Ellen Smith Tupper

Ellen Smith Tupper (April 9, 1822 – March 12, 1888) was an American writer, expert beekeeper and the first female editor of an entomological journal.

Early life Ellen Smith was born in Providence, Rhode Island, the daughter of Noah Smith and Hannah Draper Wheaton Smith. Hannah Smith died when Ellen was young, and Ellen was raised in Calais, Maine after 1833. Her maternal uncle was diplomat Henry Wheaton.

Career Tupper taught school in her home in Iowa when her children were young, earning money by adding paying students to her children's lessons. Shortly before the American Civil War she started to write short articles on her first experiences in beekeeping, which were published in a local newspaper. and in Indianapolis in 1872, and was quoted as a national expert on apiary management the following year.

Tupper was editor of The Bee-Keepers' Journal from 1873 to 1875, and taught bee-keeping at the State Agricultural College of Iowa.

Tupper lost two hundred hives in a fire in 1873, a major blow to her work. "I have worked so hard and am so tired, that I can form no plans for the future," she said at the time.

Personal life Ellen Smith married Allen Tupper, a lumberman and aspiring Baptist minister, in 1843. Artist Allen Tupper True was her grandson. Ellen Smith Tupper was widowed in 1879, and died from heart disease in 1888, aged 65 years, in El Paso, Texas, while staying with another daughter, Margaret Tupper True, there. Her grave is in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.