In this piece I want to celebrate the life — and remember the anniversary of the death, 110 years ago this week — of a chronically shy girl from Massachusetts, a girl who was born in the small town of North Oxford on Christmas Day in 1821. The daughter of Stephen Barton, a militia captain and local politician who served under General Anthony Wayne, and his wife Sarah Stone Barton, she was named Clarissa, from the title of a popular novel of the time.
She was said to have been a painfully timid child, yet her parents were determined she should have a good education and sent her to school with her brother, Stephen, at the early age of 3. Perhaps because of her shyness, Clara, as she was called, concentrated on her school work and excelled, particularly in reading and spelling.
When she was 10, another brother, David, fell from the roof of the family’s barn and received a severe head injury. Clara became his nurse, feeding him, giving him medication and even placing leeches on his body to bleed him according to the medical custom of the time. David’s doctors gave up hope, but Clara persisted in caring for him and eventually he made a full recovery.
Her parents sent Clara to Colonel Stone’s High School, but while she was there she became even more shy and depressed and they had to withdraw her so she could recover. It was around this time that her family moved and Clara made herself useful helping to repair and paint their new house on a cousin’s farm. In addition to doing this work she got to play with her male cousins and, to her parents’ surprise, she proved to be good at riding and other boy’s games. They let her continue until one day she got injured and then her mother insisted her girl cousins visited to teach her more feminine pursuits and proper social skills.
She was still very shy, but she was smart — and it was thought that one way she might overcome her timidity was by becoming a school teacher. She studied and was only just 17 when she gained her first teaching certificate in 1839.
Clara was a good teacher. Her experience playing with her male cousins had helped her to know how to deal with the more boisterous of her pupils and she proved to be an able administrator. She successfully staged a campaign to redistrict the area in order to ensure the children of ordinary workers got a good education and also petitioned vehemently for equal pay for women teachers.
She worked as an educator for 12 years, only moving on when her mother passed away in 1851. That was when she moved to New York to study writing and languages at the Clinton Liberal Institute. She did very well there and was greatly admired by the principal before, in 1852, she was contracted to open the first …….