Mary Gardiner Horsford

Mary Gardiner Horsford
Born
Mary L'Hommedieu Gardiner

(1824-09-27)September 27, 1824
New York City, New York, United States
DiedNovember 25, 1855(1855-11-25) (aged 31)
Spouse
​
​
(m. 1847)​

Mary Gardiner Horsford (born Mary L'Hommedieu Gardiner; September 27, 1824 – November 25, 1855) was an American poet and the wife of chemist Eben Norton Horsford.

Mary L'Hommedieu Gardiner was born in New York City, the daughter of Samuel Smith Gardiner and Catherine L'Hommedieu.[1][2][3] She was a descendant of Lion Gardiner and a cousin to Julia Gardiner Tyler.[2][4]

In 1840, she began a three-year course of education at Albany Female Academy.[3] It was there that she met her future husband, Eben Norton Horsford, who was then a teacher.[5] Her father, cautious of the young teacher's financial prospects, denied permission for the marriage until Horsford had attained the Rumford Chair of Physics, and the couple were married on August 4, 1847.[5] They lived at Sylvester Manor, which had descended through her mother's family.[6][7]

Her career as a poet began in her youth and continued during her marriage. She wrote for The Knickerbocker, Godey's Lady's Book, and other periodicals.[3] Her poem "My Native Isle," commemorating her longtime home of Shelter Island, New York, was among those anthologized in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's collection Poems of Places.[8] In 1855, she published the collection Indian Legends and Other Poems.[4] The book received favorable reviews. Godey's Lady's Book promoted the collection as a "volume of pearls from the heart-fountain of one of our sweetest American poetesses."[9] The North American Review praised the "grace and style and flowing versification" of the poems, as well as the "earnestness of tone and the purity of Christian sentiment which are their leading characteristics."[10] The poems have retroactively attracted criticism for repeating "familiar stereotypes, both horrific and romantic" in their tacit approval of manifest destiny.[11]

Mary Gardiner and Eben Horsford had four daughters: Lilian, Mary Katherine, Gertrude Hubbard (married Andrew Fiske), and Mary Gardiner (married Supreme Court justice Benjamin Robbins Curtis).[1] In the autumn of 1855, months after the birth of her youngest daughter, Mary Gardiner Horsford developed a cold which soon became tetanus or lockjaw.[2] She died on November 25, 1855.[2] The North American Review opined that her sudden death lent her poetry "a new and melancholy significance."[10] The Boston Transcript eulogized her, saying that "her poems have been much admired for their easy and correct versification and for their simple but beautiful imagery."[2]

In 1857 Mary's widower, Eben Norton Horsford, married Mary's sister, Phoebe Dayton Gardiner, and with her had one daughter, Cornelia Horsford.[1][4]

  1. ^ a b c Memorial Biographies of the New England Historic Genealogical Society. Vol. IX. Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society. 1908. p. 105.
  2. ^ a b c d e Berbrich, Joan D. (1970). Sounds and Sweet Airs: The Poetry of Long Island. Port Washington, NY: Ira J. Friedman Division, Kennikat Press. p. 56. ISBN 0-87198-089-4.
  3. ^ a b c Hale, Sarah Josepha Buell (1853). Woman's Record; or, Sketches of all Distinguished Women, from "the Beginning" till A.D. 1850, arranged in Four Eras. New York: Harper & Brothers. p. 830.
  4. ^ a b c "Horsford, Cornelia". The Biographical Cyclopaedia of American Women. New York: The Halvord Publishing Company. 1924. p. 169.
  5. ^ a b Civitello, Linda (2017). Baking Powder Wars: The Cutthroat Food Fight that Revolutionized Cooking. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. pp. 51–53. ISBN 9780252099632. LCCN 2017014066.
  6. ^ Hinkle, Annette (June 6, 2017). "The women of Sylvester Manor: Stories of visible and not-so-visible female residents". Shelter Island Reporter. Retrieved December 25, 2022.
  7. ^ "The House — Sylvester Manor". Retrieved December 25, 2022.
  8. ^ Horsford, Mary Gardiner. "My Native Isle". In Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth (ed.). Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co. – via Bartleby.com.
  9. ^ "From J. C. Derby, New York:—INDIAN LEGENDS AND OTHER POEMS. By Mary Gardiner Horsford". Godey's Lady's Book. Vol. 52, no. 4. Philadelphia: Louis A. Godey. April 1856.
  10. ^ a b "Indian Legends and Other Poems. By Mary Gardiner Horsford". The North American Review. Vol. 82, no. 170. January 1856. JSTOR 25104682.
  11. ^ Wadsworth, Sarah; Wiegand, Wayne A. (2012). Right Here I See My Own Books: The Woman's Building Library at the World's Columbian Exposition. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press. p. 163. ISBN 978-1-55849-928-7.