No Night Too Dark

On Feb. 12, 1892, the Crawfordsville Daily Journal printed a resolution a committee of the city’s physicians had adopted the day before. It honored “Dr. Mary H. Wilhite, one of the oldest practitioners of the city.”¹⁰

“No one was ever too poor to obtain her services,” the doctors wrote. “No night was too dark, no storm too hard for her not to respond to calls where humanity demanded the services of physician or friend.”¹⁰

They added something more personal. “She made her way to the high position she occupied in the hearts of the community, against the most bitter opposition,” the resolution said. “She began her professional life when it was thought a disgrace for a woman to aspire to anything, except domestic duties.”¹⁰

A year later, a national reference book on American women named one form that opposition took. “On account of her sex she was debarred from membership in medical associations,” it said, “but she went forward in a determined way.”¹²

A judge’s daughter

She was born Mary Mitchell Holloway on Feb. 3, 1831, in Montgomery County.¹² Her father, Washington Holloway, was a native of Kentucky and “one of the pioneers of Crawfordsville,” according to the 1893 book A Woman of the Century, which called him Judge Holloway. Her mother, Elizabeth King, was from Virginia and died when Mary was 17.¹²

The county’s 1881 history said she went to school long enough “to fit herself for teaching,” and taught for four years.¹¹ A Woman of the Century said she supported herself by “school-teaching and sewing,” and that “she studied and fitted herself unaided” for medicine.¹²

The same book said she was an advocate of women’s rights “even in childhood.” In 1850, it said, she “canvassed for the first woman’s rights paper published in America, the ‘Woman’s Advocate,’ edited by Miss Anna McDowell, in Philadelphia.”¹² Hoosier First has not checked whether that paper was in fact the first.

Philadelphia

In 1854 she entered Penn Medical University in Philadelphia, and she graduated in 1856, according to the county history.¹¹ The school had “male and female departments,” according to the title of its 1857 catalogue, which the Indiana Historical Bureau cites in its notes for her marker.¹⁴ The history added a detail the obituaries left out. “She was educated here at the expense of J. Edgar Thomson,” it said, “one of the members of the original board of incorporation of that college, and a wealthy gentleman of Philadelphia.”¹¹

On July 10, 1856, the Crawfordsville Weekly Journal noted her return. Its item, damaged in the surviving scan, introduced “Mary M. Holloway, M. D.,” who “has just returned from Philadelphia, where for the last two years, she has been a student of the Penn Medical University.”¹

A week later the Journal’s advertising columns carried her card, headed “MARY M. HOLLOWAY, M. D.” and dated July 10, 1856.²

The Indiana Historical Bureau cites another of her “Medical Notice” advertisements in the Journal of Aug. 14, 1856.¹⁴ That issue also printed the “People’s County Ticket.” Its candidate for state representative was listed as “Washington Holloway,” the same name as her father.³ The paper does not say whether they were the same man, and Hoosier First has not confirmed it. In 1881, the county history said her father was still “living in Crawfordsville at the age of eighty years.”¹¹

The county history gave the dates of her return more exactly. “Leaving her Alma Mater June 2, she nailed her sign where it is still to be seen, on the 22nd of that same month, 1856.”¹¹

“The first”?

When she died, the Crawfordsville papers called her a first. The Daily Journal’s obituary said that “there were no lady doctors in the State at that time.” When she graduated in 1856, it said, “she was not only the first Indiana lady to graduate from a medical college but was the first to begin the practice of medicine in the State.”^7,13 The Crawfordsville Review printed nearly the same words.⁹

A wire item datelined Crawfordsville called her “the first lady practitioner in Indiana,” and the Weekly Journal reprinted it.^8,13 A Woman of the Century repeated both claims in 1893.¹² So did the county history in 1881, while she was still alive: “Mrs. Wilhite was the first lady from Indiana to graduate in a medical school.”¹¹

The Indiana Historical Bureau looked at those claims when it wrote her state marker in 2020, and it did not repeat them. The marker calls her “one of the first trained female physicians in the state.”¹⁴

The bureau’s notes explain why. “Dr. Mary F. Thomas graduated Penn Medical University in 1854, two years before Wilhite finished her degree,” they say. Thomas had lived in Wabash County, and by the time she graduated she “listed her residence as Fort Wayne, Indiana, and set up a medical practice there with her husband by late July of the same year.”¹⁴

The bureau drew a careful line. Thomas “was not born or raised in Indiana as Wilhite had been,” its notes say. The sources “clearly demonstrate that Wilhite was among the earliest trained female physicians in the state.”¹⁴ Hoosier First follows the bureau.

