This post focuses on members of the Webster family, who have a direct line back to the fifth governor of Connecticut, John Webster. Webster had a strong commitment to public service and was willing to make grand personal sacrifices to uphold what he felt was right, particularly in his rigid interpretation of religion. He was in the group of signatories for a forerunner of the American Constitution, the “Fundamental Orders of 1639.”
John Webster was also on the committee that declared war on the Pequot Tribe in Connecticut, after disputes broke out over lands that Webster and other English colonists had taken in Hartford. The war with the Pequot resulted in the annihilation of the tribe. An ally of the English colonists in the war was the Mohegan Tribe, which ultimately also suffered under colonial rule.
In writing this post and learning for the first time about the Mohegan and Pequot peoples, I had the opportunity to read about Dr. Gladys Iola Tantaquidgeon, Mohegan Medicine Woman. Dr. Tantaquidgeon is descended from Mohegan Sachem Uncas, who was allied with the English at the time of the Pequot War.
In 1919, Gladys Tantaquidgeon pursued higher education at the University of Pennsylvania at a time when women were still in the minority at universities, let alone women and men from indigenous tribes. Dr. Tantaqidgeon’s lifelong work as a medicine woman, anthropologist, curator, and public servant was committed to collecting and teaching Mohegan traditions and language, as well as working for the federal government on programs for other tribes. She is incredible. Among many, many achievements, her family history research contributed to a successful claim for U.S. Federal recognition of the Mohegan Tribe in 1994. A book by historian Melissa Jayne Fawcett, Medicine Trail: The Life and Lessons of Gladys Tantaquidgeon, is available from University of Arizona Press.
Our grandmother, Joyce Barkhouse, was a wonderful storyteller. As a Canadian children’s author, it is what she did professionally, but there was nothing more fun than sitting down with Nana for a cup of tea and a chat. One story I loved was how Nana’s father, Dr. Harold Edwin Killam, was congratulated by his former teacher for marrying “one of the brainy Webster girls.” It’s a pretty simple story, really, but it was often repeated and the teaching was unmistakable: Girls can be brainy, they have been brainy in the past, and the people whose opinions matter to us approve of intelligent women.
I grew up hero-worshipping the Brainy Websters but I actually only know snippets of information about them. So I treasure this studio photograph of them with their parents. I love how much my great-grandmother Ora’s serious expression looks just like one that my Barkhouse cousins and their kids sometimes make.
Based on the children’s ages, I’m guessing the 1891 Census of Canada was taken a year or two after this group portrait was made. Samuel Webster appears on the previous page of this census – he’s a 39 year old a Baptist farmer in Brooklyn Street, Kings County, Nova Scotia.
I find the Websters, in general, to be fascinating. Samuel Webster was the eldest child of his father’s “second family” following a remarriage. His father Asael Webster had first married Hepzibah Pearson, who died May 26, 1850 at age 42, according to her grave marker in the Cambridge Station Cemetery (her stone is spelled Hephzibah).
Asael and Hepzibah had four sons. They were all educated, particularly Dr. David Webster, who graduated from New York’s Bellevue Hospital Medical College in 1868 and became a very well-known New York City eye specialist. After Hepzibah’s death, Asael Webster, who was a carpenter, married 20-year-old Wealthy Lavinia Tupper on March 25, 1851 (Sprague database). The couple had seven children together and Samuel Wesley Webster was the eldest of them, born in 1852.
As a boy, Samuel had expected to be able to pursue educational opportunities like his older half brothers had, but his father’s death on September 28, 1868 left the family in reduced circumstances, according to family lore, and Samuel gave up any plans he had for school. Nana always said that was why he insisted on education for his daughters. However, it also seems true that the Websters were fairly egalitarian when it came to educating women. For example, Samuel’s brother Albert Asael Webster had seven children, all daughters and educated. (One, Alberta, became a nurse and had an ill-fated marriage to a Gatsbyesque New Yorker and they were parents to three more remarkable daughters, but that is a whole other story.)
