Mary Mathews Adams was an Irish-born American writer and philanthropist.
Early years and education
Mary Jane Mathews was born in Granard, County Longford, Ireland, October 23, 1840. She was the oldest child of John Mathews, a Protestant. Her mother, a Catholic, was Anna Mathews. All of the children —Mary Jane, Robert, Anna, John, and Virginia Scott — were reared in the Catholic Church but all save the youngest left the church early in life. Emigrating to the United States about 1846, when Adams was six years old, the family grew up in Brooklyn. When she was 12 or 13 years of age, Adams became a student at Packer Collegiate Institute, which she left in 1855 at the age of 15, without graduating. From this, she passed into a graded school.
Career
Family tradition has it that she was a school teacher at the age of seventeen years. The records show that from 1862 to 1868 she taught in Public School No. 15, Degraw Street, Brooklyn. In the autumn of 1869, she married Cassius M. Smith, of Canandaigua, New York, and two years later, went with him to Atchison, Kansas, where her only child was born, and lived less than a year. The husband appears died in 1876, whereupon his widow returned to Brooklyn, and became a teacher in the Juvenile High School. Her enthusiasm as a student, which she always had, found its best result in her interpretations of Shakespeare, and of reading under her able guidance his delineations of character. On November 7, 1883, she married Alfred Smith Barnes, a prominent publisher and philanthropist. His first wife had died in 1881, leaving him five sons and three daughters. Mr. Barnes, a wealthy man, died at his Brooklyn home on February 17, 1888. After her marriage to Mr. Barnes, when she was 44 years of age, she became the mistress of a fortune, distributing numerous benefactions. During this marriage, she was personally concerned in aiding several worthy institutions which had won her favor — prominent among them being the Home for Incurables and St. John's Protestant Episcopal Hospital, in Brooklyn. On July 9, 1890, in London, she married Charles Kendall Adams, then president of Cornell University, which institution had received liberal gifts from Mr. Barnes, during the bestowal of which she had first become acquainted with Mr. Adams. As Mrs. Adams, her helpfulness was chiefly manifested in behalf of worthy students, both at Ithaca and Madison, who were struggling against financial odds. She was the author of thirty or more hymns, many of them incorporated in song books; of a score or more of songs and ballads, several of which were set to music, and of many lyrics and sonnets. Of her songs, the most popular were "The Birds in the Belfry," "Songs that Words can Never Know," and " The Spring Will Soon be Here Again." Adams was a poet whose numerous odes and sonnets won the commendation of several distinguished English and American critics. But it was her Shakespearian study, in which she won repute. Her published works were: Epithalamium ; The Choir Visible ; and Sonnets and Songs. In 1893 at the World's Congress of Representative Women, she spoke on the topic "The Highest Education".
Death and legacy
Poor health of Mr. and Mrs. Adams led them to remove to California during the winter of 1901. The husband died on July 26, 1902, within three weeks of moving into their property in Redlands, California. She died a few months later, on December 11, 1902. Adams not only gave to the California Historical Society on the occasion of her removal to California, her own extensive private library, but with her personal jewels, endowed the Mary M. Adams Art Fund, to be used in the purchase of either art books for the society's library or objects of art for its museum. What property she had remaining at her death — not large, for her interest in the Barnes estate was in the form of an annuity — was, like her husband's, willed to the University of Wisconsin, for whose welfare she strove throughout the last decade of her life.
Style and themes
The "Epithalamium" is perhaps the best known of her poems. Her verse was largely lyrical, and her themes included romance, heroism, and religion.