A tailor’s wife

The county history said she married E. A. Wilhite, a Crawfordsville tailor born in 1820 in Jefferson County, Kentucky.¹¹ The Daily Journal’s obituary gave his first name as Eleazar.⁷ It said he began “to use the needle” at 10 and had worked in his shop for more than 30 years. He also had “a peculiar passion for music,” the history said, and had played with the Crawfordsville band since 1840.¹¹

The sources disagree on the year they married. A Woman of the Century says 1861.¹² The Daily Journal’s 1892 obituary said “thirty-one years ago.”⁷ The Indiana Historical Bureau’s notes give Christmas Eve 1860, citing the Weekly Journal’s marriage notice of Dec. 27, 1860.¹⁴

The family’s ads turn up beside hers in the Journal. In 1869, a shoemaker advertised that his shop was “one door west of Wilhite’s Tailor Shop, on Main street.”⁴

The county history counted seven children, three of whom had died.¹¹ A Woman of the Century said she was “domestic in her tastes and was a devoted wife and mother.”¹² The 1881 history put it in her words. “She emphatically asserts she has solved the problem that a woman can be a ‘wife, mother, and physician,’” it said.¹¹

It also said she had trained two students. One later graduated from Penn Medical University and went abroad as a mission physician. The other “now holds three diplomas and is doing an extensive practice in Terre Haute.”¹¹

The convention of 1869

In September 1869, the woman suffrage movement came to Crawfordsville. The Weekly Journal had a column called “The Coming Woman,” edited by Mrs. C. S. McDonald, and on Sept. 30 it printed a long report of the convention.⁵

At the Wednesday morning session, “the Committee on permanent organization, through their Chairman, Dr. Mary H. Wilhite,” made its report.⁵

The report opened with a statement of principle. “Believing that virtue and intelligence, the two great requisites of lawmakers, do not reside with man alone,” it began. It said that “a true form of republican government, which is a government of the people, by the people, can not exist where the elective franchise is withheld from women.”⁵

It proposed “a permanent Woman Suffrage Association for Montgomery County, State of Indiana.” Its first article read: “The name of this association shall be the Montgomery County Woman Suffrage Association.”⁵ The work of the association would be “the increase and diffusion of knowledge by the distribution of tracts, newspapers and periodicals,” and holding conventions in the townships.⁵

Lizzie M. Boynton was elected president. Then “the office of Corresponding Secretary was added, and Mrs. Wilhite unanimously elected to that office.”⁵

Mary A. Livermore, who would later co-edit A Woman of the Century, spoke at the convention.^5,12 The convention adopted resolutions that day. One said “that the ballot means bread to the working woman as well as to the working man,” and called for “suffrage for the daughters of toil as the means of obtaining equal pay for equal work.”⁵

Gen. Wallace’s bad night

The convention’s evening session brought a famous local speaker. “Gen. Lew Wallace then took the stand and discussed the rights of married women in Indiana,” the column reported.⁵

It did not go well. The column said he read from the state’s Revised Statutes as if the law were “utterly incomprehensible” to “the weakminded audience he was addressing, who would gladly have informed him that they had known all that since they were children.”⁵

“We are sorry to say that the Gen. did not do justice to either himself or his friends,” the column went on, “and the audience at last openly manifested its displeasure.”⁵

Livermore answered him. “By every argument that General Wallace demanded suffrage for himself she demanded it for herself,” the column reported, and she sat down to “the hearty applause of the audience.”⁵

The town noticed. A note on another page of the same issue said that recitations “were suspended at Wabash College during one day of the Woman Suffrage Convention, to allow the students to attend.”⁶

A Woman of the Century later credited Wilhite with arranging a convention in 1869 “in which Mrs. Livermore, Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony were speakers.”¹² The Journal’s Sept. 30 report names Livermore. Hoosier First did not find Elizabeth Cady Stanton or Susan B. Anthony in that report.⁵

In 1881, the county history said she “fully expects to see the day when woman may vote for those who make laws to govern her, and when doctors will counsel one another without distinction in regard to sex.”¹¹

