╠PARA ─PAR@ ` ╠TEXT ` ╛Hemenway, Mary Porter Tileston1820╨1894philanthropistBorn in New York City on December 20, 1820, Mary Tileston was the daughter of a wealthy merchant and was educated privately. In June 1840 she married Augustus Hemenway, a prosperous Boston merchant 15 years her senior. In 1860 he suffered a nervous breakdown and was confined to a sanatorium, where he remained until 1874; he died in 1876. In 1865 Mary Hemenway began a long and effective career in philanthropy. One of her principal concerns was the practical education supplied to children in the public schools, and as a means of encouraging improvements she worked out a method of financing demonstration projects until their success warranted public support. Thus in 1865, having been impressed by the poor quality of much of the sewing done by soldiers╒ wives during the Civil War, she supplied materials and teachers for sewing classes in a Boston public school. After eight years the program was taken over by the school system. In 1883 and 1884 she sponsored summer vacation schools of manual training for girls, and out of that work came her gift of a school kitchen (the first such facility in the United States) and money for cooking teachers in 1885. In 1887 she established the Boston Normal School of Cookery to train more teachers for the successful program, which in 1888 was also taken over by the public schools. Hemenway similarly supported physical education and in 1889, after sponsoring a Conference on Physical Training, founded the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics, which was later (1909) taken over by Wellesley College. Mary Hemenway was also interested in education farther afield. Believing that education could be a powerful agent in healing the wounds left by the Civil War, she provided the money for the establishment of the Tileston Normal School in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1871 and continued to support the school during its 20-year life. She built the Brambleton School in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1880, and she also gave considerable sums to Tuskegee and Hampton institutes. Other benefactions included a $100,000 gift in 1876 to help restore the Old South Meeting House in Boston. At her suggestion and with her continuing support Old South became the focus of a highly successful community program in American history, including lecture series by eminent scholars, the publication of historical documents, and essay contests for students. The program helped also to introduce American history into the public school curriculum. From 1886 to 1893, through the Hemenway Southwestern Archaeological Expedition, she sponsored archaeological and ethnological field studies among the Zuûi by Frank Cushing and later J. Walter Fewkes. The report of that work was published in five volumes of the Journal of American Ethnology and Archaeology in 1891╨1908 underwritten by her. She died in Boston on March 6, 1894, leaving a portion of her estate to the continued support of her enterprises. ╓styl `
