Mary Virginia McCormick
American philanthropist (1861–1941)
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Mary Virginia McCormick (May 5, 1861 – May 24, 1941) was a wealthy American philanthropist[1] who donated to humanitarian causes in the United States and Canada in the early twentieth century. She was a member of the McCormick family and had schizophrenia[2] and a reclusive lifestyle.[3][4]
May 5, 1861
Mary Virginia McCormick | |
|---|---|
Photograph of Mary V. McCormick, 1901 | |
| Born | Mary Virginia McCormick May 5, 1861 Chicago, Illinois, U.S. |
| Died | May 24, 1941 (aged 80) Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
Resting place | Graceland Cemetery, Chicago |
| Parent(s) | Cyrus Hall McCormick Nancy Fowler McCormick |
| Relatives | See McCormick family |
Biography
Childhood and adolescence
Born in Chicago, Illinois,[5] on May 5, 1861,[5][6] Mary Virginia McCormick was the eldest daughter[7] of Nancy Maria "Nettie" Fowler McCormick and Cyrus Hall McCormick,[8] the American inventor of the mechanical reaper[9][10] and industrialist[11][12] who founded the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company in 1847.[13][14] Mary was the couple's second child,[6][8][15] born two years after her brother, Cyrus McCormick Jr.[6][16]
In July 1862, she sailed with her family across the Atlantic aboard the SS Scotia to Liverpool, England.[17][18] She lived with her mother in London[19][20] while her father toured the United Kingdom, France and Germany to exhibit his farming invention.[20] The McCormicks returned to the United States in 1864.[21][22] By mid-November[23][24] they occupied a second-floor suite at the Fifth Avenue Hotel[25] in New York City.[5][26]
While staying at the hotel, Mary and her older brother were infected with scarlet fever, an illness that took the life of their younger brother, Robert Fowler McCormick,[25] on January 6, 1865.[5][6]
At the age of five, Mary lived at 40 Fifth Avenue[27] in Lower Manhattan after her father purchased the residential property for the family[5][28] in November 1866.[5]
The McCormicks settled in Chicago after the Great Chicago Fire in October 1871,[29][30][31] residing at 62 North Sheldon Street until the spring of 1875[32][33] and then moving to a house on 363 Superior Street.[32][33] Although Mary McCormick was educated by private tutors[34][35] and stayed at private boarding schools away from home,[36] she attended Central High School, a Chicago public school on Monroe Street.[7] In her early teenage years, she displayed musical talent and became a skilled pianist.[15][37]
When the McCormicks visited Europe in the summer of 1878,[38][39] the family addressed her thereafter by her middle name, Virginia.[40] In August,[41] she vacationed with her mother at St. Moritz,[40] a Swiss town near the Albula Alps, while her father featured the reaper at the World's Fair in Paris.[39][42] The pair then rejoined the family at the French capital in October[43][44] and stayed at the Hôtel du Jardin,[44][45] across from the Tuileries Garden.[44] Mary remained with her parents and younger siblings in Paris until mid-April 1879[46][47] to care for her father[48] as he recovered from a malignant carbuncle on the back of his neck.[49][50] During her stay, she visited museums, historic places, the French opera, performances by stage actress Sarah Bernhardt and a mass at Notre-Dame Cathedral with church music led by composer Charles Gounod.[47]
The family returned to the United States in the summer of 1879.[51] When the McCormicks moved into their new Chicago mansion on Rush Street in late November, Mary was at a boarding school in New York.[52]
Mental illness
Mary McCormick exhibited signs of anxiety that worsened throughout her teenage years.[15][37] By the age of 18, she expressed delusional ideas and hallucinated.[15] She had frequent bouts of weeping and frantic praying.[15][37] Episodes of insomnia[37] were marked with incidents of her climbing out of windows[15] and wandering around at night.[15]
At the age of 19,[2][53][54] she was diagnosed by doctors with dementia praecox.[37][55] Because of her medical diagnosis, doctors declared her insane[54][56] and mentally incompetent[57][58] in 1880.[58] Her condition became worse after the death of her father[59] on May 13, 1884.[60][61][62] The following August,[63] she stayed at Clayton Lodge, the McCormick family estate in Richfield Springs, New York,[64] and after Christmas,[65] her mother brought her to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to seek treatment under the care of Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, a neurologist.[66]
