I saw this photo several places on line when I was researching the Red Cross in southern Minnesota. It’s a May Red Cross Day parade in Ceylon, Minnesota around 1890.
I wonder if my Grandmother, Maybelle Kateley, who was a professional nurse, was influenced by the parade, the Red Cross, or Clara Barton. Grandma, who was born in 1880, would have been about 7 years old and was living in the Tennhassen area near Ceylon at the time of this parade. Parades were a big deal and the local people attended them.
Clara Barton is listed as one of the most influential people in the early 1900’s. She brought the Red Cross to America, elevated the nursing profession, and is known for her humanitarian work and her advocacy for women’s rights in a society where they were not allowed to vote. I’m not sure if Grandma admired her, but thousands of women did.
Grandma would have also have known local “country nurses.” These were women with no formal schooling in nursing, but lots of practical experience. Although they were starting to grow, communities were very small in the 1890’s and there were few doctors. These women delivered babies, set bones, provided medicine and nursed the sick.
Grandma’s future mother-in-law, Mary Alvord, was one of these nurses as was her future sister-in-law, Anjanette Alvord. She would have known them both. I think that though they might have influenced her passion for nursing, it was Clara Barton and others like her that planted the seeds for going to nursing school. Community Colleges were beginning to offer nursing programs in the years when grandma was young and she was eager to attend.
Like Clara Barton, nursing suited Grandma. Actually advocacy suited her too. She became a life long nurse and was a working mother in a time when women didn’t work outside the home.
Grandma went on to influence her daughter Harriet, who graduated with a 4 year degree in nursing from the Kohler School of Nursing at the Mayo. She also was a life long nurse.
tales from my typewriter 