Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn Lives of the Past Informing the Future | Page 11

sweet auburn | 2019 volume ii
George (1809–1867) and Mary
Stearns (1821–1901)
The Stearns were a powerful couple in the
abolitionist movement and members of the
“Secret Six,” who provided financial support
to John Brown for his raid on Harpers Ferry.
When their identities were suspected, the
Six fled to Canada to escape arrest. Mary’s
support for Brown was so strong that she
actually woke George in the middle of the
night and suggested they sell their Medford
estate to fund Brown’s cause. (They found
other methods to support John Brown, and
their estate eventually became a significant
part of Tuft University’s campus in Medford.)
George was instrumental in the
recruitment of black troops for New
England’s 54th Regiment, and he ultimately
recruited more than 13,000 African American
soldiers in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and
Tennessee. After the war, he helped found the
Freedmen’s Bureau. Mary and George hired
Joshua Bowen Smith to cater a banquet in
their home in 1863 to reveal a commissioned
bust of John Brown. (George and Mary also
appear in my moonlight abolitionist play.)
Harriot Kezia Hunt (1805–1875)
Born in Boston, Harriot Hunt was one of the
first women physicians in the United States.
Though she was did not hold a diploma from
a medical school (many doctors did not back
then), she began practicing medicine in 1835,
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with a focus on women’s health. She had a
strong interest in the whole patient, believing
that mental and physical health are strongly
linked.
She applied to attend lectures at Harvard
Medical School in 1847 and was rejected.
She applied again in 1850; this time she was
accepted but was forced to withdraw after
protests by the male students.
Hunt remained committed to the practice
of medicine for the rest of her life. In 1860,
she celebrated twenty-five years as a healer
with an anniversary party for 1,500 of her
friends and colleagues, where they presented
her with a silver ring, commemorating her
“marriage to medicine.”
Hunt was deeply involved with the
start of the women’s rights movement in
the 1850s and gave numerous lectures and
attended important conventions for that
cause. Her grave is marked by a statue to the
Greek goddess of health, Hygeia, which she
commissioned from Edmonia Lewis, one of
the American women sculptors working in
Rome (with Harriet Hosmer) and the first
significant African American woman sculptor.
I love that Hunt wrote an annual protest
letter to the state and the newspapers when
she paid her taxes, explaining that it was
clearly “taxation without representation,”
because she had earned the money herself but
was not allowed to vote. Harriot Kezia Hunt
appeared in two of The America Plays that
were produced in September.
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