When Helen Grant Duncan Became Mrs. F. E. Woodbury

Helen Grant Duncan was born on Michigan’s upper peninsula in 1865, the oldest of four children. Her father was superintendent of a mining company.

Helen studied music and art at Oberlin in 1881–82 and 1884–86. College friends called her Nellie.

At the end of 1887, Helen Grant Duncan married the mining engineer Frederick E. Woodbury. He was in his late twenties, having started work under his father and then spent two years as a “special student” at MIT.

The American Institute of Mining Engineers remembered Frederick this way:

He was, as a young man, intellectually keen, with a zest for life, yet generous, considerate, and of a peculiarly clean mind. The passing years with their responsibilities and trials seem to have developed the strong fiber of this man without producing anything of harshness. His character was marked by a most unusual blending of gentleness and strength.

Woodbury worked at a few mining companies over the next quarter-century, developing new methods and inventions, rising in the executive ranks.

As “Mrs. F. E. Woodbury,” wife of an engineer in the northern Michigan town of Calumet, Helen continued her artistic pursuits. In 1895, for instance, she ordered a Knabe grand piano from Detroit. The couple doesn’t appear to have ever had children.

On 24 Mar 1896, the Calumet News reported that Helen Woodbury had just “returned from an extended visit to the Alma Sanitarium.” Three weeks later, on 14 April, the same newspaper said she and a friend had taken a train to Chicago for “an advanced class on china painting.”

In 1900, Frederick Woodbury moved from Calumet to Milwaukee, a larger and less remote city. Helen Woodbury became involved in the People’s Pulpit, a weekly lecture series at the Pabst Theater; she played the organ at one gathering in June 1906, according to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. On 26 Nov 1907, the Milwaukee Daily News reported that she would “entertain the Tuesday Musical club this evening.”

Soon, however, Helen Woodbury would leave the Midwest for Los Angeles.

TOMORROW: California.