ΓPARA ┌PAR@ ` ΓTEXT ` ╘Brown, Martha McClellan1838╨1916temperance leaderBorn on April 16, 1838, in Baltimore, Martha McClellan grew up from 1840 in Cambridge, Ohio. In November 1858 she married the Reverend W. Kennedy Brown, with whom she moved to a succession of Methodist pastorates in Pennsylvania and Ohio over the next several decades. Shortly after her marriage she enrolled in the Pittsburgh Female College and graduated in 1862. A member from 1861 of the Independent Order of Good Templars, a fraternal temperance society, she became a noted temperance lecturer in the years following the Civil War and in 1867 was elected to the state executive committee of the Ohio Templars as grand vice-templar. In 1868 she became editor of the Alliance Monitor in Alliance, Ohio, and retained that post until 1876; from 1870 the paper was owned by her husband. She played a large role in laying the groundwork for the organization of the national Prohibition party in 1869. In 1872╨1874 she was grand chief templar of Ohio. She attended the 1873 international convention of Templars in London, and in 1874╨1875 she was world supreme vice-templar. At the height of a temperance prayer crusade that swept Ohio in 1873╨1874 Brown seized the opportunity to create a more broadly based temperance organization than the Templars, and in February 1874 in Columbus, Ohio, she led in founding what apparently was the first women╒s state temperance society. That August, at Chautauqua Lake, New York, she and two others planned a national society, and she is believed to have drafted the call for the convention that met in Cleveland in November and organized the Woman╒s Christian Temperance Union. Failing to win the presidency of the new group, probably because of her identification with the Templars, she withdrew. In 1876 she withdrew as well from the Templars when that group declined to admit African-American members. Brown then concentrated her efforts on the Prohibition party, becoming vice president of the convention that year and serving on the executive committee in 1876╨1880. In 1877 she helped organize the National Prohibition Alliance, a speakers bureau closely associated with the Prohibition party. She served as the Alliance╒s secretary and principal lecturer until its dissolution in 1882. She served again on the party╒s executive committee in 1884╨1886 and 1892╨1896, but in 1896 she broke with the party when the convention dropped from its platform the woman suffrage plank that she had been instrumental in making one of the party╒s goals in 1869. From 1882 to 1892 she served as vice-president and professor of art, literature, and philosophy in the Cincinnati Wesleyan Woman╒s College, a financially shaky institution of which her husband was president. She resumed her connection with the Templars to make lecture tours of Great Britain in 1881, 1891, and 1911, but in later years she occupied herself chiefly with local philanthropies in Cincinnati. Martha Brown died in Dayton, Ohio, on August 31, 1916. ╓styl `
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