (This information is taken from the Knox College website https://www.knox.edu/about-knox/our-history/perspectives-on-knox-history/origins-of-knox-college. It was founded in 1837 by George Washington Gale, who was born in Stanford, New York, in 1789. He was an itinerant teacher in rural New York, traveling from town to town and teaching in local schoolhouses. This was the part of New York state that was called the ‘Burned-Over District’ for the fiery evangelical revivals that occurred there. Gale noticed the role that religion played in the homes of families that boarded him on his travels, and he set his sights on the ministry. He graduated from Union College in 1814 and entered Princeton Theological Seminary. However, poor health forced him to abandon his studies at Princeton and pursue active missionary work instead. He soon accepted a pastorate in Adams County, New York (in the middle of the Burned-Over District).
Poor health again led him to leave New York to travel to the warmer climate of the southeastern United States, where he visited several colleges including Georgetown, Hampton Sydney, and the University of Virginia. He disagreed with UVA’s founder, Thomas Jefferson, on the importance of the separation of religion from the University.
He returned to New York, this time with ideas about advanced education. He was a proponent of what he called the “manual labor plan” – what we would call a work-study program today. Students who could not pay to go to college were required to perform 3 ½ hours of manual labor each day in exchange for their education.
These efforts led to the formation of the Oneida Institute in 1827, a manual labor training school for evangelists. Oneida soon developed a distinct abolitionist character that became a defining feature of the school. In 1833, students at Oneida founded an Anti-Slavery society, inspired by William Lloyd Garrison. The manual labor theory spread across the country in the 1830s and 1840s. Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, founded in 1829, was one of the schools based on this theory. The abolitionist mentality that characterized the Oneida Institute moved to Lane as well; however, Cincinnati did not receive the abolitionist ideas as well as Oneida. Local pressure was exerted on the school to disband its anti-slavery society; rather than do that, a great number of Lane students left the school. They founded Oberlin College in 1835 with the abolitionist principles they had been forced to forgo at Lane.
Gale continued to push his manual labor theory, recruiting supporters to found another manual labor college further west. A scouting party found available land in Illinois, and in 1836, more than 30 families from upstate New York accompanied him to found Galesburg, Illinois, which was named for him. The following year, the Knox Manual College (later Knox College) was founded in the newly established town.
Gale’s original plan included the creation of a Female Seminary, which opened in 1844. The progressive character of Knox College was derived from Gale’s experiences as a preacher and educator in New York.
This is the place where Mary Ann found herself a few years later – 1858-59. I was curious about Mary Ann’s connection to Knox College, so I wrote to the registrar at Knox College to find out what they could tell me about Knox College at the time Mary Ann attended the school. They sent me the 1858-59 Knox College catalog, which included a list of students in attendance and a lot of information about the college itself. This is a remarkable document and I’m still digesting it. The first thing I discovered was that Mary Ann did not go to college on her own; a man identified as “S. Botts” also appears in the catalog. Now, there are two possibilities: this could be either Mary Ann’s brother Simeon or her brother Sidney. Simeon was two years younger than Mary Ann, and Sidney was three years younger. These are the only two Knox students from Plymouth (and the only two from the entire county). I don’t imagine I’ll ever be able to figure out which brother it was, so I’m going to call this brother Simeon/Sidney in this essay.
Here’s what I want to find out about Mary Ann (and Simeon/Sidney) at Knox College.
First, what were the admissions requirements at Knox College in the late 1850s? Mary Ann needs to pass examinations in Geography, Arithmetic, Elementary Algebra, English and Latin Grammar, Harness’s Arnold’s First Book (Latin), Latin Reader, Zoology, Physiology, Physical Geography, Uranography (the mapping of celestial bodies), and the History of the United States. Simeon/Sidney would also have to pass tests in Greek Grammar and Philosophy. This made me wonder about how Mary Ann and her siblings would have achieved an education like this. There were schools in Hancock County as early as the 1830s, but it’s hard for me to imagine the children of farmers getting the kind of education that would allow them to pass these admissions tests.
Second, how much did it cost to attend Knox College in the 1850s? This is what the catalog says:
Next, how did she and her brother travel to Galesburg from their home in Plymouth, Illinois? The best information I’ve been able to access documents that a railroad link between Galesburg and Quincy, Illinois, opened in 1854. This railway passed within a few miles of the small village of Plymouth; I haven’t been able to determine if there was a train station there, but I imagine there was a station somewhere in Hancock County. I can’t know for sure that this is how they traveled to Galesburg, but it makes sense. It might also explain part of Mary Ann’s story that I wrote about last week – her long train trip to visit her sister in Kansas in 1900.
Where did they stay in Galesburg? By 1858 the college had built campus housing for both men and women, so as far as I can tell they both lived in this campus housing.
What was the college calendar like? The Academic year consisted of forty weeks, commencing the first Thursday of September and closing the fourth Thursday of June, with a two-week winter vacation. I don’t imagine that Mary Ann and Simeon/Sidney went home other than for the two-week winter vacation. Here’s more detail about the 1858-1859 calendar.
