Childhood friends from India reunited in Mount Vernon in 1915

MOUNT VERNON — Browsing an old newspaper, I found a fascinating little slice-of-life story about a marriage of two people from India, who found each other in Mount Vernon.

The article, in the Tuesday, Aug. 3, 1915 edition of the Democratic Banner states that Mount Vernon was the scene of a reunion of long-lost childhood friends from India, and turned into a romantic proposal of marriage.

It said that the following week, Miss Mary Robinson, who for the previous two years had lived with Mr. and Mrs. George D. Neal on East Vine Street, would be traveling to Colorado to get married to her fiancé, Abner Place, on a ranch near the town of DeBeque.

“As children and natives of Calcutta,” the article says, “they romped together and formed an acquaintance which lasted through the period of their removal to America, both having been adopted by people of American persuasion.”

In a regrettable lapse of journalistic duty, the reporter dismissively avoids trying to render their birth names: “Their original names are unpronounceable.”

When Dr. Place moved to Mount Vernon with his adopted son Abner, his family lived in Academia, the neighborhood surrounding the Seventh Day Adventist Church and their educational facility, the Mount Vernon Academy, on the northeastern edge of town, along Ohio 3. 

The Places later moved on to Colorado, but not before Abner and Mary reconnected, delighted to have traveled halfway around the world only to meet again.

In the time they were here, Abner courted Mary. They continued the relationship by letter after he moved, culminating in a marriage proposal and acceptance.

The reporter, as was typical of the day, goes out of his way to remark about Mary’s racial features, though he is at least complementary: “The bride is a very handsome Indian, dark in skin, while her husband is of the same shade.”

Since the article specifically cited one of the two families as living in Academia, and further stated that both Mary and Abner had been adopted by missionaries in India, then brought back to the states, I decided to dig into what I could find out about the Seventh Day Adventist Church’s missionary activities.

After an inquiry to the local church wasn’t answered by the time of publication, I did some online digging.

According to research by Koberson Langhu posted in the Digital Commons at Andrews University, the Seventh Day Adventist Church opened its first mission school in Calcutta (known today in India as Kolkata) in 1896 at 14 Bow Bazaar St. 

The church has maintained a presence in India to this day. The initial school housed two missionaries teaching 70 girls.

The program was gradually expanded from there, and today features 144 schools, eight colleges, and a university, no longer run by foreign missionaries but by indigenous faithful. 

The students in our story seem likely to have come from relatively early in the mission’s history if they were of age to be married by 1915, though Langhu says that most of the students were age 16 to 24.

Mary was almost certainly a Bengali, for according to Langhu’s history, India’s caste system strongly determined which children the missionaries were able to teach.

For those unfamiliar with it, the caste system holds that people from certain families are born into a particular social status, based on the traditional employment and/or social function of that family over the centuries. 

Thus, aristocrats remain aristocrats, and workers remain workers. It is similar to the upper class vs. lower class distinctions in the U.S., except that it is even more rigid and nearly impossible for one to move from one class to the other.

At this time in India, upper caste families would not send their children if the school were to house lower-caste families, so the decision was made to open the school to upper-caste Bengali families only.

The school made a big social impact in India, where few schooling opportunities existed in 1896 for young females, who often received little education. 

Those families who were interested in having their daughters educated responded enthusiastically.

Langhu reports that soon after the school started, a teacher named D.A. Robinson and his wife Edna worked at the mission.

Could they be the ones who adopted Mary and gave her their surname before sending her to Mount Vernon? 

Other girls at the school appear to have been from families, but because of the adoption, it seems possible that either Mary became on orphan while attending the school. Or, if her parents were high caste but not wealthy, they may have made a strategic decision to adopt out their daughter to Americans who might be able to offer her a better life away from the crowded city of Calcutta. 

The orphan scenario is distinctly possible because of the massive earthquake that hit Eastern India in 1897, killing at least 1,500 people in the area.

The school barely survived the earthquake, but it managed to reopen.

Tensions between Muslim and Hindu populations made its existence touch-and-go for the next few years, but it eventually stabilized and expanded. Boys were added to the school, as was technical training.

Knowing that churches often keep detailed records of their activities, I kept digging, and found the Encyclopedia of Seventh Day Adventists. Searching through this trove of information, not only did I find an early photo from the mission, I believe I actually found Mary!

The photograph features many of the original teachers of the school, including D.A. Robinson and Edna, but the caption also identifies the people in the picture, noting that Edna, sitting in the front row, is holding her adopted daughter Mary in her lap. 

The photo is from 1898, and Mary looks to be little more than a toddler, suggesting that it’s very possible she lost her parents in the earthquake the previous year. While there is no sign of Abner, there is another pair of teachers in the picture, identified as Mr. and Mrs. O.G. Place, which is the other surname involved in our story.

The newspaper article said that Mary and Abner grew up in the same neighborhood and played together as children.

Since she is already, clearly very young in the photograph, this suggests that the neighborhood where they played was around Bow Bazaar Street in Calcutta, and it would make sense if Abner was adopted at the same time for the same reason — the earthquake — by another teacher at the mission. 

This makes me think that the two children were not students in the early years of the mission, but were instead neighborhood children who lost their parents in the earthquake, and only later entered the mission school. 

This would put Mary around age 18, which matches up with the reporter’s description of her as a girl instead of calling her a woman.

If this is the case, that the Mount Vernon Mary is the same one seen in this mission picture, then we’re able to partially reconstruct her and Abner’s life stories.

I have not had much luck with finding them in later records, though. Abner is not a very common name, but searches for that name around 1915 and after in Colorado proved fruitless. 

Mary, on the other hand, is such a common name that too many potential records pop up. It may also be the case that one or both of them went by middle names either then or later on, or even reverted to their original given names.

It may not even be correct that the young man’s adopted name was Abner, as the reporter in the original story seems to be reporting it second-hand.

I did find one E.A. Place with a wife named Mary in Colorado in the right time frame. If this was them, they lived until the 1970s.

It remains a fascinating example of how even a small town like Mount Vernon could end up being the crossroads to reunite long-lost friends from the other side of the world.

It also serves to remind us that a wide range of people have lived in Mount Vernon and continue to do so today.

Their stories matter just as much as every other that animates our landscape.