Mary Bannister Willard

Mary H. Bannister Willard (18 September 1841 – 7 July 1912) was an American editor, temperance worker, and educator from the U.S. state of New York.

In the infancy of Mary, their oldest daughter, the father became principal of Cazenovia Seminary, and her childhood and early youth were spent as a pupil in that institution.

When she was fifteen, the family removed to Evanston, Illinois, when her father became Professor of Hebrew in Garrett Biblical Institute, the western theological school of the Methodist church.

[2][1] The year after graduating, she went to Tennessee as a teacher, but her career was cut short by the approach of the American Civil War.

The financial burden proving too heavy, it was relinquished, and not long afterward Willard was called to assume the editorship of a new paper, the Signal, the organ of the Illinois Woman's Christian Temperance Union.