Mary Gardiner Horsford

Mary Gardiner Horsford, born Mary L'Hommedieu Gardiner on September 27, 1824, in New York City, was an American poet and the wife of chemist Eben Norton Horsford. Her parents were Samuel Smith Gardiner and Catherine L'Hommedieu. She was a descendant of Lion Gardiner and a cousin of Julia Gardiner Tyler.

In 1840, Gardiner began a three-year course of study at the Albany Female Academy. During her time there, she met Eben Norton Horsford, who was serving as a teacher. Her father expressed concerns about Horsford’s financial prospects, leading to a delay in marriage permission until Horsford secured the Rumford Chair of Physics. Mary and Eben Horsford married on August 4, 1847. Their residence was at Sylvester Manor, a property that had inherited through her mother’s family.

Gardiner’s career as a poet commenced during her youth and continued throughout her marriage. She contributed poetry to periodicals such as The Knickerbocker and Godey's Lady's Book. Notably, her poem “My Native Isle,” which honors Shelter Island, New York, where she had long resided, was included in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's anthology titled “Poems of Places.” In 1855, she published a collection titled "Indian Legends and Other Poems," which received favorable reviews from critics and publications. Godey's Lady's Book described it as a “volume of pearls from the heart-fountain of one of our sweetest American poetesses.” The North American Review commended her “grace and style and flowing versification,” highlighting the earnestness and Christian sentiment expressed in her work. However, retrospective criticism has noted that her poetry often employed familiar stereotypes, both horrific and romantic, reflecting and tacitly endorsing ideological themes such as manifest destiny.

Mary Gardiner Horsford and Eben Horsford had four daughters: Lilian, Mary Katherine, Gertrude Hubbard (who married Andrew Fiske), and Mary Gardiner (who married Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Robbins Curtis). In the fall of 1855, shortly after the birth of her youngest daughter, she contracted a cold that developed into tetanus, commonly known as lockjaw. She died on November 25, 1855, at the age of 31.

Her death was noted in contemporary reviews; the North American Review remarked that her sudden passing endowed her poetry with “a new and melancholy significance.” The Boston Transcript eulogized her, commending her poems for their “easy and correct versification” and “simple but beautiful imagery.”

Following her death, in 1857, Eben Norton Horsford married her sister, Phoebe Dayton Gardiner. The couple had one daughter named Cornelia Horsford.