Mary Virginia McCormick

Mary Virginia McCormick (May 5, 1861 – May 24, 1941) was a wealthy American philanthropist who donated to humanitarian causes in the United States and Canada in the early twentieth century. She was a member of the McCormick family and had schizophrenia and a reclusive lifestyle.

Biography

Childhood and adolescence

Born in Chicago, Illinois, on May 5, 1861, Mary Virginia McCormick was the eldest daughter of Nancy Maria "Nettie" Fowler McCormick and Cyrus Hall McCormick, the American inventor of the mechanical reaper and industrialist who founded the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company in 1847. Mary was the couple's second child, in 1880. The following August, she stayed at Clayton Lodge, the McCormick family estate in Richfield Springs, New York, and after Christmas, her mother brought her to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to seek treatment under the care of Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, a neurologist.

By 1889, she occupied a camp in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York and a house on the Upper West Side of Manhattan near the Hudson River, two dwellings that were provided by her mother who had employed a resident physician and household attendants to care for her. Grace Thorne Walker, a Canadian-born business secretary for the McCormick family, was the head of Mary McCormick's household and served as her nursing companion. Cyrus McCormick Jr. negotiated a three-year contract to recruit Dr. Alice Bennett, a superintendent at the Norristown State Hospital for the Insane, as Mary McCormick's attending physician in 1896, after her mother purchased the property from industrialist Michael Joseph O'Shaughnessy in 1900. She kept a small herd of deer on the estate and maintained a dairy that provided free milk to underprivileged children in Huntsville.

Mary McCormick visited Canada in 1904 and remained in Toronto for months. She noticed the Oaklands manor on Avenue Road during her stay and her family bought the property from the family of Senator John Macdonald in November 1905 for her. where her home held indoor gatherings for the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA), the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and the Women's Christian Medical College. The grounds of her manor held outdoor garden parties every June that raised funds for the benefit of the Girl Guides of Canada, the Toronto General Hospital and the Home and School Association of Brown Public School on Avenue Road. In June 1916, her estate had the largest fête ever held in Canada, a four-day festival for the Canadian Red Cross Society Fond of music herself, The Caravels manor served as a layover during her travels between Huntsville and Toronto as the McCormicks made annual family visits to Cohasset at the end of June.

Later life in California and death

After the death of her mother on July 5, 1923, Mary McCormick moved back to California in 1924. The property at 1400 Hillcrest Avenue in Pasadena was purchased by the McCormicks from the family of oil magnate Frank Whitney Emery as her primary residence. She was placed under the care of Dr. Adolf Meyer, a psychiatrist who was retained in 1927 for five years by her younger sister, Anita McCormick Blaine.

In 1928, the McCormick family acquired a cliffside property in Los Angeles on Alma Real Drive in the Huntington Palisades community near Santa Monica that became her summer home Her estate in Toronto was sold to the Brothers of the Christian Schools in 1931 for the purpose of establishing a campus for De La Salle College and her manor in Huntsville was sold at auction in 1932 and became a hotel that year.

She hired symphony orchestras to play for her and unable to attend the wedding of her younger brother, Harold Fowler McCormick, to his nurse, Adah Wilson, that was held at her other home in Pasadena. Her belongings in California were sold at auction she provided the first settlement house in Huntsville with the opening of Virginia Hall, a fifteen-room community center situated in West Huntsville. that offered affordable meals for women.

She pledged a donation to the Toronto Playgrounds Association in 1910 for the purpose of equipping a children's playground in the city. Cottingham Square, a public square but it was too close in proximity to the Canadian Pacific Railway line. which then became the site for the McCormick Playground in July 1911. Her mother and Toronto Mayor George Reginald Geary opened the McCormick Recreation Centre in September 1912 on the site of the playground at 163 Brock Avenue, a venue where Mary McCormick held annual Christmas parties for 400 children and their parents. The total of her contribution to the Toronto Playgrounds Association was .

During the Jim Crow era of racial segregation in the Southern United States, Mary McCormick funded the construction of a hospital in 1911 at the Alabama State Agricultural and Mechanical College, a black college in Normal, Alabama. The Virginia McCormick Hospital cost to build and it was the only hospital for African Americans in Madison County when it opened. She also contributed in the same year to erect the Councill Domestic Sciences Building on the campus, named after the college's founder William Hooper Councill, In February 1916, she donated to open a black hospital annex of the Huntsville Infirmary, and located across the street in downtown Huntsville from the segregated white hospital.

Mary McCormick supported the Canadian war effort during the First World War by giving to the Canadian Red Cross Society in 1916 , to the YMCA Red Triangle Fund in 1918 and 200 pairs of socks to the Ontario Red Cross Sock Fund.

Legacy

Landmarks with her namesake include the following:

Mary McCormick Recreation Centre at 66 Sheridan Avenue in Toronto, a municipal recreation facility that replaced the McCormick Recreation Centre at 163 Brock Avenue in 1964 and named originally as the McCormick Recreation Centre until 2001.

McCormick Park in Toronto, a municipal park in Brockton Village that was named originally as the McCormick Playground in 1911 McCormick Playground Arena at 179 Brock Avenue in Toronto, a municipal indoor ice arena that opened in 1972. McCormick YMCA at 3214 Eighth Avenue in Huntsville, opened from 1915 to 1983. Virginia Hall at 60 Shiloh Road at Tusculum University in Greeneville, Tennessee, opened in 1901 as the first dormitory for women at the college. Virginia Library at 826 Belden Avenue in Chicago, an academic library at the McCormick Theological Seminary from 1896 to 1963. Virginia McCormick Hall at 308 Buchanan Way at Alabama A&M University in Normal, Alabama, first opened as the Virginia McCormick Hospital from 1911 to 1927.

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