Mary Osmond was born near Philadelphia in 1843. Her family moved to Iowa when she was four years old. She lived the life of frontier people, all poor people and all working hard. There was little of primitive farm work that she did not learn. In her girlhood she was blessed by having access to books and the best magazines and newspapers; she read everything, educating herself in a large measure that way, being possessed of a vigorous mind and an insatiable desire to learn.
She attended the Southwestern Normal School at Lebanon, Ohio for several months and began teaching school. For several years she taught in the country schools, then in the graded schools of Osceola and Murray. She was a remarkably successful teacher and was elected on the Republican ticket as County Superintendent of Schools in Clarke County holding that office for two years being the first woman to hold the office in the county and one of the first in the state.
Mary had a distinct personality. There was none other just like her. Her character was of that rugged strong pioneer type, frank and open and honest, and yet by a strange paradox she was sensitive in the extreme, and never willingly by word or deed brought injury to another. She had a particularly rugged mind and always reasoned through a problem to its conclusion and having come to a conclusion, she held it.
At the end of her term of office as Superintendent she decided to take up newspaper work as a vocation and became associate editor of the Osceola Sentinel, then, for 15 months from 1889 to 1891 was sole owner and editor of the Osceola Gazette, a paper she started herself. After the demise of the Gazette she again edited and was half owner of the Sentinel. Mary was a practical newspaper woman with a knowledge far beyond the average man in the business.
For three years she was editor of the paper, which was strongly Republicans in its policy. She joined the P.E.O. sisterhood in 1891 and was editor of the P.E.O. Record for eighteen years.
During her tenure as editor Greenbackism flourished and Kelsey’s Army paraded through Osceola on its way to Washington. Coxey’s Army was in the east.
Selling her half of the paper to Mr. Guches in January of 1894 Mary assisted editors of Osceola newspapers. She was a writer of much prominence, having articles and stories in the best periodicals. She wrote under the pen name of “Marmon”.
She had a robust personality and without being particularly militant she was an ardent worker for woman suffrage and at one time adopted the bloomer costume representative of that group. Her independence and self-possession as she strode about her business in this attire successfully defied ridicule. Her tax payments were always accompanied by written protests against taxation without representation.
She was a member of the Christian Church for sixty three years. For years she believed sincerely in equal suffrage. She was born of a family of abolitionists and war haters, her father’s farm near Hopeville being one of the main stations of the “underground railway.”
One hundred years ago Mary cast the first vote that was ever cast in a general election by a woman in Clarke County. She died February 27, 1921 and is buried in the cemetery at Hopeville, Iowa.