The children at the poor farm

The work Crawfordsville remembered most was the Orphans’ Home. The Daily Journal’s obituary told the story.⁷

“A number of years ago in her visits to the poor farm she was shocked to notice how small children were of necessity associated there with the ignorant and vicious,” it said. “In the natural goodness of her heart she put on foot the movement which resulted in the establishment of the Orphans’ Home.”⁷

A Woman of the Century said she was physician to the county almshouse at the time. “She was grieved at the condition of the children associated with the class of adult paupers,” it said, “and she never rested until she had, with the help of others, established the county children’s home.”¹² The state marker dates the founding of the Montgomery County Orphans’ Home to the early 1880s.¹⁴

The physicians’ resolution of 1892 credited her too. “To her efforts was largely due the founding of the Orphans’ Home,” they wrote, “where the innocent children could be separated from the vice and immorality so prevalent among the adult class who inhabit our charitable institutions.”¹⁰

“Congestion of the lungs”

She died on the evening of Monday, Feb. 8, 1892, at her home on West Wabash Avenue. The Weekly Journal said she had been sick “only since last Thurday,” and that the immediate cause of death was “congestion of the lungs.”¹³

The Crawfordsville Review placed the house at the “corner of Wabash and Grant Avenues.”⁹ The state marker for her stands today at the northwest corner of S. Grant Ave. and W. Wabash Ave.¹⁴

The Daily Journal said she left her husband and four grown children, Edward, Mary, Stanton and Bertha.^7,9 Her daughter Mary came from Boston and her son Edward from Washington, D.C., for the funeral.^7,8

On Feb. 10, the Journal announced that “the medical profession of the city will meet this evening at 7:30 p. m., in the small court room to take appropriate action upon the death of Dr. Mary Holloway Wilhite.”⁸ The next day it reported that the doctors had “passed resolutions on the death of Dr. Mary Wilhite,” and that “a number of eulogistic speeches were made.”¹⁵

The funeral

The funeral was held at 10 a.m. on Feb. 11 at the family home. The Rev. S. W. Brown of the Christian church officiated.^8,15

“A large concourse of people attended and followed the remains to their last resting place at Oak Hill cemetery,” the Daily Journal reported.¹⁵ It said her death “has caused a void which could have been caused by the death of no other individual.”¹⁵

“Her feet were as swift to visit the hovels of the poor as the mansions of the rich,” the paper said. Her grave, it said, would “stand forever as a monument of a brave woman’s successful fight against the prejudices by which her sex has been so long thrust into the background.”¹⁵

The Review put it more simply. “A call from a hovel in the dead hours of the night found as quick and ready response as one from a palace with its liveried servants,” it said. “She was a friend to the poor, the feeble, the unfortunate.”⁹

The physicians’ resolution was signed by three doctors: Thomas J. Griffith, J. R. Etter and T. F. Leech. It ended with a prediction. “Hundreds of poor people, who have been the recipients of her charity,” they wrote, “will reverence the name of Dr. Mary H. Wilhite.”¹⁰

The marker

In 2020, the Indiana Historical Bureau and the League of Women Voters of Montgomery County placed a state historical marker for her in Crawfordsville.¹⁴ It calls her a “physician and women’s rights leader.”¹⁴

The marker’s second side says she “helped revive the women’s suffrage movement in Indiana after the Civil War” and was “integral in founding the Montgomery County Woman Suffrage Association in 1869.” It says she “advocated for equal pay for equal work, increased educational opportunities for women, and full equality under the law.”¹⁴

In 1881, she was still waiting for that day.¹¹ Eleven years later, the doctors who signed her tribute called her “one of the oldest practitioners of the city.”¹⁰

How she died

Dr. Mary Holloway Wilhite died at her home in Crawfordsville shortly before 9 p.m. on Monday, Feb. 8, 1892, at 61.^13,9 Every local account Hoosier First found gives the same cause. The Weekly Journal said she had been sick only since the previous Thursday and that “the immediate cause of her death was congestion of the lungs.”¹³ The Crawfordsville Review said she died “after a short illness of congestion of the lungs.”⁹

“Congestion of the lungs” was a 19th-century description, not a modern diagnosis, and this story does not try to translate it. A wire item from Crawfordsville gave the day as Tuesday; the local papers, which reported her death the next morning, said Monday evening.^13,7