Annis Ford Eastman (Mark Twain Studies Resource Page)

Editor’s Note: One of the Center for Mark Twain Studies most important strategic goals is service to the general public. One way that CMTS fulfills this endeavor is the creation of Mark Twain related resource pages for students, teachers, and enthusiasts who are interested in learning more about Mark Twain and his world. CMTS asks Mark Twain Studies scholars to provide information about a specific topic, often consisting of concise summary, related images, and suggestions for further reading. If you are a scholar who is interested and participating in this act of public service and creating a resource page for CMTS, please contact Director Joseph Lemak at [email protected].

For this resource page, Mary Lemak graciously agreed to write about Annis Ford Eastman, the preacher after Thomas K. Beecher of Elmira’s Park Church and mother of Crystal Eastman and Max Eastman.

Mary Lemak recently graduated from the University at Albany’s undergraduate history program. Her honors thesis “‘Making of a Woman Minister’” focused on the Reverend Annis Ford Eastman and her tenure at the Park Church. She is an Elmira native and worked for the Elmira College Center for Mark Twain Studies from 2018 to 2023. In the Fall 2024, she will attend the University at Buffalo School of Law.

Mary Lemak delivered a lecture on Rev. Annis Ford Eastman at The Park Church in July 2024:

• Mary Lemak, “‘Making of a woman minister’: Rev. Annis Ford Eastman and Elmira, New York” (July 17, 2024 – The Park Church)

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Annis “Bertha” Ford was born in Peoria, Illinois on April 24, 1852, the youngest of five daughters. Her father, George Ford, was known around the Midwest for making fine rifles but domestically had a violent temper and a strong insistence on patriarchal values. While George tried to force these principles on his daughters, it seems that his emphasis that his daughters were lesser-than combined with his propensity toward physical abuse instilled completely opposing ideas into them. It was at this early point in her life that Annis began her political and feminist writings.

After graduating from high school, Annis arrived at Oberlin College in Ohio, intending only to stay one year. It’s at Oberlin that she met Samuel Eastman, a relative of George Eastman of Eastman-Kodak fame. Samuel, attending Oberlin’s Divinity School, was a veteran of the American Civil War. During his service, he contracted typhoid pneumonia, from which he lost a lung and never fully recovered. During her year at Oberlin, Annis and Samuel fell in love and, after she left, the two began a correspondence. Samuel worked towards finishing his degree. Annis maintained that she would not marry him until he had a job. Once Samuel had graduated and received an offer to preach, the two married on August 25, 1875, and moved to Swampscott, Massachusetts.

By 1881, the couple had moved to Newport, Kentucky, and then to Canandaigua, New York, and had four children: Morgan, Anstice, Crystal, and Max. The Eastmans led a happy life in Canandaigua, but their happiness was disrupted when Morgan died at seven years old of malignant scarlet fever. Morgan’s death exacerbated Samuel’s already poor health. He would often return from preaching unable to stand. To help her husband, Annis began writing his sermons for him. Samuel’s condition worsened and he was forced to resign. To support the family, Annis decided to make use of her brief religious education and attempted to find her own parish.

People were not receptive to this decision. In an essay published in The Congregationalist, Annis described how people would avert their eyes from her in public and how they believed that should a woman speak in the pulpit, “‘we might as well lock the church door and throw the key in the well.’”^[1] Despite the initial negative reception, Annis persisted and eventually won over her parish, which she kept for three years. During her tenure there, she was ordained by a group of Congregationalist ministers, including Elmira, New York’s Thomas K. Beecher.

Soon after, the Eastmans moved to West Bloomfield, a small town near Ithaca, New York, and Annis became the preacher of their Congregational Church. During her time in West Bloomfield, she began to speak and write on the national scale. She wrote articles for The Independent and the Congregationalist, but it seems that her oration skills surpassed her writings. In 1893, Annis was invited to speak at the Congress of Women in Chicago. Susan B. Anthony introduced her as the “movement’s main orthodox woman minister.”^[2] Here, she delivered a speech entitled “The Home and its Foundations” which emphasized how the sexes are dependent on one another but the way that late-19th century American society was structured prevented this cooperation. Only a few months later, Annis returned to Chicago to speak at the World’s Parliament of Religions. She took this opportunity to speak on the influence of religion on women.