By 1889, she occupied a camp in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York and a house on the Upper West Side of Manhattan near the Hudson River, two dwellings that were provided by her mother[67] who had employed a resident physician and household attendants to care for her.[68] Grace Thorne Walker, a Canadian-born[69][70] business secretary for the McCormick family,[69] was the head of Mary McCormick's household[71] and served as her nursing companion.[72][73] Cyrus McCormick Jr. negotiated a three-year contract to recruit Dr. Alice Bennett,[71][74] a superintendent at the Norristown State Hospital for the Insane,[71] as Mary McCormick's attending physician in 1896,[71][74] but Bennett resigned two years later[71][74] after resident nurses accused her of morphine addiction.[74]
Mid-life in the United States and Canada
In 1897,[2][15][75] Mary McCormick moved to the family estate at Riven Rock in Montecito, California[76][77] and lived there until 1904.[78] She stayed in Asheville, North Carolina[79] in the summer of 1898,[80] which became her winter residence.[81]
The Kildare manor near Oakwood Avenue in Huntsville, Alabama, then became her winter home[73][81][82] after her mother purchased the property from industrialist Michael Joseph O'Shaughnessy in 1900.[1][72] She kept a small herd of deer on the estate[83] and maintained a dairy that provided free milk to underprivileged children in Huntsville.[82] On May 5 of each year, an outdoor festival was held on the grounds of her manor for hundreds of invited schoolchildren to celebrate her birthday.[82][84]
Mary McCormick visited Canada in 1904[85] and remained in Toronto for months.[86] She noticed the Oaklands manor on Avenue Road during her stay and her family bought the property from the family of Senator John Macdonald[87] in November 1905[85] as a summer residence[88] for her.[86] By 1908, she occupied the estate[89] where her home held indoor gatherings for the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA),[90][91][92][93] the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU)[94] and the Women's Christian Medical College.[95][96] The grounds of her manor held outdoor garden parties every June that raised funds for the benefit of the Girl Guides of Canada,[97][98] the Toronto General Hospital[99][100] and the Home and School Association of Brown Public School on Avenue Road.[101][102][103][104][105] In June 1916, her estate had the largest fête ever held in Canada,[106][107][108] a four-day festival[106][107][108] that was opened by Ontario Premier William Hearst[109][110] for the Canadian Red Cross Society[107][108] at the mid-point of the First World War.
She visited Cohasset, Massachusetts, in 1910 and leased the Caravels manor on Nichols Road.[111] Fond of music herself,[69][82][111] she accommodated musicians from the Boston Symphony Orchestra during her stay at the manor that year.[111] Her family then acquired the property from industrialist Albert Cameron Burrage the following year[111] as her seaside residence.[112] The Caravels manor served as a layover during her travels between Huntsville and Toronto[113] as the McCormicks made annual family visits to Cohasset at the end of June.[114]
Later life in California and death
After the death of her mother on July 5, 1923,[115][116] Mary McCormick moved back to California in 1924.[3][4][117][118] The property at 1400 Hillcrest Avenue in Pasadena[119] was purchased by the McCormicks from the family of oil magnate Frank Whitney Emery as her primary residence.[120][121] She was placed under the care of Dr. Adolf Meyer,[122][123] a psychiatrist who was retained in 1927 for five years by her younger sister, Anita McCormick Blaine.[122]
In 1928, the McCormick family acquired a cliffside property in Los Angeles on Alma Real Drive in the Huntington Palisades community near Santa Monica that became her summer home[121] known as the Quelindo manor.[3][4][82][124] Her estate in Toronto was sold to the Brothers of the Christian Schools in 1931 for the purpose of establishing a campus for De La Salle College[125][126] and her manor in Huntsville was sold at auction in 1932 and became a hotel that year.[127]
She hired symphony orchestras to play for her[4][121] and kept three musicians among her retinue of 30 household servants[82] as she divided her time between the two California estates.[3][120] In May 1938, she was ill at the Quelindo manor[128] and unable to attend the wedding of her younger brother, Harold Fowler McCormick, to his nurse, Adah Wilson, that was held at her other home in Pasadena.[128][129]
Bedridden by an illness in her final three months, Mary McCormick died at the Quelindo manor on May 24, 1941, at the age of 80.[3][4][82][124][130] Her belongings in California were sold at auction[120][121] and her net worth, after all inheritance taxes and expenses had been deducted, was US$6,550,802 in 1942[71][130] (equivalent to US$99,154,962 in 2024).[131] She was buried with other members of the McCormick family at Graceland Cemetery in Chicago.
