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Jennie North is seen in a photo taken during her years at Bates College in the 1870s and later identified with her married name. Muskie Archives, Bates College LEWISTON – Jennie North, the sole child of Loomis and Anne North of Bristol, Connecticut, wasn’t even a year old when her father died in 1856. Though she lived in a nice home on Federal Hill in a bustling city known for its clock industry, it wasn’t an easy time to grow up with just her mother to look after her each day.
But North — called “modest, unassuming and self-poised” by the Lewiston Evening Journal — turned out to have both the brains and the luck to soar. In 1877, she graduated at the top of her class at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, apparently the first woman anywhere to serve as valedictorian at any co-educational college. “The Bates College valedictorian is a girl,” gushed The New York World, and “a perfect brick of a girl.
” Whatever that meant. A newspaper in Tennessee, The Milan Exchange, expressed incredulity “that one of this sex should have carried off the highest honors in a class of her superiors, men.” But the editor of the local Evening Journal, Frank Dingley, said, “The experience of Miss North shows the propriety, the feasibility, (and) the distinguished success of the co-education of the sexes.
” North’s academic achievement capped a remarkable era at the little liberal arts college that was just finding its footing at the time. Only eight years earlier, Mary Wheelwright Mitchell earned a Bates degree to become the first woman to graduate from a New England college. Mitchell, by then a professor at Vassar College, was on hand in Lewiston to deliver a poem about women’s rights at the commencement where North collected her diploma.
That Bates, racially mixed and open to all since its first class entered in the fall of 1863, marked two key milestones in women’s history in less than a decade has been largely forgotten in the years since. North became a teacher, married a busy builder and politician in nearby Auburn, and ultimately returned home to Bristol as a widow to live out her last years in the same house where she was born. Oren Cheney, the founder of Bates College, who opened the college to men and woman of all races from its first day.
NORTH’S EARLY YEARS In 1856, when North was born, Bates itself was just beginning. Initially a little seminary with two buildings — Parker and Hathorne halls, each of which is still standing — nobody except perhaps its founder, Oren Cheney, envisioned that it would become one of the nation’s elite colleges. And few could have imagined that Jennie Eliza Rich North would make history, either, especially when her father dropped dead at age 45 less than nine months after her birth.
Dr. Loomis North grew up in Cornwall, Connecticut, where his father practiced as a physician, according to an 1854 volume titled “History of Ancient Woodbury, Connecticut.” Two of his brothers also became doctors.
Loomis North received his medical education in Cherry Valley, New York — just a short hop from Cooperstown, where the National Baseball Hall of Fame is located today — and began working as a doctor at the age of 25 in Connecticut’s Litchfield County, where he stayed for a dozen years before moving to Bristol. “He is considered a skillful physician,” William Cothren wrote in his book on Woodbury history. Loomis North had two sons, Edward and Hubert, by his first wife, who died in 1849, probably in childbirth.
Neither son lived long enough to see their younger sister graduate. The doctor next married a Bristol native, Anne Eliza Rich, who was 15 years his junior. They had just one child, Jennie, born in mid-winter in 1856.
The country was on the verge of the Civil War and technology was quickly changing a nation of shopkeepers and farmers into an industrial powerhouse. Both Bristol and Lewiston were utterly transformed within a few decades. Little is known of Jennie North’s childhood, but by the time she reached her teens, she was studying Greek “at the hands of a Yankee schoolmaster,” the World reported.
His name was Elbridge Turner. North always ranked first in her class in Bristol, the World reported, and at age 16 her teacher told her mother, “Your daughter has nearly a college preparation, and what do you propose regarding her?” “To have her receive as good an education as any man in the land,” her mother responded. “Send her to Bates College,” said Turner, who attended Bowdoin College for a time.
The World said that in less than two years, North acquired enough Greek, Latin and advanced mathematics to qualify for admission. At age 17, she entered the incoming class at Bates in 1873. A view of the Quad in front of Parker Hall at Bates College as it appeared about 1894 in a photograph by student Miles Greenwood.
Muskie Archives, Bates College A YOUNG WOMAN AT BATES The youngest person in her class, North did well from the start. She was always “very popular” and commanded respect from classmates, the Journal said. The Journal said she “furnished music” at literary debates, but never took part in them herself.
She did, however, participate in speech exhibitions. “It was a little troublesome at first to stand up, a lone girl in a class of 40, and recite,” Dingley wrote, but she got used to it. At the end of her freshman year, she earned first prize for general scholarship – and then won it again for three more years.
North and a friend who was also from Bristol, Carrie Warner, kept their studying to daylight hours, the World said. By “keeping proper hours,” the paper said, North improved her health. The Journal added that she did not study before breakfast as well.
“Caring for her health has preserved it,” the Journal said. “Jennie never ‘swung clubs’ at gymnasium, but was ever an interested spectator on the baseball ground,” the World said, “rejoicing at the general victories gained by Bates over other clubs.” North “waved her handkerchief, some say her hat, at every class victory on the ball ground or elsewhere, and in every manner prominently identified herself with the interests of her classmates,” the paper said.
The Journal said the young men at Bates would sometimes get “frisky and erratic” and cut class to frolic somewhere. But “modest little North” and her friend Warner had a profound sense of duty and did not go along, Dingley wrote. He said they felt “exceedingly unpleasant” at having to make the choice, but they put their coursework before having fun.
