Editor’s note: This is the final piece in a series on 20th-century resident Mary Abbot, in celebration of Women’s History Month. The information is taken from the diaries Mary wrote between 1913 and 1952. The diaries are part of the Harvard Historical Society’s collections.
Despite how busy Mary was helping her brother Frank run the apple business, delivering eggs to town center every day, and working in her vegetable and flower gardens, she made time to be active in many town organizations and even to found one—the Garden Club of Harvard in 1927. She also championed causes that benefitted the town. Had Harvard had such a thing in the 1920s and ’30s, Mary Abbot would no doubt have been a candidate for Harvard’s Citizen of Note.
This image of Mary Abbot from a painting by her sister, well known artist Agnes Abbot, served as the cover for the Garden Club’s yearbook for three years. (Courtesy drawing)
Eight months after settling into the house at 204 Bolton Road, Mary joined the Harvard Woman’s Club. She participated in the programs, often reporting on current events and once delivering a talk on home and school life in her birthplace, Berlin, Germany. In 1916 she became clerk, and she was later appointed treasurer, in which capacity she kept the membership list and collected dues, which included chasing delinquent members. She wrote notices and reports about the club for the local newspapers. Once, during her turn as chair of the tea committee, she served 64 cups of tea. At that same meeting—though with no implied connection—there was great excitement when Mrs. Royal and Mrs. Dolphin fell down the stairs.
Mary spearheaded the creation of a bird club and was elected secretary, in which role she wrote letters and did a lot of telephoning. She bought some bird books at the Old Corner Book Store in Boston (one of her very favorite places) and displayed them in the library. Near them Frank set up some bird boxes (perhaps for people to take with a donation), and he put some boxes on poles on the Common. The club circulated a petition for a bird reservation in Harvard, and in 1917 some mallard ducks sent by the Massachusetts Game Commission were released at Bowers Brook.
In 1926 Mary became a trustee of the Warner Free Lecture, a position she continued to hold for at least the next decade. She liked that committee because it met a few times to plan the programs for the year, and that was that. In this same spirit of efficacy, she wrote that in 1927 the trustees decided on three high-quality programs rather than four less expensive ones.
Since Mary’s arrival in town, women had been asking her for gardening advice, and she had been giving away perennials along with landscaping suggestions. In October 1927 she met with two women from the Groton Garden Club to get their help in starting a similar club in Harvard. The bylaws were accepted in November, and there were 41 charter members. Mary served as president the first two years and again from 1936 to 1940, and she was long-term head of the conservation committee. It seemed she was also in charge of programs, often conferring with her friend Miss Miriam Shaw, Miss Clara Endicott Sears’ niece.
In the 1930s the Garden Club held the first of several annual flower shows at Town Hall. Mary decorated the stage, typed up and made copies of the program, and wrote an account for the local papers. She created a committee to landscape around the Powder House once the carriage sheds behind the Unitarian Church were torn down in 1930. Mary devoted much time and effort toward Powder House Park, the beautification of which was a losing battle to ledge and lack of soil, as future Garden Clubs would attest. The club planted shrubs around Town Hall, and Mary drew up a plan for five elm trees to be planted on the Reed land where the mansion had burned in 1917. For decades the Garden Club made wreaths and other decorations for the holiday sale to benefit Ayer hospital.
Mary was a member of the Grange and on the nominating committee of both the Historical Society and, in 1948, the League of Women Voters. She was also active in the administration of the Girl Scouts, serving as secretary-treasurer for 16 years. Mary notes that when she was “finally out,” the position was divided between secretary and treasurer. Some of her jobs were to find captains for the troops, negotiate with the school so the girls would not have to stay after on meeting days, and in April 1927 to ride on the bus with the girls to a rally of 10,000 Scouts in Boston. She was a resource for the girls working toward badges in areas such as tree finding, wildflowers, and insects, and she graded the tests they were required to pass.
In the 1920s the hospitals in both Ayer and Clinton were struggling to get started. Until they were established, people needing a hospital were taken into Boston. When a girl working for the Abbots had a hemorrhaged ulcer, Frank put the top on his Ford truck and a cot in the back and took her and her mother into Boston City Hospital.
Mary joined the Harvard hospital aid committee, and the group sold subscriptions and held numerous fundraisers to benefit the Ayer Community and Memorial Hospital—cookbook sales, magazine subscriptions, dances, and raffles. For several years Mary was in charge of the benefit food sale at Annual Town Meeting. In 1947 the committee held a huge auction in Town Hall to raise money for the hospital building fund. Miss Clara Sears donated some artwork—primitives and one or two landscapes. The event raised $1,205. When the hospital added a wing, Mary proposed a gift shop, with residents of each of the five towns in the region taking a day to work in it. Mary recruited women who volunteered to do mending for the hospital; she would regularly pick up items, distribute them among volunteers, and collect the finished work to return to the hospital.
Mary was an activist in many causes that benefitted the town. When the state highway department started “beautifying” the roadside by cutting down trees, she got up a petition to stop the work. When Dr. Herbert Royal retired from his practice, Dr. Clark Streeter succeeded him around 1946. Then Dr. Streeter contracted a touch of tuberculosis and was at the sanatorium in Boylston for a year. This left the town without a doctor and residents were very concerned. The selectmen, the Board of Health, and Nashoba Boards of Health, which Frank helped establish, insisted they were not in charge of providing a doctor for the town so Mary encouraged residents to form a public health committee to address the problem.
Mary was the go-to person when a committee position needed to be filled, when something needed to be picked up or delivered, when a problem came up within a group, and when a collection of food or clothing for a local or overseas cause had to be organized. What is truly remarkable is that Mary managed to do all this while facing two major obstacles. The first was her car, or rather the lack of it. Either cars in the 1920s and ’30s were in general unreliable, or the Abbots bought lemons. At least once a week, Mary would blow out a tire or two on her way somewhere, or the car would just break down. Often the trouble started in her own garage with a dead battery. The more serious issue was her health. Hardly a day went by that Mary didn’t suffer from neuralgia, headache, lame back, stomach upset, sore throat, or cold in the head. She carried on, but there were many days when she could not get out of bed. Even then, although she herself couldn’t get to the meeting, she made sure whatever she was responsible for got there in her stead.
Mary Abbot was most definitely a citizen of note in Harvard’s history.