Philanthropy
Mary McCormick was endowed with a trust fund that afforded her with the means to support social activities and charitable causes.[1][82] In 1904,[132][133][134] she provided the first settlement house in Huntsville[133] with the opening of Virginia Hall,[82][132][133][135] a fifteen-room community center[133][134] situated in West Huntsville.[132][134][135][136] In Toronto, her donation to the YWCA allowed the charity to open the YWCA Cafeteria in August 1910, a downtown restaurant at 209 Yonge Street[137] that offered affordable meals for women.[138]
She pledged a donation to the Toronto Playgrounds Association in 1910 for the purpose of equipping a children's playground in the city.[139][140][141][142] Cottingham Square, a public square[139] near her Toronto home,[140] was the original location for the playground[143][144] but it was too close in proximity to the Canadian Pacific Railway line.[144] The land of the former Grand National Rink on Brock Avenue was purchased by the city of Toronto in December 1910[145][146] which then became the site for the McCormick Playground in July 1911.[147] Her mother and Toronto Mayor George Reginald Geary opened the McCormick Recreation Centre in September 1912[148][149] on the site of the playground at 163 Brock Avenue,[150] a venue where Mary McCormick held annual Christmas parties for 400 children and their parents.[151][152][153] The total of her contribution to the Toronto Playgrounds Association was CA$25,000[154][155] (equivalent to CA$648,438 in 2025).[156]
During the Jim Crow era of racial segregation in the Southern United States, Mary McCormick funded the construction of a hospital in 1911 at the Alabama State Agricultural and Mechanical College, a black college in Normal, Alabama.[157][158] The Virginia McCormick Hospital cost US$10,000 to build[157] (equivalent to US$345,536 in 2025)[159] and it was the only hospital for African Americans in Madison County when it opened.[160] She also contributed US$19,000 in the same year (equivalent to US$656,518 in 2025)[159] to erect the Councill Domestic Sciences Building on the campus,[157] named after the college's founder William Hooper Councill,[160] an educator who was a former slave.[161] In February 1916,[162][163] she donated US$5,000 (equivalent to US$147,936 in 2025)[159] to open a black hospital annex of the Huntsville Infirmary,[162][163][164] an eight-room building[162] that was furnished by her household servants[165] and located across the street in downtown Huntsville from the segregated white hospital.[162][164][165]
Her other acts of charity included a sum of US$17,500 to the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) of Huntsville in 1912[166][167] (equivalent to US$583,836 in 2025),[159] which allowed the Central YMCA to open on Greene Street[168] in February 1912[166] and the West Huntsville YMCA[82][167] to open on Eighth Avenue in 1915.[169][170] She contributed US$3,000 in 1916 (equivalent to US$88,761 in 2025)[159] to erect the West Huntsville School, an eight-room wooden schoolhouse on Ninth Street.[171]
Mary McCormick supported the Canadian war effort during the First World War by giving CA$1,500 to the Canadian Red Cross Society in 1916[172] (equivalent to CA$36,761 in 2025),[156] CA$5,000 to the YMCA Red Triangle Fund in 1918[173] (equivalent to CA$92,247 in 2025)[156] and 200 pairs of socks to the Ontario Red Cross Sock Fund.[174]
Legacy
Landmarks with her namesake include the following:
- Mary McCormick Recreation Centre at 66 Sheridan Avenue in Toronto, a municipal recreation facility that replaced the McCormick Recreation Centre at 163 Brock Avenue in 1964[175][176] and named originally as the McCormick Recreation Centre[177] until 2001.[178]
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- McCormick Park in Toronto, a municipal park in Brockton Village that was named originally as the McCormick Playground in 1911[147] until 1963.[179]
- McCormick Playground Arena at 179 Brock Avenue in Toronto, a municipal indoor ice arena that opened in 1972.[180]
- McCormick YMCA at 3214 Eighth Avenue in Huntsville,[181] opened from 1915 to 1983.[169]
- Virginia Hall[182] at 60 Shiloh Road at Tusculum University in Greeneville, Tennessee,[183] opened in 1901[184] as the first dormitory for women at the college.[185]
- Virginia Library[186] at 826 Belden Avenue in Chicago,[187] an academic library at the McCormick Theological Seminary from 1896 to 1963.[188]
- Virginia McCormick Hall at 308 Buchanan Way at Alabama A&M University in Normal, Alabama, first opened as the Virginia McCormick Hospital from 1911 to 1927.[160]
Print sources
- Casson, Herbert N. (1909). Cyrus Hall McCormick: His Life and Work. Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Company.
- Ellis, Diane; Drost, Maureen (Summer–Fall 2002). "Mr. O'Shaughnessy's Dream House" (PDF). Historic Huntsville Quarterly. 28 (2 & 3): 13–22.
- Fields, Armond (2003). Katharine Dexter McCormick: Pioneer For Women's Rights. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers. ISBN 978-0275980047.
- Hutchison, William T. (1935). Cyrus Hall McCormick: Harvest, 1856–1884. Vol. 2. New York City: D. Appleton-Century Company.
- Noll, Richard (1999). "Styles of Psychiatric Practice, 1906–1925: Clinical Evaluations of the Same Patient by James Jackson Putnam, Adolph Meyer, August Hoch, Emil Kraepelin and Smith Ely Jelliffe". History of Psychiatry. 10 (38 Pt 2): 145–189. doi:10.1177/0957154X9901003801. PMID 11623876. S2CID 34823163.
- Pruitt, Raneé G., ed. (2005). Eden of the South: A Chronology of Huntsville, Alabama, 1805–2005 (PDF). Huntsville: Huntsville-Madison County Public Library. ISBN 0-9707368-2-7.
- Record, James (1978). A Dream Come True: The Story of Madison County and Incidentally of Alabama and the United States (PDF). Vol. 2. Huntsville, Alabama: John Hicklin Printing Company.
- Roderick, Stella Virginia (1956). Nettie Fowler McCormick. Rindge, New Hampshire: Richard R. Smith Publisher, Inc.
- Rosenberg, Chaim M. (2019). The International Harvester Company: A History of the Founding Families and Their Machines. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company. ISBN 978-1476677095.