Abby Maria Hemenway

Abby Maria Hemenway (October 7, 1828 – February 24, 1890) was a Vermont teacher, author and historian.

Abby Hemenway was born in Ludlow, Vermont on October 7, 1828. She attended Black River Academy, afterwards beginning a career as a teacher in Michigan.

Hemenway returned to Ludlow, became interested in publishing literature specific to Vermont, and attempted to attract supporters for her project. Refused backing from established printers and publishers, in 1858 she published on her own Poets and Poetry of Vermont, an anthology of verse by Green Mountain State writers.

The success of her volume of poetry encouraged her to continue in publishing, and she began the Vermont Historical Gazetteer. She planned to produce histories of every city and town in Vermont. Prior to Hemenway, publishing history usually meant biographies of famous military and political men and stories about the major events in which they took part. Hemenway advanced the concept of history as a social science by encouraging local authors to compile information on their areas and submit it to her for editing and publication, which placed the focus of Hemenway’s Gazetteer on chronicling the day-to-day activities of Vermont’s cities and towns, rather than focusing only on prominent individuals and events.

Many individuals prepared histories of their towns and cities and submitted them to Hemenway. For towns where she could not obtain the cooperation of a local author, Hemenway wrote the histories herself. In preparing for her first volume, Hemenway had to overcome the objections of several Middlebury College professors, some of whom had been working on town histories for Addison County. (Middlebury College is in Addison County.) These professors, all members of the Middlebury Historical Society, signed a letter to Hemenway insisting that her project was not feasible, asking how she expected to succeed when 40 men of the historical society working for 16 years had not. They described the project as "not a suitable work for a woman," and predicted that she would quit before she finished visiting half of the county. Undaunted, she set out to visit every town in person to recruit local authors.

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