Mary Adams Van Cleve

For over three decades, Mary Adams Van Cleve helped guide, organize, and run the Department of Geology as its stenographer and secretary. During those years many geology students expressed their gratitude for her help and more than a few may have owed their later success in part to Van Cleve’s efforts on their behalf. 

However, Van Cleve’s path to the department and her attitude towards her ‘geology boys’ not only reflected her own family and upbringing, but two of the main epidemics to plague late 19^th century American society, tuberculosis and gonorrhea. 

Although Van Cleve was not a direct victim of either, members of her family were, so those diseases changed the trajectory of her life. Her response was a commitment to the service of others, a path modeled for her by her grandmother and stepmother. Hence, the geology students at the University of Minnesota were simply the beneficiaries of a larger story. 

Mary Adams Van Cleve was born on February 4, 1874, in Providence, Rhode Island. Her parents were Edward Mortimer Van Cleve and Sarah Martindale Adams. 

At the time of her birth, Mary’s parents were living with her maternal grandfather George Adams and his second wife Camilia. Mary’s maternal grandmother had died a year before Mary’s birth and her grandfather quickly remarried. Adams was a cotton manufacturer and broker. Although Edward self-reported his profession as banker on Mary’s birth records, in the 1875 Rhode Island Census both he and his wife were listed as clerks, living in his father-in-law’s house. While Mary’s parents worked for her grandfather, there was a more poignant reason her family lived with Adams. Mary’s mother was suffering from consumption and would die later that year on the 24^th of November 1875. 

Besides his grief at the loss of his wife, Edward had a twenty-one-month-old daughter to care for. Rather than stay with his father-in-law, Edward returned to his own parents in Minneapolis. Hence, Van Cleve grew up within the familial and social circles of her paternal grandparents, General Horatio Philips Van Cleve and Charlotte Ouisconsin Clark. 

Growing up on military outposts, Charlotte embraced the commitment to the general welfare those frontier military communities relied on. She was not content to live a small life and blazed a path as an early suffrage advocate and social reformer. 1876 was a pivotal year for Charlotte as she and Charlotte Winchell became the first women elected to public office in Minnesota, decisively defeating a slate of prominent wealthy male opponents in the school board election. Not to take anything from Winchell’s efforts but Charlotte Van Cleve’s renown and social connections undoubtedly played a key role in their joint victory. 

1876 was also the year Charlotte and Abby Grant Swift became the main founders of Bethany Home, Minnesota’s first home for unwed mothers and former prostitutes. Charlotte would be the president of the Bethany Home from its founding until her death. On her own, she rented a house on 6^th Avenue to be the original Bethany Home. In a time when married women were seldom listed in city directories, Charlotte Van Cleve proudly had her own directory entry as Charlotte O. Van Cleve, president of Bethany House. Not content with titles though, Bethany Home was also the source of the ten children Charlotte and Horatio fostered over the course of their lives.

Charlotte did not just provide  a home and support for unwed mothers but took the battle for them even further, publicly demanding society make men accountable for their actions. 

‘Where are the men who make these girls what they are? Go find them in our business marts, drawing rooms, and churches. Men are getting rich on the toil and tears of famishing women and children.’

For her early formative years, this remarkable woman was Mary Van Cleve’s primary maternal figure. Even after her father remarried and her family moved out of her grandparents’ house, her grandmother would continue to play a significant role in Van Cleve’s life. Mary was mentioned in numerous news stories helping her grandmother host social events. Some of those events involved over a hundred guests converging on the Van Cleve home which, while a comfortable home, was hardly a mansion. 

Mary Seymour Williams Van Cleve, Mary’s stepmother, also took an active interest in the lives of those less fortunate. She routinely checked in on families on the lower river flats, the immigrant community later known as Bohemian Flats. On one occasion she helped a woman navigate the municipal court system to have her abusive husband incarcerated. Consequently, Mary’s stepmother as well as her grandmother modeled a commitment to others’ welfare.

On January 12, 1897, a month before Van Cleve’s twenty-third birthday and almost a year after her graduation from the University of Minnesota, Mary gained another step-sibling, Grace William.

To understand Van Cleve’s service to the Geology Department, you have to consider not only her stepmother and grandmother, but her siblings as well. In his biography of the Van Cleve family, Mary’s brother wrote that her stepmother treated Mary the same as any of her own children. If so, Mary more than returned that favor. From an early age, she helped care for her stepsiblings. Her two oldest stepsiblings left home quickly, leaving Mary to help care for the remaining two. After her father’s death Mary was the main financial support for her stepmother and her two youngest stepsiblings who were both blind.

Horatio Phillips Van Cleve II, who often went by the name Ray, attended East High School. He was valedictorian of his 1901 graduating class. Horatio then entered the University of Minnesota and graduated with a civil engineering degree in 1905. After graduation, Horatio initially worked as a draftsman for Minneapolis Steel and Machinery Company but dreamed of a life beyond Minnesota. 

