The Washburn daughters had no claim to beauty; they were plain girls and Mary was plainest of all. As a child her special playmate was her brother Sammy. She was desolate when he went to sea, first shipping as a foremast hand on a coastwise schooner, and later sailing the Boston to Liverpool and Boston to New Orleans routes as second mate. Mary shared the feelings expressed by her sister:
“Samuel has become a sailor boy. Feel rather unpleasant that he should choose such a course, not that it is not honorable, but that ’tis a hard, perilous life. I hope he will get enough of it this voyage and will feel willing.” Later she wrote, “We shall expect Sammy the sailor in a few days. He is on his way from London to Boston. No one can tell how much we want to see him.”
When she was twenty, Mary went to Orono for a lengthy visit with Israel, Jr. and his wife. Even then she was concerned with her imagined lack of appeal to the opposite sex. Sister Martha’s remarks in a letter to Cadwallader seem unkind, even catty. “Our worthy sister Mary is now at Orono where she has been with her adorable brother, as she terms him, for a long time. When she will return is more than I know, probably this fall, if she gets a beau, for she proclaimed to all far and near before she left that she would not return ’til she did. You know what a queer thing she is.”
Mary did get a beau—a young adventurous carpenter named Gustavus Buffum. The romance was interrupted by the discovery of gold in California. Gustavus joined a group of prospectors and sailed around the Horn, but before he left he slipped an engagement ring on Mary’s finger. She promised to wait, never once dreaming how much time would pass before she saw him again. For eight long years she waited spending much of her time with Israel and his wife in Orono. Often in winter, she visited them in Washington where Israel, a dedicated anti-slavery Congressman, was involved in organizing a new political party.
Finally, after what seemed an eternity, Gustavus returned from the West, and in March 1858 he and Mary were married at the Washburn family home in Livermore. In her trousseau was a formal dress, made of rose brocaded material which Gustavus had brought from California to his bride. Their first home was in Monroe, Wisconsin, where a son Frank was born. Later they moved to Lyons, Iowa where Ada Mary and Charles Gustavus were born.
Mary yearned for a sight of her old home so she made the long trip to Livermore with her three little children in late summer of 1866. She found many changes – her mother was dead; her aged father was nearly blind. Brother Algernon Sidney, head of a Hallowell bank, was grieving over the recent loss of his wife and two sons. Israel, Jr. and his family were living in Portland where he was Collector of Customs.
Returning to Iowa, Mary wrote to her father about the poor condition of the crops and the destruction caused by potato bugs which were “everywhere outdoors and in the house, even in the beds.” The next spring Algernon Sidney received a letter from Gustavus Buffum announcing that Mary had “presented him a pair of boys” and that “twins and mother were doing well.” However, all was not well. Mary died ten days after her twins were born, and both babies died in September. Poor Mary—dead at forty-one! Her life was less than half as long as the lives of her sisters, but Mary, alone of the three, has living descendants—a special kind of immortality.
