ABSTRACT
Mary Ella Wilkins Freeman, the older of two daughters, was born to Warren E. and Eleanor Lothrop Wilkins on October 31, 1852, in Randolph, Massachusetts. With the outbreak of the Civil War in the 1860s, the town faced hard times, and Freeman’s family did what numerous other New England families did during these decades: they moved. In 1867, when Freeman was fifteen, the family relocated to Brattleboro, Vermont, and Freeman’s father, who had been a carpenter in Randolph, opened a mercantile business in Brattleboro. In 1870, Freeman graduated from Brattleboro High School. She then spent one year at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, the same school that Emily Dickinson briefly attended. In 1884, after the loss of three family members, Freeman returned to Randolph, Massachusetts, to live with her very good friend from her Randolph school days, Mary Wales, and her family.
