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Ellen Smith Tupper

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American writer, expert beekeeper and editor
Ellen Smith Tupper
An older white woman, seated, holding a large book open on her lap.Ellen Smith Tupper, from an 1893 publication.
BornEllen Smith
April 9, 1822
Providence, Rhode Island
DiedMarch 12, 1888 (1888-03-13) (aged 65)
El Paso, Texas
Occupation(s)writer, editor, beekeeper

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. She started keeping bees in Iowa by 1860. 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.

In 1871, she and Annie Savery started the Italian Bee Company, based in Des Moines, Iowa, to import and sell Italian honey bees in the American midwest. "She attends personally to all shipments of bees, honey, extractors, hives, etc., to all her correspondence and her bees," noted a profile in 1873. She attended the North American Bee-Keepers Convention in Cleveland in 1871, 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. She also wrote for American Bee Journal, Prairie Farmer, The National Bee Journal and Youth's Companion.

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. She was selected to coordinate the bee exhibit at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition.

However, in January 1876 she was arrested on forgery charges. "It appears that she freely used the names of relatives and friends, and in addition, forged the names of leading citizens of various cities of Iowa," in signing checks, according to a report at the time. She was found "not guilty, the defendant being insane, and not responsible for her acts". In time she was released and relocated to Dakota Territory.

Personal life

Ellen Smith married Allen Tupper, a lumberman and aspiring Baptist minister, in 1843. The Tuppers moved to Iowa in 1851. Among their eleven children were two Unitarian ministers, Eliza Tupper Wilkes and Mila Tupper Maynard, and educator Kate Tupper Galpin. 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.

References

  1. ^ Willard, Frances Elizabeth; Livermore, Mary Ashton Rice (1893). A Woman of the Century: Fourteen Hundred-seventy Biographical Sketches Accompanied by Portraits of Leading American Women in All Walks of Life. Moulton. pp. 726. Ellen Tupper Smith.
  2. ^ Mielewczik, Michael; Jowett, Kelly; Moll, Janine. "Beehives, Booze and Suffragettes: The "Sad Case" of Ellen S. Tupper (1822–1888), the "Bee Woman" and "Iowa Queen Bee"". Entomologie Heute. 31: 113–227. Retrieved 22 March 2020.
  3. ^ "What an Iowa Woman Has Done". St. Landry Democrat. August 15, 1873. p. 3. Retrieved September 10, 2019 – via Newspapers.com.
  4. ^ Horn, Tammy (2011-11-01). Beeconomy: What Women and Bees Can Teach Us about Local Trade and the Global Market. University Press of Kentucky. pp. 169–175. ISBN 9780813134352.
  5. "Bee Culture". Mower County Transcript. December 28, 1871. p. 4. Retrieved September 10, 2019 – via Newspapers.com.
  6. "Indianapolis; The North American Bee-Keepers Convention; Second Day's Proceedings". Chicago Tribune. December 6, 1872. p. 8. Retrieved September 10, 2019 – via Newspapers.com.
  7. "Facts for Bee-Keepers". The Daily State Journal. April 23, 1873. p. 4. Retrieved September 10, 2019 – via Newspapers.com.
  8. "Eliza Tupper Wilkes". Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography. Archived from the original on 2019-10-17. Retrieved 2019-09-10.
  9. "A Lady Forger". Vermont Farmer. February 11, 1876. p. 2. Retrieved September 10, 2019 – via Newspapers.com.
  10. "Arrest of Mrs. Tupper". The Morning Democrat. September 13, 1876. p. 4. Retrieved September 10, 2019 – via Newspapers.com.
  11. "The Case of Mrs. Tupper". Quad-City Times. March 13, 1888. p. 1. Retrieved September 10, 2019 – via Newspapers.com.
  12. Lindell, Lisa R. (Summer 2008). "'Sowing the Seeds of Liberal Thought': Unitarian Women Ministers in Nineteenth-Century South Dakota" South Dakota History 38(2): 152-156.
  13. "Dust to Dust". Argus-Leader. March 19, 1888. p. 4. Retrieved September 10, 2019 – via Newspapers.com.
  14. "A Remarkable Woman Gone". Pacific Rural Press. March 24, 1888. p. 254. Retrieved September 11, 2019 – via California Digital Newspaper Collection.

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