Canfield, Mary Grace, 1864-1946

Mary Grace Canfield (1864-1946) was a native of Vermont and the wife of the Reverend Harry Lee Canfield (1860-1942), a Universalist minister working in North Carolina. The Canfields came to North Carolina in the 1920s.

Mary Grace Canfield ( 1864-1946 ) graduated from the University of the City of Akron, Ohio, in 1886 . She married Universalist minister Harry L. Canfield in 1891 . Mary Grace Canfield was also a member of the League of Women Voters . She is the author of The Valley of the Kedron: The Story of the South Parish, Woodstock, Vermont ( 1940 ).

Mary Grace Canfield was born Mary Grace Webb on the Connecticut Western Reserve, in 1864. She received an A.B. degree from the Municipal University of Akron, Ohio, and taught school in Kent, Ohio. She married Harry Lee Canfield (1862-1942), a minister, and moved to Vermont with him in 1902, where he had been called to serve the Woodstock Universalist Church. They had two children, Hubert and Vivian.

Mary Canfield was an historian and writer, and published several books and articles, most notably the 1934 book Lafayette in Vermont (Rochester, N.Y.: Canfield and Tack, Inc.). Active in social causes along with her husband, she campaigned for woman's suffrage, and after it was secured by the nineteenth amendment in 1920, she continued her support of the women's political movement through involvement with the League of Women Voters. Though her husband resigned from the Woodstock Universalist Church in 1917 and began working in Greensboro, North Carolina, Mary Grace Canfield remained in Woodstock, writing, lecturing, and running a craft shop, until her death July 26, 1946.