Mary Emilie Holmes

Mary Emilie Holmes was born April 10, 1850, in Chester, Ohio, to the Rev. Mead Holmes (1819–1906), a Presbyterian minister and missionary, and Mary D. Holmes (1819–1890). She was their second child; her brother, Mead Jr., was nine years older. When Mary Emilie was three, the family moved to Manitowoc, Wisconsin, where the Holmeses did mission work among local Native Americans and became abolitionists. Her mother also ran a women's seminary for two years. Mary Emilie showed an aptitude for language, and by listening in on her brother's lessons had picked up the rudiments of Greek, Latin, and French by the time she was eight years old. She also demonstrated a precocious interest in science, starting her first herbarium at the age of five and turning her family home (and later her own home) into a menagerie with her collections of tamed animals, including at different times squirrels, chipmunks, raccoons, gophers, foxes, woodchucks, a bald eagle, owls, and various small birds. Mary Emilie's brother died unexpectedly of a ruptured blood vessel in April 1863 in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, while serving as a soldier on the Union side during the Civil War. The following year, the family moved to Rockford, Illinois where Rev. Holmes became active in local politics. Mary D. Holmes became secretary of the Woman's Presbyterian Board of Missions of the Northwest and was active in working for the welfare of freedmen after the Civil War ended. Mary Emilie got her schooling at Rockford Female Seminary, which she entered at age 14 and from which she graduated with a certificate in 1868. She then began teaching Spencerian penmanship at the seminary while she studied for a second certificate, in organ performance, which she earned in 1870. She later joined her parents in working with freedmen under the auspices of the Presbyterian Board of Missions for Freedmen. ==Teaching and science career==

In 1877, Mary Emilie Holmes returned to the seminary, teaching botany and chemistry there until 1885; in part to honor her "original scientific investigation and discovery" and in part because she had been awarded a doctoral degree in the field. Three years later, she gave a talk before the Women's Department of the World's Congress Auxiliary of the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, urging the importance of teaching geology early in children's education. Holmes's career as a scientist was very short, encompassing mainly the years between 1885 and 1892; this may have been due in part to the fact that this was a period when the earth sciences were considered the exclusive realm of men and there were few precedents for women making a career in the field. It would be the second woman elected to the Geological Society of America, Florence Bascom, who would become the first American woman to attain a career as a fully professional geologist and college professor. ==Educational activism and writing==

Holmes turned her attention to education and focused her efforts on the needs of African-Americans. Through her membership in the Presbyterian Board of Missions for Freedmen, she traveled around in the late 1880s giving speeches in support of education for freedmen. at the age of 55, predeceasing her father by a few months and leaving behind "one of the finest private scientific collections in the west." She is said to have continued her work for freedmen until very shortly before her death. ==Selected works==

Co-author • ''His Father's Mantle'' (1895) • Aida Rocksbege and the White Stone (1897) ==See also==