In 1894, Thomas K. Beecher made Annis and Samuel his associate co-pastors of Elmira’s Park Church. The Eastmans moved to Elmira and were given two corridors of rooms to live in above the church parlors. In 1896, Susy Clemens, Mark Twain and Olivia Langdon’s eldest daughter, died of spinal meningitis. Annis and Beecher co-officiated the funeral, marking the first recorded meeting between Annis Eastman and Mark Twain. In 1900, Beecher passed away, having designated the Eastmans as his successors.

During her tenure, Annis continued to publish articles in nationally famous journals. In 1903, she attended a summer school session at Harvard studying contemporary philosophy with peers such as William James, Josiah Royce, and George Santayana. This summer class influenced her decision to change the Park Church from Congregationalist to Unitarian. Though this was largely Annis’ decision, it had to be delivered through Sam in 1906 as “they would never take it from a woman.”^[3]

The Eastmans began summering on Seneca Lake in New York’s Finger Lakes region during their tenure at the Park Church. In 1901, Samuel built a cottage on a ten-acre plot on the lake which he called Cherith Cottage. Many of Elmira’s notable families bought property adjacent to the Eastmans’; this association became known as the Glenora Community. All costs and chores were shared communally, as organized by Annis. Other than enjoying the lake and the upstate scenery, those who stayed with the Glenora Community were there to engage intellectually with the residents. When it came to Sunday sermons, Annis would almost exclusively read secular literature and, if the mood struck her, she would let Max “preach” instead.

In April 1910, Mark Twain died and was buried in Elmira’s Woodlawn Cemetery. As the pastor of the church Twain attended in Elmira, Annis was responsible for writing and delivering Twain’s eulogy. Annis was able to finish writing it but could not deliver it due to a brief illness. The same year, she began seeing the United States’ first psychotherapist, Dr. Abraham Brill, and was asked to become the dean of Barnard College, an all-woman’s liberal arts branch of Columbia University. However, she was never able to fully accept the offer.

In early October 1910, Annis suffered an unexpected stroke and was found by her husband clinging to a bedpost. Max and Crystal rushed to Elmira to see their mother in the days before her passing, though Annis never regained consciousness after the stroke. On October 22, 1910, Annis Ford Eastman passed away at 11:50 AM in her house in Elmira. She was fifty-eight years old. Other than her husband and three living children, she was survived by two sisters, both of whom had moved to California. Her body was cremated and her ashes were spread in Canandaigua, New York.

^[1] Annis Ford Eastman, “Glimpse of a Woman’s Pastoral Experience,” Congregationalist and Christian World 89, no. 9 (1904): 296.

^[2] Geoffrey N. Pollick, “Biographical Sketch of Annis Ford Eastman,” Alexander Street, accessed 10 April 2024, https://documents.alexanderstreet.com/d/1010922380.

^[3] Annis Ford Eastman to Max Eastman in Enjoyment of Living, (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1948), 277.

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SUGGESTED READINGS

Eastman, Annis Ford. “The Home and Its Foundations.” In The Congress of Women: Held in the Woman’s Building, World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, U.S.A., 1893, With Portraits, Biographies, and Addresses, edited by Mary Kavanaugh Oldham Eagle, 612-615. Chicago: Monarch Book Company, 1894.

Eastman, Annis Ford. “The Minister’s Helpmeet.” The Independent… Devoted to the Consideration of Politics, Social and Economic Tendencies, History, Literature, and the Arts 30, no. 2482 (1896): 5-6.

Eastman, Max. Enjoyment of Living. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1948.

Evans, Christopher H. The Social Gospel in American Religion: A History. New York: New York University Press, 2017.

Glenn, Myra C. Thomas K. Beecher: Minister to a Changing America 1824-1900. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1996.

Reddick, Louise. “‘Hitched to a Steam Engine’: Marriage and Crises of Gender at Park Church in Nineteenth-Century Elmira, New York” Masters Thesis, William and Mary, 2002.

Seybold, Matt. “150 Years of Mark Twain in Elmira: Dickens Holidays, The Gospel of Revolt, & The Quarry Farm Style” Center For Mark Twain Studies (September 19, 2018)