August 9, 1762 – Mary Randolph, author, was born at Ampthill, which was her grandfather’s Chesterfield County plantation. The following quote is taken from the preface to Mary Randolph’s immensely popular cookbook, The Virginia Housewife which has been in print almost continually since 1824.
The government of a family bears a Lilliputian resemblance to the government of a nation. The contents of the Treasury must be known, and great care taken to keep the expenditures from being equal to the receipts. A regular system must be introduced into each department, which may be modified until matured, and should then pass into inviolable law. The grand arcanum of management lies in three simple rules: “Let every thing be done at the proper time, keep every thing in its proper place, and put every thing to its proper use.
~ Mary Randolph
Randolph, M. (1984). Virginia housewife. Facsimile ed. University of South Carolina Press.
August 27, 1833 – Margarethe Meyer Schurz, was born in Hamburg, Germany. She is credited with establishing the first kindergarten in the United States in 1857. She was the wife of German-American journalist and statesman Carl Schurz.
August 16, 1836 – Virginia Thrall Smith, charity worker, was born in Bloomfield, Connecticut. Ms. Smith believed that all children deserved to be properly cared for, be they legitimate or illegitimate, abandoned or orphaned, and black or white. She helped to establish the Sister Dora Society, The Children’s Aid Society and the Newington Home for Crippled Children.
The poorest children in a community now find the beneficent kindergarten open to them from the age of two-and-a-half to six years. Too young heretofore to be eligible to any public school, they have acquired in their babyhood the vicious tendencies of their own depraved neighborhoods; and to their environment at that tender age had been due the loss of decency and self-respect that no after example of education has been able to restore to them.
~ Virginia Thrall Smith
August 2, 1896 – Sarah Tilghman Hughes, judge, was born in Baltimore, Maryland. Sarah received her law degree in 1922. She worked as a lawyer until 1935 when Governor James Allred appointed her to the bench of the Fourteenth District Court in Dallas. She became the first woman state district judge in Texas.
August 16, 1914 – Ellen Axson Wilson, first wife of Woodrow Wilson, died.
Of all the world’s workers, those which to my mind take by far the highest rank are the writers of noble books.
~ Ellen Axson Wilson
August 16, 1945 – Suzanne Farrell, ballet dancer, was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. Farrell was discovered in 1959. Following an audition at age 15, she was offered a Ford Foundation Scholarship. Her performance in 1965 as Dulicinea in Don Quixote made her a star and excelled her to principal dancer.
