Maynard, Ken, 1895-1973

Wild west show, circus, and rodeo performer who starred in western films from the late 1920's to the mid 1940's.

Wild West show, circus and rodeo performer who starred in Western films from the late 1920's to the mid-1940's.

Wild west show, circus, and rodeo performer who starred in western movies from the late 1920's to the mid 1940's.

Carol Hutchings Maynard, known as "Hutch," was born to Caroline (Baxter) and Edwin Maynard in Mount Vernon, New York on 15 August 1895. The second of five children, she was raised in Worcester, Massachusetts. She graduated from Classical High School in 1915. Following graduation, Maynard settled in New York City, where she became active in the campaign for women's suffrage, canvassing and marching on behalf of New York suffrage leagues. Her work was publicized in Worcester newspapers. In 1918, she enlisted in the Woman's Land Army of America, a war-time venture that trained women to perform agricultural labor. The colloquially termed "farmerettes" were deployed to replace male farm workers engaged by the war. Maynard completed Land Army training at Wellesley College and was stationed at Bedford, New York. After the war, she traveled west as a self- described vagabond, settling in Alaska for a period of time in the early 1920s. There, she lived alone and took work in the salmon canneries.

From the 1930s forward, Maynard was employed as an educator and agriculturalist at a series of secondary schools. This phase of her career started at women's reform institutions. She was hired by the South Carolina State Industrial School for Girls in 1928 but was soon dismissed by the state governor in a controversial case targeting the institution's leadership. Subsequently, she took employment at the Montrose School for Girls in Reistertown, Maryland. In 1935, Maynard applied for a position with the farm program at the newly opened Putney School, a preparatory high school in Vermont that emphasized progressive ideals and manual labor. Initially camouflaging her gender by submitting an application under the name "C.H. Maynard," Maynard was hired to manage the school's farm. She also supervised the student work program, which was the labor-oriented segment of the curriculum. In the late 1930s, Maynard took a hiatus from Putney, worked at the Massachusetts Reformatory for Women in Framingham, and returned to Putney in 1944. Her association with the Putney School continued for the remainder of her life.

In her positions at each of these educational institutions, Maynard combined her passions for agriculture, animal husbandry, and creative writing. She encouraged her students to do the same, offering instruction in dairying and poetry alike. Maynard herself was an artist, dramatist, and a prolific poet. Her poetry frequently focused on agricultural life--animals, plants and seasons--but was far-ranging, touching upon love, loss, and the arts. From the 1940s to the 1960s, she developed the farming side of her career as a tester for the Vermont Dairy Herd Improvement Association. She also was involved in the 4-H and was active in civic life, serving as a member of the town's school board and planning commission. She took particular interest in the town and school gardens, and after her death, the Hutch Maynard Fund was started at the Putney School to support its greenhouse. Hutch Maynard died on January 7, 1973 at the age of 77.