In 1909 Horatio left the state to work as a civil engineer for various bridge building firms across the country. His first assignment was in East Saint Louis, Illinois where he married Leslie Gertrude Allen on April 2, 1910. The couple lived in Kansas City for a few years and had two children, a daughter, Leslie Allen and a son, John Woodbridge. They then moved to Cranford, New Jersey where they had two more sons, Allen Seymour and Horatio Phillips III. While in New York, Horatio was the Chief Engineer of the J. Edward Ogden Company.

Yet while her two oldest siblings left to explore the world, Mary Adams remained in Minneapolis. Although that might have been her own preference, Mary, as her parents aged, also took on a greater role supporting her two youngest siblings who were both blind. 

Erastus Williams Van Cleve, who went by the name of Will, was born on March 18, 1888. Unlike his older siblings, Erastus was taught at home by his mother, because he was blind almost from birth. Before her marriage to Mary’s father, Mary Seymour Williams had been a teacher, so she not only valued her children’s education but was capable of teaching Erastus at home. Later Erastus attended the State School for the Blind in Faribault, graduating in 1910. There he learned how to tune pianos, a profession he would follow for the rest of his life. Like his grandfather, father, and older brother, Erastus was also an Elder in Andrew Presbyterian Church. 

Possibly in part because of the responsibility of raising a blind child, it was nearly nine years before Mary’s last sibling, Grace Williams Van Cleve, was born on January 12, 1897. Although she had some sight as a young child, Grace soon became blind. Grace was one of four students chosen to speak at the 1916 East High graduation. Later, despite having to have all her materials read to her, Grace still managed to graduate from Carleton College in Northfield with Magna Cum Laude honors. For a number of years, Grace taught at the State School for the Blind in Faribault but then transferred to the school run by the Minneapolis Society for the Blind where she taught braille. A talented teacher and advisor, Grace also became an Elder in the Andrew Presbyterian Church. 

In the modern, having two of five children become blind might send doctors searching for a genetic trait, but blindness does not seem to have occurred in other lines of the extended Van Cleve family. In the late 1800s though, there were other epidemics that were far more likely causes of childhood blindness, namely gonorrhea and chlamydia. Although the latter disease was not even recognized until 1907, modern studies estimate those two diseases were responsible for well over a third of all cases of childhood blindness during the 19^th century, before it became a customary practice to treat newborn eyes with antibacterial ointment or rinses. Mary’s parents were most likely infected sometime after the birth of Rebecca and both their youngest children would bear the burden of that affliction.

Upon her retirement, Van Cleve was no longer responsible for the success of her ‘geology boys,’ (along with a lone woman geologist, Eunice Peterson). However, her responsibilities simply shifted even more heavily to her family. 

In 1915, Mary’s family moved to a new home at 516 6^th Avenue Southeast. After her father’s death in 1924, Van Cleve had become the main financial support for her mother and two younger siblings although the family also took in boarders.

When Horatio and his two sons returned to Minneapolis in 1932, they moved back in with the family. Sometime after Horatio remarried, the house was informally subdivided into two units with Horatio’s family living in one half and Mary’s remaining family in the other. 

At the time of Mary Van Cleve’s retirement, her stepmother was approaching her eighty-sixth birthday, and would die on January 19, 1947, at the age of ninety-one. Van Cleve not only took care of her mother but helped support her youngest siblings. Erastus continued to work as a piano tuner, but his income was naturally episodic. After Mary retired, Grace pitched in as well, finding work as a braille instructor at the Minneapolis School for the Blind. 

Van Cleve died on August 24, 1957, at age 83 and was buried in Lakewood Cemetery. 

Her brother, Erastus, followed on February 27, 1964, and was buried next to her. After Horatio died in 1972, Grace moved to Trumansburg, New York, to live with her older sister Rebecca. When Rebecca died in 1977, Grace stayed with her niece in Trumansburg, eventually dying two days short of her ninety-ninth birthday on January 10, 1996.

Van Cleve’s concern for the geology students was legendary, and she kept scrapbooks of their photographs similar to family albums. In a sense, they were family albums, as Van Cleve expanded her family to include the department’s students. Her brother wrote that when Van Cleve died a former student sent a purple orchid, then a symbol of respect and admiration, that he asked to be placed in her hand in remembrance of her close ties to past students. 

Yet nowhere in the department’s older histories was it noted that Van Cleve’s concern and care for her students was part of a larger pattern, a lifetime of care and commitment to others, modeled by her grandmother and stepmother. Commitments that included helping her youngest siblings lead independent lives in a society then designed almost exclusively for the sighted. 

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email: Kent Kirkby ([email protected])