“Yet never did I suffer the slightest insult or discourtesy from any member of the class because I did not join them in rebellion,” North told the Journal. Not long after North completed her years at Bates, a three-man examining committee weighed in on having women as students at the college. Their June 1878 report said “the lady undergraduates” at Bates “have no more trouble mastering the curriculum than their male associates; and their apparent health and strength, their ladylike manners, and the gentlemanly like deportment of their fellow students toward them seems to indicate that some at least of the supposed evils of the co-education of the sexes are imaginary.
” Dingley said North finished out her years at Bates with “rosy cheeks and perfect health.” He said that on the verge of graduating, North, “of slight figure and girlish in appearance,” looked like “a high school girl, for all the maturity that her face discloses.” The two oldest buildings at Bates College, Parker and Hathorne halls, as they looked in 1894 in a photograph taken by Miles Greenwood.
In the foreground is Rand Field, where Bates’ baseball team once played. Muskie Archives, Bates College ALMOST SMOTHERED IN FLOWERS “Let honor be given to the faculty of Bates College, who dare to give a girl the well-merited honors of the college at the close of her studies, and let New England be proud that such an institution has reared its walls in the Pine Tree State,” the World said. The Journal said North “was fairly the favorite of the commencement stage of ‘77” when 1,700 people gathered at Lewiston City Hall to witness the small class of graduates receive their diplomas and the public acknowledgement of North’s status as valedictorian.
Dingley said she received “a rousing reception of cheers” as she rose in a black silk outfit to speak. “The young gentlemen of her class as well as the multitudinous man on the floor vied with the ladies in giving the first feminine valedictorian of college history a rousing welcome to the stage,” he wrote. In her oration at the commencement, titled “The Mystery of Genius,” North said genius “is not the product of circumstances.
The times do not make the man.” She said that William Shakespeare, for example, may have lived during a period “favorable to his genius,” but so did many others “whose names pale” by comparison. “Even in this age of wonders,” North said, “no receipt can be invented for the compounding of such a man.
” “Within a certain circumference, man is free,” she argued, “but beyond that is God. Burns must write. Raphael must paint.
Angelo must give life to marble. Handel and Hayden must ravish the ear with harmony.” North said, to sum up, that “genius must think and must publish.
” After diplomas were handed out, the Journal noted that North and Warner, the two women in the class, were “almost smothered in bouquets” of flowers from the many well-wishers on hand. A detail from the bird’s-eye map “Bristol, Conn. Looking North-East, 1889.
” Courtesy Connecticut Museum of Culture and History and “Connecticut History Illustrated” NORTH’S LIFE AFTER BATES North said before her graduation that she wanted to become a teacher and eventually a physician like her father, grandfather and uncles. According to records at Bates, North taught in Mechanic Falls for a year, then at Berwick Academy in Rockland from 1878 to 1887. She moved on to tutor for a private family in Brooklyn, N.
Y. for several years before teaching at a school in Somers, Connecticut, from 1891 to 1895. A 1947 story in the Lewiston Evening Journal said North “was an inspired teacher who encouraged her pupils to achieve the maximum in their scholastic world.
” At Berwick Academy, one of her students was a Madge Richmond, a talented young woman. North convinced her to attend Bates starting in 1883. The two women became lifelong friends.
In 1895, North became engaged to Elbridge York Turner, the teacher in Bristol who helped her master the background required for entry at Bates more than two decades earlier. The following year, they had a son, Loomis, but he died in infancy. They never had another child.
Jennie Eliza Rich North Turner’s married life was spent entirely in Auburn, where her well-known husband dabbled in everything from politics to mining. He oversaw the digging of a canal to help generate electricity on the Little Androscoggin River and erected commercial buildings downtown. He was also president of the Mount Apatite Mineral Co.
Elbridge Turner died in 1916 after several years of serious maladies after hitting his head on an iron spike. His obituary in the Journal noted that he had been the inspiration for his wife to attend Bates. It also said that the “charming and lovable” Elbridge Turner “has been a live wire in politics and in public affairs” for years.
“Who cannot remember his sturdy figure, set as firmly as a colossus with his strong, rugged, intelligent face as he has gathered his clans about him and talked good roads or care of the city streets or civic duty and to a larger degree, the duty of each man to state and nation,” the Journal said. “In short, he was a big, wholesome, honest, able and kindly man — and his death leaves behind him in his own home, where his faithful and devote wife is left alone, a sorrow that is more poignant than words can express,” the paper said. “There is no ordinary and common sorrow over his passing on.
” His widow later auctioned off his business equipment, sold her house in Auburn and moved back to Connecticut. A charter member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, she was active in the Congregational Church and several women’s clubs both in Auburn and Bristol. In her later years, she wrote pieces about nature.
Also living in Bristol was Jennie North’s classmate Carrie Warner Morehouse. She married schoolmaster Henry Morehouse there in 1879. Eloise Jordan in 1982 wrote in the Lewiston Journal Magazine about her recollections of long-dead Bates graduates she’d met as a youngster while traveling with her aunt Madge Richmond, the young student North befriended while teaching at Berwick Academy.
One of those graduates was North, whom she remembered as “a very frail and delicate” woman who couldn’t quite force her screen door open in Bristol. North died in 1929 in the same house where she was born. She left behind an estate worth $7,000 — $222,000 in today’s inflated cash — and earmarked $1,000 of it to help Auburn build more good roads, a nod to her husband’s passion.
Alongside her husband and son, North lies beneath a large granite marker in Bristol’s West Cemetery, reduced to names and dates. She deserves to be remembered. We invite you to add your comments, and we encourage a thoughtful, open and lively exchange of ideas and information on this website.
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