Mary Monnett Bain

[2] Monnett Hall provided the female dormitory space for all of OWUs women students for decades, until it was abandoned in the 1960s and torn down in the 1970s.

Mary Monnett's donation of initial funding for the building provided generations of women with a kind of freedom she herself never enjoyed.

After Gurley persuaded her to sever ties with McCabe (who stopped eating, left school and moved to the other end of the state, probably because he was so distraught), Mary was emotionally flattened.

The amount of $10,000 (ten percent, which might have been viewed as a tithe) was what Gurley induced her to donate to the Methodist effort toward creating its own female college.

Instead, Bain took his wife and their budding family to New York where, on his money and hers, they enjoyed very high living for several years, only to return to Ohio to learn that the ministers who had promised to wisely invest Mary's wealth had lost nearly all of it.

The children continued to live with their half-brother—Bain's child by his earlier marriage, and Mary was institutionalized in a state facility for the insane, where she died shortly after being discovered by the Reverend Charles McCabe who was attending to the residents of the asylum as a minister.

A plaque commemorates the space where Monnett Hall once stood, and a group of volunteers maintains a garden on the former building site.

As a tribute for her generosity towards the Female Seminary and Ohio Wesleyan University, Mary Monnett Bain's formal portrait hangs in the main level of OWU's Frances E. Mowry Memorial Alumni Center.