Mary Bell Smith

Mary Bell Smith ( 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.

In 1832, she and her family moved to Rochester, Ohio. In this role, Smith also had charge of Missouri and Nebraska. In 1880, she was elected superintendent of temperance headquarters at Topeka, Kansas. In 1887, she was elected matron of the Home of the Friendless at Leavenworth, Kansas, and through her influence many children were adopted. The long trial of the noted Hull baby case proved Smith's strength of character for truth, being offered many times money by the unscrupulous Carrie E. Hull if Smith would return to the home and persuade the home to give up the case. Great excitement prevailed, not only at Leavenworth, but all through the State of Kansas.

Mary Perkins Blair Bell Smith died in Kansas City, Kansas, December 9, 1894.

Selected works

My Uncle's Family, or Ten Months at the South (1860) On the quicksands (1897) A terrible tangle Her son's wife Little Bessie Poor Nell The tramp's daughter Two wives Were they married?