Women’s History Month puts us in mind of women who made special contributions in their lifetimes. Locally, a 19th century woman’s contributions play an important part in our lives today, yet few know of her.
Ellen Kellogg Fisher, who lived from 1833 until 1906, contributed between $200,000 and $300,000 in today’s dollars to her Amherst community. She helped make the North Amherst Library a reality and aided improvements at the North Congregational Church, including the purchase of an excellent organ.
Her largest contribution was the legacy in her will that gave her house and a substantial monetary gift to establish the Amherst Home for Aged Women, known for years as the Fisher Home.
Today, that legacy lives on in the Hospice of the Fisher Home.
This forward-thinking, generous woman was remarkable from her early years. She entered Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, as Mount Holyoke College was then called, in 1851 and graduated in 1855. Few women went on to this level of schooling and graduation was even rarer.
Fisher was one of just two students in her class of 57 who came from Amherst; the other students came from all over the east and midwest.
One can imagine that in the small village of North Amherst, the young Ellen Kellogg stood out, which was undoubtedly a factor in the brouhaha that occurred at the North Congregational Church in 1855, when the work of the pastor, George Fisher, was undermined because of his supposed attention to Ellen.
Rev. Fisher called for church councils on three occasions to examine charges against him, and despite the conclusion of the councils that his morals were exemplary, criticism continued until he was dismissed on Jan. 5, 1858. A portion of his farewell sermon, in which he strongly defended himself and chastised those who spoke against him, was published in the New York Times on Feb. 4, 1858.
George Fisher left the ministry at North Church, while Ellen Kellogg remained at home with her parents. George Fisher’s invalid wife, Harriet, died of tuberculosis on Aug. 8, 1858, a few months after his dismissal, and Ellen and he married at her parents’ home on Sept. 7, 1859. She was almost 26 years old and George was 36.
That’s quite a bit of activity in such a short time — with no discovered written records to tell us where the truth lay at the time of the councils, and how all of this played out.
One might assume that Ellen Fisher was childless because she left her house and assets to other than family members. In fact, she bore four children, three between 1861 and 1869, each of whom died by the age of two years. A fourth daughter born in 1874 survived until she was almost 13 but died on Christmas Day in 1886, the year that the Fishers moved into the house in North Amherst that was part of Ellen Fisher’s legacy.
Her only known first-hand accounts of her life come in the form of Mount Holyoke class letters, which are preserved in the archives of the college. Individual letters were written by each class member and then sent to a class scribe, who combined the letters to send out to all the members.
Some of her letters are heartbreaking, as she describes the loss of her children: “My heart is too sad to say much … Death has entered our happy home and made it desolate. Our only and darling child has been taken from us … She was only 19 months old, the light and joy of our home, but she is gone never to return.”
During the years after their marriage, Rev. Fisher served churches in three towns before coming back to Amherst in 1879, where he took a pastorate at the Second Congregational Church, now the location of the Jewish Community of Amherst.
Then, in 1886, the year they moved into the house in North Amherst, he was called to the Leverett Congregational Church. Ellen apparently did not attend that church with him, which was unusual for a pastor’s wife, but became active at her home church in North Amherst.
Fisher’s will stipulated that the trustees of the ministerial fund at North Church be on the board of the new home for aged women, along with her executor and eight women to be selected by the men. The house itself was moved in 1970 to another location in Amherst to make way for the one-story building that houses the hospice today.
Ellen Fisher remained thoughtful and generous until the very end. She had ample reason to become bitter, but her religious faith, demonstrated in a number of class letters, strengthened her and she never gave up.
This strength sustains hospice residents and families today.
Barbara Benda Jenkins lives in Amherst.