“Wellington Enterprise,” 7-20-1898, pg. 5.
A number of weeks in the past, I used to be working an errand on the native publish workplace. As I used to be leaving, I noticed a plaque on the wall that I had not seen earlier than. A big greeting card show usually hides it from view. It’s engraved with all of the names of Wellington’s postmasters, from Nathan Wooster in 1833 to James Sosinski in 1995. As I regarded over the listing of names, I used to be shocked to see that the village had a feminine postmaster appointed in July 1898. Readers of the weblog could recall that I printed a small quantity of biographical essays on nineteenth-century Wellington girls again in 2017; my first thought upon seeing this plaque was wishing I had recognized about our feminine postmistress earlier than going to press!
The girl in query was Mary L. Herrick, born in Huntington on October 24, 1865. She was a youthful sister to Myron T. Herrick (1854-1929), Governor of Ohio and United States Ambassador to France. Mary was thirty-two years outdated when she was appointed as Wellington’s postmistress by President William McKinley, who was a detailed buddy and political ally of her brother.
“Wellington Enterprise,” 8-3-1898, pg. 5.
Herrick was single on the time she assumed the function of postmistress in August 1898. The 1900 federal census confirmed her lodging with a pair referred to as Robert and Harriet Codding. Her occupation was listed as “postmaster,” a place she held for 4 years. On October 3, 1902, simply shy of her thirty-seventh birthday, Herrick married a person eight years her junior, a health care provider from Wellington referred to as Arthur B. Smith. The marriage was celebrated at Myron Herrick’s mansion–often known as The Overlook–in Euclid Heights, an prosperous growth in what’s now Cleveland Heights.
The Smiths moved to San Diego, California, someday between 1910 and 1930. Arthur died in 1948, after serving honorably as a significant within the Medical Corps in World Conflict I, and Mary died in 1956. The couple are each interred in Greenwood Cemetery. After Mary Herrick relinquished the title of postmistress, it might be eighty years earlier than one other lady served as “Officer in Cost” of Wellington’s mail supply.
#Postmistress
