Mary Lyon was born February 28, 1797 on a remote New England farm. The Lyon family lived in Buckland, a town in the hills of western Massachusetts. Less than 50 years before her birth, Lyon's great-grandfathers had migrated from eastern Massachusetts and Connecticut to help settle the area and to farm the rocky hilltown soil. Her father, Aaron, fought in the Revolutionary War.
Aaron Lyon died when Mary was five, leaving his wife, Jemina, to raise seven children and manage a 100-acre farm on her own. At her mother's side, Mary Lyon learned the skills and crafts required of every early nineteenth-century New England farm girl. She cooked on the open hearth, baked bread, spun and dyed wool from the family sheep, wove coverlets, sewed clothes and embroidered linens, preserved fruits and vegetables picked from the family garden, churned butter, made cheese, jam, soap, and candles, cured meat, washed clothes, and swept floors. When Mrs. Lyon remarried and moved to her new husband's home, 13-year old Mary was left behind. Now, self-supporting, she kept house for her brother, Aaron, who ran the family farm. He paid his sister a weekly wage of one silver dollar.
The job paid 75 cents a week, far less than the $10 to $12 a month a man received to teach the winter term. As was the custom of the day, Lyon "boarded around" in her students' homes--an arrangement that meant moving as often as every five days. For the inexperienced Mary Lyon, maintaining discipline in the crowded one-room schoolhouse and teaching the "3 Rs" to pupils, ages four to ten, were difficult tasks. On rainy days, when older boys came in from the fields, the job was even harder. Nevertheless, Mary Lyon worked hard to improve her teaching skills and her ability to keep order in the classroom.
Mary Lyon was first exposed to the study of science at Sanderson Academy, where she took courses in geography and astronomy. Like all of her education, her scientific knowledge was gained by the "handfuls," obtained when she studied for short periods with prominent scientists and attended lectures at male academies and colleges. When Lyon was studying science in the early nineteenth century, cell theory had not yet been formulated; the first laboratory synthesis of an organic compound was still a few years away, and it would be decades before Darwin and Pasteur presented their revolutionary ideas. The distance between stars had yet to be determined. But research with precise apparatus by French scientist E. L. Lavoisier had paved the way for the founding of modern chemistry, the field that became Lyon's specialty.
In 1837, Mary Lyon was an educator ahead of her time. She required seven courses in the sciences and mathematics for graduation, a requirement unheard of at other female seminaries. She introduced women to "a new and unusual way" to learn science—laboratory experiments that they performed themselves. She organized field trips on which students collected rocks, plants, and specimens for lab work, and inspected geological formations and recently discovered dinosaur tracks. She invited distinguished scientists to give lectures, and inspired women to pursue careers in the sciences as college teachers and researchers. Mary Lyon herself taught chemistry. Her interest in the sciences and high expectations for women sparked a tradition of leadership in science education that continues to this day at Mount Holyoke College.
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Mary Lyon's life and work are documented by primary sources in the Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections. These materials include her correspondence and publications, books that were part of her personal library, and an extensive collection of unpublished writings that outline her ideas concerning education, teaching, and religion. The archives also contain the papers of her Byfield Seminary teacher, Joseph Emerson, and colleague, Zilpah Grant.
