MRS. HARRIET E. AREY (1819-1901)

Harriet Ellen Grannis, a daughter of John and Roxana Chandler Grannis, was born in Cavendish, Vermont, April 14, 1819. In 1824 the family moved to Hatley, Canada. The mother dying in 1833 and the father being away from home the greater part of the year as a member of the Provincial Parliament at Quebec, Harriet went to live with her father's elder brother, Timothy, at Claremont, New Hampshire, and remained there some four or five years.

At the time of the Rebellion in 1837, Mr. Grannis fled to the United States and went to Oberlin, Ohio, where the family again assembled. Here Harriet entered Oberlin College, but on account of eye trouble she did not receive her degree of A.B. until 1845. For a time she was a school teacher in Cleveland, Ohio, and later taught in a girls' school in the same city; meanwhile she had been writing poems for the Cleveland Daily Herald, Willis and Morris's Home Journal and other periodicals. In 1848 she was married to Oliver Cromwell Arey, Principal of Public School No. 10, in Buffalo. In 1855 she succeeded James O. Brayman as editor of The Youtth'ss Casket, Beadle's first publication in Buffalo. She also edited The Home for Beadle from its beginning in 1856 until the end of November, 1857, when she was succeeded by Mrs. Metta V. Victor. She immediately started, with Mrs. Gildersleeve, a rival magazine, patterned as closely after Beadle's Home as possible, and even imitated the name by making it The Home Monthly. Beadle having moved his magazine to New York, she established her editorial office at 226 North Main Street, Buffalo, as close as possible to Beadle's old address, 227 North Main Street. In September, 1860, her magazine was united with Cyrus Stone's Home Magazine, in Boston.

In December, 1864, her husband accepted the principalship of the State Normal School at Albany, New York, but in a railway accident in February, 1865, he received a severe head injury. He was so slow to recover that he resigned in 1867 and accepted lighter duties at the Brockport, New York, Normal School, where he had charge of the Department of Natural Science and his wife became Lady Principal.

When the new State Normal School at Whitewater, Wisconsin, was opened early in 1868, Mr. Arey became Principal and "Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy and Theory and Practice of Teaching," while his wife became "Preceptress and Teacher of English Literature, French and Drawing." Their only daughter, in her late teens, died during their first year at Whitewater.

In 1876 Mr. and Mrs. Arey resigned and went to Yonkers, New York, where Mr. Arey had charge of a girls' school, but the pupils made life too strenuous for him and in the autumn of 1877 they returned to Buffalo and recuperated for over a year. In 1878 Mr. Arey again had charge of a school in Buffalo, but the next year he was called to the principalship of the Cleveland City Normal, and there remained until 1882 when he permanently retired.

In 1884 Mrs. Arey published her "Home and School Training" (Philadelphia), and during the 1880's she was editor of The Earnest Worker, the organ of the Cleveland Woman's Charitable Association. She was one of the founders and the first president of the Ohio Women's State Press Association. With the exception of the years 1893 and 1894, she lived in Cleveland. On April 26, 1901, Mrs. Arey died of pneumonia in Brooklyn, where she had been but a short time. Her husband and a son survived her and accompanied her remains to Cleveland, where she was buried.

REFERENCES: William T. Coggeshall, The Poets and Poetry of the West, Columbus, 1860, 383; Magazine of Poetry, VI, 1894, 70, 72; Journalist, XVIII, June 23, 1894, 10; XIX, October 13, 1894, 5; Publications of the Buffalo Historical Society, XIX, 1915, 234; Oberlin College, Alumni Catalogue, 1833-1935; Willard and Livcrmore, Women of the Century, Buffalo, 1893, 32; Historical Sketches of the First Quarter-Century of the State Normal School at Whitewater, Wisconsin, with a Catalogue of Its Graduates and a Record of Their Work, 1868-1893, Madison, 1893, 5, 51, 97-112; Obituaries in Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 26, 1901, 3, 5, and Cleveland Plain Dealer, April 29, 1901, 8.

The Home

I. Without and Within, 1856
V. My Neighbor's Stepson, 1858