Floral Home; or, First Years of Minnesota.
Bishop, Harriet E. Floral Home; or, First Years of Minnesota. Early sketches, later settlements, and further developments. New York: Sheldon, Blakeman and Company, 1857.
8vo.; frontispiece and nine additional full-page plates, many of native Americans; title page and frontispiece foxed, light foxing throughout and to edges; endpapers offset; purple cloth stamped in blind and gilt; heavily sunned and faded.
First edition of an early history of Minnesota and of Bishop’s experiences there. This is one of three books, one entirely in verse, that Bishop wrote on the past, present, and future of the state. Sabin 5604. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: A gift of love to Rosa from the Author. H.E.B. McC. 1860. This volume was “designed,” Bishop writes in her preface,
to exhibit the rise and progress of Minnesota; what it was and what it has become; the rapid development of its resources; when, how and by whom the foundations of an unparalleled prosperity were laid; and to rescue from oblivion facts which might be unchronicled by the future historian…the most important object of its publication will be secured if men and women of sterling worth, are, by it, induced to identify themselves with the interests of this youthful empire, and labor to make it the first state in our glorious Union.
Though the weight of the book lies with the customs and habits of the Native American population, her own experiences, and the efforts of the early settlers to maintain a standard of educational, religious, and political values, Bishop does not neglect the role women played in this endeavor. Chapter seven includes a discussion of Mrs. Holton, “the first Citizen Woman,” “endurance and Virtues of Mrs. Northup,” and “Duties of Women in New Settlements, and their importance.” Chapter 51 is about several Indian women.
Harriet Bishop (1817-1883), raised in Vermont and trained as an educator there and in Albany, accepted a teaching mission in 1847 in St. Paul, or more precisely at “Little Crow’s Village,” (or Kaposia). Upon her arrival she opened the first permanent citizen day school in what was at that time “a primitive trading post among the Sioux Indians consisting of a few log structures and containing at most twenty families, of which three were American” (NAW I, p. 151). Soon she had developed her school into a model for others, and the third annual report of the Board of National Popular Education, which came out in the third year of her establishment, named her as a “woman of excellent mind and heart” who had “deservedly acquired great influence in the Territory” (ibid.) Her Sunday school inspired the first Baptist, Presbyterian, and Methodist churches in St. Paul. She “also took up the pen, in literary efforts which reveal some ambition and a modest talent. Articles sent to Eastern newspapers sought to entice settlers by praising the attractions of Minnesota” (ibid.).
In the midst of many fulfilled ambitions, Bishop was brought down when her engagement to a somewhat younger St. Paul lawyer was broken off in 1850. She married another man in 1858 and, after nearly twelve years in Minnesota, returned East, where the marriage was annulled in 1867 because of her husband’s drunkenness and abuse. At that point she legally adopted her maiden name, prefacing it with “Mrs.,” and once again threw herself into her work for the temperance and women’s suffrage movements; she was named a vice-president of the American Equal Rights Association. After a brief stint in California, she returned to Minnesota, where she died of “general asthenia (weakness).” Though her name has diminished somewhat in the 20th century, her legacy is preserved by Harriet Island in the Mississippi River at St. Paul.
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