Civil War Quilts: November 2025

Wednesday, November 12, 2025

Petticoat Press #11: Herald Square for Mary Clemmer Ames

Petticoat Press #11: Herald Square for Mary Clemmer Ames

by Jeanne Arnieri

Mary Estella Clemmer Ames Hudson (1831-1884)

Mary Estella Clemmer was born in New York and grew up in Massachusetts. At 17 she married Presbyterian minister Daniel Ames who was dispatched to Winona, Minnesota.

Herald Square by Becky Brown

When Civil War commenced Daniel became a chaplain and Mary accompanied him to Harper's Ferry, (West) Virginia in 1862. Mary published an account of the Battle of Maryland Heights, also called the Battle of Harper's Ferry, which surprised her at her door one morning.

"We were eating our breakfast in a comfortable home on Camp Hill on Saturday morning, the 13th of September, when we heard the quick, cruel ring of musketry cutting the air. We ran out upon the hill in the rear of the house overlooking the village below, London Heights [Loudoun Heights, the second highest mountain overlooking Harpers Ferry], the Shenandoah, the Potomac, the Heights of Maryland, a vast green precipitous wall, on the opposite shore. [Stonewall] Jackson had come."

View of the Potomac River from Maryland Heights

Confederate General Thomas Jonathan

"Stonewall " Jackson (1824–1863)

"We knew the foe was advancing; we heard his hellish war cry; we heard Dixie shrieked by thousands of barefooted fiends."

Alta California, October, 1862

Her account of the battle, “The Battle of Harper’s Ferry As a Woman Saw It,” was published in The New York Evening Post on September 26, 1862 and widely copied afterwards...and embroidered upon over the years as in this drawing of her in heart of battle.

Herald Square by Denniele Bohannon

Mary relocated to Washington where like so many other women she tended to ill soldiers in her spare time and despaired of Union victory. Was she living with Ames at the time? She was certainly unhappy in her marriage and in her outlook in those years.

The Cary Sisters

The happiest days during her marriage were recalled as those she spent in New York as a guest of Phoebe and Alice Cary, sister poets.

Her second husband's memorial to her after her death

included an 1863 letter to her friends Representative

Justin Morrill and his wife Ruth Swan Morrill.

After the war she began a regular column for the New York Independent titled "A Woman's Letter from Washington," later collected in a book Ten Years in Washington.

As was expected of "A Woman's Letter" her columns were full of fashion and gossip but she addressed politics as well.

Like many she was not a fan of Mary Todd Lincoln.

Read it here:

https://books.google.com/books?id=0EAIGA6XQ-4C&printsec=frontcover&dq=ten+years+washington+clemmer+ames&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwizt4KW39WEAxUVmIkEHaAgDoUQ6AF6BAgMEAI#v=onepage&q=ten%20years%20washington%20clemmer%20ames&f=true

In 1874 Daniel Ames divorced her in West Virginia.

She'd been earning her own living through journalism for years.

Mary Clemmer Ames became Mary Clemmer again.

She lived with her parents at 134 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington when the 1880 census taker came to call. Nine years after her divorce she married Edmund Hudson Washington, editor of The Army & Navy Register. He was said to be well-known but little about him appears in the records. They married in 1883 and she died the following year, of a cerebral hemorrhage (a stroke). Edmund thought it the result of hitting her head in a carriage accident, but she had been complaining about painful headaches for a while before the accident. Mary Clemmer died at 53 in August, 1884.