Picture courtesy of the UUA Archives.

 

In 1880 Mary Augusta Safford was invited to Humboldt's Unity Church.  She remained in the community for five years before she was invited to Sioux City. 

Mary was born at Quincy, Illinois, December 23, 1851.  At the age of eighteen she entered the State University at Iowa City.  She spent several years there studying and teaching.  After leaving school, she joined her parents in Hamilton, Illinois and began to preach there.

 

It was in Hamilton that Mary organized a Unitarian Society in 1878.  She preached in Hamilton a year and a half and then was invited by the Iowa Unitarian Association to be ordained in the State of Iowa.  She received her ordination while in Humboldt.  Mary remained in Humboldt for five years.  She was a woman of great energy,  and enthusiasm.  She was well liked in Humboldt and attracted many new members to the Unitarian Church. 

 

In 1871, Miss Safford founded the Hawthorne Literary Society, a forum for the sharing of new ideas. The organization presented book reviews, essays, poetry readings, and plays. There was occasionally a guest lecturer.   She continued the Literary Society in Humboldt, for both young people and adults.  The Literary Clubs were well received.  S. H. Taft was a frequent guest speaker at the meetings.

 

In addition to the literary, educational and humane work of her church, Miss Safford was an ardent woman suffragist.  After leaving Humboldt she when on to Sioux City, and then to Des Moines.  In these larger cities she was received as favorably as she had been in Humboldt.

She retired to Florida.  But she continued her work of organizing Unitarian Churches.  In 1927, after suffering a stroke in Orlando, Florida, Safford died. Her body was returned by train, traveling northward along the Mississippi River, to Hamilton, Illinois for burial.

 

 Mary Augusta Safford will be remembered as a Unitarian minister with  remarkable energy, zeal and dedication.  She did much to promote the growth of Unitarian churches in the Middle West during the late 19th century. The central figure in a framework of women Unitarian ministers known alternately as the "Iowa Sisterhood" or the "Iowa Band," she led her ministerial colleagues in their common work of founding and serving new Unitarian churches in Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota, and North and South Dakota.