BURIED TOGETHER
Partner Mabel Reed, buried together
Queer Places:
Drexel University, 3141 Chestnut St, Philadelphia, PA 19104
Cornell University (Ivy League), 410 Thurston Ave, Ithaca, NY 14850
Hoopa Valley Reservation, Trinity-Klamath, CA
Reserve Mines, NS, Canada
Providence Friends Meeting Cemetery, 105 N Providence Rd, Media, PA 19063, Stati Uniti
Mary
Ellicott Arnold (April 23, 1876[2]
– 1968) was an American social activist, teacher and writer best known for
In the Land of the Grasshopper Song, the memoir she wrote with
Mabel Reed (February 6, 1876 – December, 1962) on their experiences as
Bureau of Indian Affairs employees, 1908–1909.[3] Mary Ellicott Arnold and Mabel Reed built cooperative housing units for Nova Scotia miners and Newfoundland fishermen and established consumer services for lobster fishermen along the Maine coast. Arnold also farmed in Maine, aided the Indians, and managed cafeterias.
A native of Staten Island, New York, Arnold moved at an early age to
Somerville, New Jersey where she began her childhood friendship with
Mabel Reed, a companionship that later
matured into a life partnership. Arnold studied business at Drexel
Institute, Philadelphia, and agriculture at
Cornell University in
Ithaca, New York. As young women, Arnold and Reed devoted five years
(1901–1906) to farming a fifty-five acre plot.[4]
They next gained experience as urban organizers in New York City. Their
employer, City and Suburban Homes Company, was a philanthropic
organization building affordable, decent housing for the working poor.[5]
When Arnold and Reed accepted positions as so-called field matrons on
the
Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation in the
Klamath River Valley of Northern California, they were charged to
exert a “civilizing influence” upon the fewer than eight hundred members
of the Karok
nation, a vagueness they were to exploit to their own benefit and that
of the Karok.[4]
Arnold and Reed lacked the social and racial prejudices of the era.
Although the
Bureau of Indian Affairs expected them to enforce white cultural
values, they instead accepted Karok practices and established a close
working friendship with Essie, a native woman with three husbands.[4]
They were eager, Arnold said, not to be “ladies—the kind who have Sunday
schools, and never say a bad word, and rustle around in a lot of silk
petticoats”.[6]
In the decades following their breakthrough experience of independent
living and community education among the Karok, Arnold and Reed further
developed their skills as organizers and activists in
cooperative housing,
credit unions,
adult education, rural development, and American Indian rights. Arnold
worked in Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Maine, New York, and Pennsylvania.
In
Reserve Mines, Nova Scotia, Arnold and Reed helped the mining
community establish cooperative housing. Arnold conferred with
Antigonish Movement elders
Moses Coady and
Father Jimmy and she and Reed lived among the miners.[7]
In 2016,
Nova Scotia playwright Lindsay Kyte illustrated this as a musical true
story, Tompkinsville about a community built by the residents
themselves, assisted by Arnold and Reed, and the town priest,
Jimmy Tompkins and Rev. Dr.
Moses Coady (for whom the
Coady International Institute is named, in
Antigonish, Nova Scotia.) Kyte's great-uncle and aunt were among the
residents, struggling for freedom from the
Dominion Coal Company in
Reserve Mines.[8]
Arnold was an active
Quaker and a finance officer with the
Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. She was a member
of the Providence Monthly Meeting in
Media, Pennsylvania.[9]
Mary Ellicott Arnold and Mabel Reed are buried together at Providence
Friends Meeting Cemetery,
Media, Pennsylvania.
Arnold’s papers and correspondence are housed at Friends Historical
Library,
Swarthmore College and the
Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.[9]
In 2003, playwright Lauren Wilson adapted In the Land of the
Grasshopper Song for the stage as a musical comedy, with music by Tim
Gray, for production by the Dell’Arte theater troupe.[10]
My published books:
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