edited. Later, she spent a year as state organizer in California and Nevada, and
for these efficient services in the West she was made a national organizer in 1889. She spends the evening of her life as preceptress of her Alma Mater, which has become Farmington College.
Mrs. Mary Towne Burt began her work for temperance with the first crusade in Ohio and continued without intermission for many years. In March, 1874, she addressed a great audience in the Auburn Opera House on temperance and immediately afterward was elected president of the Auburn Woman's Christian Temperance Union, holding the office two years. She was a delegate to the first national convention held in Cleveland, Ohio, 1874, an d was eventually promoted in the organization until she was made managing editor of the Woman's Temperance Union, the first official organ of the national union. In 1877 she was elected corresponding secretary of the national union, retaining the position for three years, and during that term of office she opened the first headquarters of the national union in the Bible House, New York City. In 1882 she was elected president of the New York State Union and during the years of her presidency it increased from five thousand to twenty-one thousand members, and from a hundred and seventy-nine to eight hundred and forty-two local unions.
Mrs. Matilda B. Carse, whose young son was run over and instantly killed by a wagon driven by a drunken man through the streets of Chicago, was brought by this tragedy to register a vow that until the last hour of her life she would devote every power of which she was possessed to annihilate the liquor traffic. She has been president of the Chicago Central Woman's Temperance Union since 1878. To Mrs Carse is due the credit of establishing the first creche in Chicago, known as the Bethesda Day Nursery. Besides this, several other nurseries, two free kindergartens, two gospel temperance unions, the Anchorage Mission, a home for erring girls; a reading room for men, two dispensaries for the poor and two industrial schools have been established through Mrs. Carse's energetic management, and these charities are supported at a cost of over ten thousand dollars yearly. Mrs. Carse personally raised almost the entire amount and yet she has never received any compensation whatever for her services to the public. She founded the Woman's Temperance Publishing Association and in January, 1880, the first number of the Signal was published. This was a large sixteen page weekly paper and two years later when Our Union was merged with it, it became the Union Signal, the national organ of the society. In this publishing business Mrs. Carse started the first stock company composed entirely of women as no man can own stock in the Woman's Temperance Publishing Association. Mrs. Carse was president and financial factor of this association from its inception. The great building, the national headquarters of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, is a monument to her life work.
Mrs. Clara Christiana Chapin, prominent member of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, in Nebraska, wrote much for the press on women and temperance questions. An Englishwoman by birth, Mrs. Chapin's life work has been of great benefit to America, her pen and personal influence aiding materially in the securing of the temperance, educational and scientific law for the state in which she lived.
