Mary Mathews Adams

Mary Mathews Adams (neé Mary Jane Mathews; later, Mary Mathews Smith, Mary Mathews Barnes, Mary Mathews Adams; October 23, 1840 – December 11, 1902) was an Irish-born American writer and philanthropist.

Mary Jane Mathews was born at the hamlet of Granard, County Longford, Ireland, October 23, 1840, the oldest child of John Mathews (d. Staten Island, April 1, 1869), a Protestant who married a Catholic woman whose maiden name was Anna Reilly (d. Brooklyn, ca. 1850). All of the children —Mary Jane, Robert, Anna, John, and Virginia Scott (born in New York City)— were reared in the Catholic Church but all save the youngest left the church early in life. Emigrating to the US about 1846, when Adams was six year 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.

Family tradition has it that she was a school teacher when but 17 years old; the records show that from 1862 to 1868 she taught in Public School No. 15, Degraw Street, Brooklyn.

In the autumn of 1869, she was married to Cassiua M. Smith, of Canandaigua, New York, and two years later went with him to Atchison, Kansas, where her only child was born, who lived less than a year. The husband appears to have died in 1876, whereupon his widow returned to Brooklyn, where she taught in the Juvenile High School.

On November 7, 1883, she took for her second husband, Alfred Smith Barnes, then prominent as a publisher and philanthropist; his first wife (nee Harriet Burr) had died in 1881, leaving him five sons and three daughters. Mr. Barnes, a man of large wealth, died at his Brooklyn home February 17, 1888.

Upon July 9, 1890, his widow was united in marriage at London to Charles Kendall Adams (d. July 26, 1902), 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 the president.

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