Mary Bell Smith

Mary Bell Smith
Born	Mary Perkins Blair (1818-08-03)August 3, 1818 Becket, Massachusetts, U.S.
Died	December 9, 1894(1894-12-09) (aged 76) Kansas City, Kansas, U.S.
Occupations	Educator social reformer author
Employers	Oskaloosa College Patee Female College
Notable work	My Uncle's Family, or Ten Months at the South
Title	President, Kansas Woman's Christian Temperance Union
Spouses	John Johnston Bell ​ ​ (m. 1836; died 1841)​ Daniel Smith ​ ​ (m. 1847; died 1879)​
Children	4

Mary Bell Smith (née Blair; after first marriage, Bell; after second marriage, Smith; August 3, 1818 – December 9, 1894) was a 19th-century American educator, social reformer, and writer. Active in the early Women's Crusade movement, 1873, for many years, Smith was a prominent activist in the prohibition campaign in Kansas, as the organizer and president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (W.C.T.U.) in Topeka as well as serving as president of the Kansas state W.C.T.U. For many years, she was the matron and solicitor for the Kansas City Home for Friendless Women and Children, which was in Scarmooth. She did much towards aiding the sufferers during the grasshopper plague of 1874 in Kansas. She resided quite a long while in Wellington, Kansas after her second marriage, on a farm in the northwest part of the town which was once known as a depot of the Underground Railroad, by which fugitive slaves made their way to Canada before the end of the Civil War. Gray wrote for a woman's suffrage paper called The Lily. Amongst her printed writings was a book called Ten Months at the South, or My Uncle's Family. During the later part of her career, she devoted herself to painting, receiving pupils when she was well advanced in age. She had an ardent interest in tracing and recording her genealogical relations and left a valuable collection of family matters which her daughter, Mrs. Jennie J. Goodwin, completed.^[1]