Series 5 - Mary Jane Hill Anderson memoir

41pp

This copy of the autobiography was received by Kerby A. Miller from the Minnesota Historical Society.

[This memoir contains outdated attitudes or language that does not reflect the current views or positions of the University of Galway Library. Reader discretion is advised.]
Photocopy of the Mary Jane Hill Anderson memoir. Mary Jane Hill Anderson was born in 1827 in Bailieborough, County Cavan into a Church of Ireland family and emigrated from Liverpool, arriving in New Orleans, in 1850. Anderson married in Ireland in 1850 and emigrated that same year, eventually travelling up the Mississippi and settling in Minnesota. She wrote her memoir, Autobiography of Mary Jane Hill Anderson, Wife of Robert Anderson at the age of 95 in 1922. A number of Anderson relatives followed from Ireland to Minnesota and all lived nearby at Anderson Lake in the early 1850s. The memoir also details the first school house in the area built on a nearby farm, encounters with local Indigenous populations, log cabin building, land acquisition, homesteading in Minnesota, the Battle of Shakopee and the Dakota War of 1862, religion in the area, the American Civil War, amongst other aspects of Anderson's own life.

The reference copy of Anderson's memoir and Miller's research related to Anderson, her family, and Eden Prairie, Minnesota are located in P155/10/1.