Mary Artemesia Lathbury
Born: August 10, 1841, Manchester, New York.
Died: October 20, 1913, East Orange, New Jersey.
Buried:
Rosedale Cemetery, Orange, New Jersey.
Composer Lowell Mason lies nearby.
Daughter of a Methodist minister, Lathbury studied art in Worcester, Massachusetts, and taught art and French at the Newbury Academy, Vermont, and in New York. She coauthored Woman and Temperance; or, the Work and Workers of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union with Frances Elizabeth Willard in 1883, and contributed pieces to St. Nicholas, Harper’s Young People, and Wide Awake. She was associated with the Chautauqua Movement near Chautauqua, New York, and was known as the “poet laureate of Chautauqua.” Regarding her gift for art and verse, she said that one day she heard a voice she believed was God, saying:
Remember, my child, that you have a gift of weaving fancies into verse and a gift with the pencil of producing visions that come to your heart; consecrate these to Me as thoroughly as you do your inmost spirit.
Hymns