What would Mary Ann and Simeon/Sidney have studied while they were at Knox?
I don’t know how long Mary Ann and Simeon/Simon attended Knox College. The unsourced statement on Mary Ann’s Find-A-Grave site where I got the first clue that she had attended the college also said that she was there from 1858-1861. That would be consistent with the three-year course of study outlined above. But I don’t know.
One event of national historical significance occurred at Knox College in 1858, while Mary Ann and Simeon were in school there. Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas were running for a seat in the United States Senate that year – Lincoln as a Republican and Douglas as a Democrat. Feeling about slavery were running high in the country – and would erupt in a Civil War just three years later. As part of their campaign, Lincoln and Douglas met on the debate stage in Illinois seven times; one of those debates was at Knox College on October 7, 1858.
Lincoln lost this election a month later, but he won the presidential election in 1860. The rest is, literally, history. Slavery was the hot topic for these debates, and it is important to recognize that neither of these men favored the abolition of Slavery. Douglas supported the cause of popular sovereignty – a point of view that allowed the people who settled in new territories in the west to decide the status of slavery there. Lincoln, on the other hand, opposed the spread of slavery to the west under any circumstances, although he accepted the institution of slavery in the parts of the country where it already existed.
The same Find-A-Grave entry said that Mary Ann had been a teacher after attending Knox. I don’t have direct evidence of that, although it would have been a logical choice for an educated and unmarried young woman on the frontier in the 1860s. Mary Ann married William Coke in Plymouth in November of 1861, which doesn’t leave much time for her to teach if she attended Knox for the entire three years of the program outlined above. William’s family lived near the Botts family in Plymouth. They had come to Hancock County from Kentucky just like Mary Ann’s family, and the family’s were probably close. It’s not surprising that Mary Ann married William. Mary Ann’s younger brother Sidney married William’s younger sister Miriam in Plymouth in 1866.
I want to tell you a bit more about Simeon/Sidney. Despite how I have referred to them here, they were two distinct individuals. They both enlisted in the 28th Illinois Infantry on the same day, August 17, 1861. They were both sent to Camp Butler, Illinois (near Springfield), for training.
However, their fates diverged at that point. Simeon contracted an illness at Camp Butler and was discharged. He came home and died from that illness in March of 1862. Sidney went on to serve with his unit through Shiloh and the siege of Corinth in 1862. He was apparently wounded at one of these encounters, as he was discharged for “disability” in December of 1862. He filed for an “invalid” pension in 1882, although he was apparently well enough to marry and raise a family after the war. He died in 1913 – coincidentally, the same year that his sister Mary Ann died.
Mary Ann’s life went a bit sideways after her marriage. She and William had a child – a girl they named Carey – in 1862. Unfortunately, William died in 1864. I haven’t been able to find out how he died. He doesn’t appear to have served in the Civil War – or at least I can’t find any evidence of it. One unattributed source said that he died of typhus. To add insult to injury, their daughter Carey died the following year, in August of 1865.
The more I think about it, the more I believe that Mary Ann may have been a teacher between 1865 and 1867. She was a childless widow before she remarried in 1867. It makes sense to me that an educated woman like Mary Ann would have found a way to put her education to use at a point when so much had been taken from her.
I am transfixed by this part of Mary Ann's story. I was a public school teacher, so I identify with this aspect of Mary Ann's life. I have just ordered a book published in 2019 by the Hancock County Historical Society -- Rural One-Room Schools of Hancock County, Illinois, 1830s-1960s. Here's how the Historical Society describes this book:
This over 500 page book will consist of the account of how the rural one-room schools began, about the superintendents and other history of how they helped in furthering education in Hancock County. This volume is comprised of 24 townships in the county with a total of 169 rural one room schools. Each school will include names of teachers, surnames of families who attended the school, photos depicting life in those years to help visualize the setting of education from 1830 to 1960 in Hancock County. Some of these began to consolidate over the years to become other influential rural school districts.
I'm looking forward to getting this book. I hope that Mary Ann's name appears among the teachers and that I will see a lot of surnames of family members who grew up in Hancock County.
Karen, Your story of Mary Anne is intriguing. I share with you the following: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberlin_College. My attention was singularly focused once you noted that students from Lane Seminary left Lane to found Oberlin. Oberlin was founded separately and singularly. Yes the 2 institutions were related by several factors. And it is interesting for me to read of the names of significant actors at Oberlin who were familiar with Lane and the ideology of Oneida; Charles Grandison Finney (Finney chapel in which I gave my senior recital) Tappan (Tappan Square which provides, to this day, object d’art - mainly large boulders - and romantic archways for marriage ceremonies), and others.
There is this, which gives some credence to your claim: “The Lane Rebels are commonly mentioned in the early history of Oberlin. These original Oberlin Students, who had little to do with Lane other than walking out on it, were carrying on a tradition that began at Oneida Institute of Science and Industry , in Oneida County, New York, near Utica.”
I wonder how many students, actually, there were. 🤔
You come from a long line of interesting people. I enjoyed getting to know Mary Ann.