Mary C. Ames
Mary C. Ames (sometimes referred to as Mrs. Mary Clemmer; after second marriage, Mrs. Edmund Hudson; May 6, 1831 – August 18, 1884) was a 19th-century American journalist, author, and poet. She wrote poetry and prose, including novels. Her complete works were published at Boston (four volumes, 1885). She gained newspaper experience with the Springfield, Massachusetts Republican, the New York Press (1865), and the Brooklyn Daily Union (1869–71). In 1871, she received for her work, the largest salary ever paid a newspaper woman up to that time. In later life, she moved to Washington, D.C., where her home was a literary and social centre, and on June 19, 1883, she married Edmund Hudson, editor of the Army and Navy Register. She became best known for her "Woman's Letter from Washington", which she contributed for many years to the New York Independent. Early years and education Mary Estella Clemmer was born in Utica, New York, May 6, 1831. The oldest of seven children, her ancestors on both sides came from famous families. Abraham Clemmer, her father, a native of Pennsylvania, was of Huguenot descent. The Clemmer family traced their origin to Alsace, France, on the borders of Germany. Their name in the fatherland was spelled Klemmer. In 1685, when Louis XIV pushed his persecutions of the Huguenots past the borders of France into the very heart of Germany, the Clemmer family were among the million Huguenots who then fled from their native land to seek refuge in other lands. They settled in Berks County, Pennsylvania, before the American Revolution. Margaret Kneale, her mother, was a descendant of the Crains, a well-known family of the Isle of Man, who trace a direct line back to 1600. Ames was one of a large family of children, two brothers and four sisters. As a child, Ames would compose rhymes, repeating them to herself, long before she learned the use of a pen. When she had just passed childhood, business circumstances led Abraham Clemmer to remove to Westfield, Massachusetts, where two brothers of his wife, one Hon. Thomas Kneale, had already settled. In due time, Ames entered Westfield Academy, one of whose early teachers was Emma Willard. The principal of the school, William C. Goldthwaite, took great interest in this young girl, and especial attention in the cultivation of her education. While a student in the Westfield Academy, her first line in verse was put into print. Read as a school exercise, it pleased one of her teachers, Samuel Davis, sufficiently to impel him to send it to his friend, Samuel Bowles, who printed it at once in the Springfield Republican. Career Child bride Unfortunately, at the early age of seventeen, she yielded to the wishes of others and became the wife of a man many years her senior. On May 7, 1851, she married The Reverend Daniel Ames. The taking of that step was undoubtedly due in part to the onerous and probably unhappy life she was then leading at home. During the marriage,