Samuel and Louise Webster’s eldest daughter Winnifred (misspelled with one “n” in her university graduation lists) was among the most brilliant of the Brainy Websters. Nana, who lived with her for a time, greatly admired her intellect and her achievements as a teacher and high school vice-principal at Kings County Academy, Kentville, Nova Scotia.
In the early 1900s, Winnifred attended Dalhousie University and in 1903 was one of four women to graduate with a BA. Not only did she graduate with Distinction, she led the entire class and was awarded the Avery Prize. She was then accepted for graduate work at Columbia University’s Teachers College in New York, where Dean James Earl Russell was making a name for the college as a centre of liberal education theory and training. At the time Winifred arrived in New York City, Dean Russell’s Speyer School was only just starting work as a remarkable education experiment for the children and adults living in the Lower East Side tenements.
Winnifred had the benefit of being able to stay with her uncle, Dr. David Webster at his Madison Avenue residence while she was studying at Columbia. The 1905 New York State Census lists her there, along with Dr. Webster’s sister-in-law and three servants: a “houseman,” a maid, and a cook (via FamilySearch.org). Dr. Webster’s wife Genevieve, who struggled with mental illness, had died December 7, 1902. The couple had no children and Dr. Webster provided opportunities over the years for several of his talented nieces to live with him and pursue their studies in New York.
Winnifred was the only one of the four Webster sisters who did not marry. She returned to Nova Scotia and devoted herself to educating generations of Annapolis Valley students at Kings County Academy in Kentville, NS, which was for many years the only high school serving Kings County. In the biography, Frank Manning Covert: Fifty Years in the Practice of Law edited by Barry Cahill (McGill-Queen’s Press, 2004), Covert described with gratitude how “Miss Webster” helped him cram for his Provincial Exams. Like many students at the Academy, he had been educated in a one-room school house and found himself needing to quickly obtain four years of French and Latin in order to pass his high school exams. Winnifred volunteered to spend every recess with him, teaching French, while the principal of the Academy took on the necessary Latin review with a small group during the lunch break. Covert described what happened when he got his exam results in the mail in 1924:
“I passed and had just got through the door to tell mother when the phone rang. It was Winnie Webster asking, “Did you grade?”
“Yes.”
“How did you do in French?”
“76.”
“Not bad.”
“Having taught me algebra, geometry, and trigonometry, she asked me about these; I received 100 per cent in each of them so she was happy.” Covert said he later got a call from the principal to hear the results, “He was pleased, but not overjoyed like Miss Webster.” (p. 16)
Half a decade after Covert “graded,” Nana also moved to Kentville, where she boarded with her Aunt Winnifred, to complete Grade 12 at the Academy and prepare for Provincial Exams. Nana’s goal was to apply for teacher training at the Provincial Normal College. Aunt Winnie also gave her extra academic coaching, especially helping Nana to in her struggles with math. It was the Depression, so there were no other education options for my grandmother and failure was never an option. Like her grandfather Samuel Webster, not going to university was something that Nana always regretted, especially since her two older sisters had the opportunity.
When Nana graduated from Normal College in Truro, NS in 1932, Aunt Winnie was there to cheer her on, too. A treasured book Nana gave to me exactly 60 years after she received it, when I had started to “make something of myself,” was the graduation present from her revered aunt. It is Songs of the Maritimes, a 1931 poetry anthology edited by Eliza Ritchie, a Dalhousie graduate who is thought to be the first Canadian woman to earn a PhD. Ritchie’s entry in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography is awesome. I think it might also suggest a thing or two about what Aunt Winnifred Webster wanted her young niece to think about, when it came to the Maritime provinces, women, and what they could contribute and achieve. Nana — Joyce C. Barkhouse — who became a teacher, children’s author, mentor and advocate, definitely lived up to the challenge.
Root and Blade 