Sweet Americana Sweethearts: Martha Maxwell

Wednesday, June 18, 2025

They Preserved the Past

MARTHA MAXWELL - CHARLES E.H. AIKEN

Post by Doris McCraw
writing as Angela Raines

Photo property of the author

In the late 1880s and early 1900s, a fascination with nature was prevalent, particularly among those in the eastern United States. The Audubon Society and the Sierra Club were two of the organizations that have endured, although others existed prior to and after them, as mentioned above. Taxidermy was a means of studying the animals and birds, allowing others to observe them in museums and exhibits.

Both Aiken and Maxwell were taxidermists. Aiken focused on birds and Maxwell on wild animals. They both collected their own specimens, and both were in Colorado. Aiken in Colorado Springs and Maxwell in Boulder.

Charles Edward Howard Aiken was born on September 7, 1850, in Vermont. The family later moved to Illinois. It was there at the age of eighteen that Aiken began his study of birds. After the family business was destroyed in the Chicago Fire of 1871, they moved to Colorado Springs. Charles continued his study of birds, using the standard method of study by killing them. Aiken went a further step and stuffed and mounted them. He had a music store and museum on Pikes Peak Avenue in Colorado Springs. His collection from his years in Colorado Springs was donated to Colorado College. The Aiken Audubon Society is named for him. For more information: https://libraryweb.coloradocollege.edu/library/specialcollections/Manuscript/Aiken.html You can also access his book "Birds of El Paso County, Colorado" here: https://archive.org/details/birdselpasocoun00unkngoog/page/n64/mode/2up

Charles Aiken died in January 1936.

Charles Edward H Aiken (1850-1936) - Find A Grave Memorial

Charles Edward Howard Aiken

Martha Dartt Maxwell was born on July 31. 1831 in Pennsylvania. According to the information included when she was inducted into the Colorado Women's Hall of Fame, she was five feet tall and a lifelong vegetarian. She and her husband arrived in Colorado around 1863, and she ran a restaurant in the Boulder area. When her mother was ailing, she went to Wisconsin to care for her. Here, the story gets a bit cloudy. Some say she became interested in taxidermy while in Wisconsin, but other sources claim it was when she drove a taxidermist off her property that she developed an interest. Regardless, by 1868, she had opened a museum in Boulder, showcasing her panoramas of animals she had caught, skinned, and stuffed. Helen (Hunt) Jackson was so impressed that she wrote an article that appeared in publications on the East Coast. If you would like to read her book "On the Plaines, and Among the Peaks, of How Mrs. Maxwell Made Her Natural History Collection," you can access it here on Google Books: https://www.google.com/books/edition/On_the_Plains_and_Among_the_Peaks/ePpGAQAAMAAJ?kptab=editions&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiL9b2wn63pAhUPCs0KHW9PDK0QmBYwAHoECAEQBw

Martha Maxwell died on May 30, 1881, in Massachusetts. For more on Martha:https://americacomesalive.com/2014/04/05/martha-ann-maxwell-1831-1881-naturalist-taxidermist/

Marth Dartt Maxwell

As I continue researching early Colorado and its residents for my upcoming National Park Brides book, the deeper I delve. This post is a revised version of earlier research.

Until next time

Doris

Angela Raines - Amazon

Doris A. McCraw - Amazon

Wednesday, March 19, 2025

National Women's History Month - Colorado Women

Post by Doris McCraw

aka Angela Raines

Buffalo Peaks in Colorado
from Wikipedia

March is National Women's History Month. As most of you know, I am fascinated by and have researched a lot about the early women in this county, especially those who were part of the westward expansion west of the Mississippi River. This is in no way a discount to those women who came to this country in the 1600s and 1700s. All women and men who had the courage to make something of their lives and create what we now have deserve to be remembered.

Here is a brief look at some of those early women in Colorado.

1. Martha Maxwell - Naturalist: Martha Ann Maxwell was born in Pennsylvania in 1831. She married widower James Maxwell, who had four children, in 1853. The couple moved to Colorado following the gold rush of 1859. It was while here that Martha began killing and stuffing her own animals. Her work was so lifelike, and her practice of posing them in their natural habitat was unique. Prior to her death in 1881, she wrote the book: "On the Plains and Among the Peaks or How Mrs. Maxwell Made Her Natural History Collection."

Martha Maxwell
Wikipedia

2. Mary Florence Lathrop - Newspaper Reporter, Lawyer: Born in Pennsylvania in 1865, she began her first career as a reporter in Philadelphia. She traveled the world as a reported, and after contracting tuberculous, she moved to Denver, Colorado. There, she attended the University of Denver, where she studied law and graduated in 1896. Her scores for the bar exam remained the highest for the Colorado Bar until 1941. She argued cases in front of the Colorado and US Supreme Courts. She was one of the first two women to be admitted to the American Bar Association in 1917.

Florence Mary Lathrop
Wikipedia

3. Dr. Rose Kidd Beere - Physician: Dr. Beere was born in Indiana in 1859. Her father was a military man stationed in the West after the War Between the States. She married Edmund Burke Beere, an attorney in Las Cruces, NM, in 1883 and had three sons. After the death of her husband, Dr. Beere moved to Chicago, where she studied medicine at Women's Medical College at Northwestern University in Chicago. She graduated in 1892 and moved to Durango, CO., where she practiced prior to moving to Denver. During the Spanish-American War, she went to Manilla with the Red Cross as a nurse since they wouldn't let her go as a doctor. She had told her father since he had no sons to serve in the military, she would go as the family representative in that conflict.

Dr. Rose Kidd Beere
from Find a Grave

4. Marie Guiraud - Rancher: Born in France in 1830, she moved to Colorado via Louisanna, Ohio, and Kansas in 1862. She and her husband homesteaded in Park County, Colorado, in addition to Adolphe running a store in a nearby town. After Adolphe's death in 1875, Marie grew the 640 acres into one of the earliest ranches in Park County. In her obituary in the Fairplay Flume, on June 11, 1909, they wrote the following: "After her husband's death, with a large family of little children and heavy financial reverses, she struggled on and not only kept their property together but prospered well, added to their possessions and accumulated and estate very nearly as great, if not equal, of the largest estate ever built up in Park County."