Mary Ann Nelmes

1830s–1850s

Born 5 August 1839 in Burford Township, Upper Canada. Grew up alongside her future husband, Isaac Kipp.

1860s

Traveled west by way of Panama to marry Isaac in New Westminster in March 1865. One of the first white women in the Chilliwack valley, she was also its only source of medical care for years.

1870s–1890s

Served as midwife and nurse across the valley. Elected a school trustee in 1895, then ruled ineligible because she was a woman.

1900s–1910s

Traveled to California and Ontario, celebrated her golden wedding in 1915, and nursed two dying daughters at home.

1920s–1930s

Widowed in 1921. Celebrated her ninetieth birthday in 1929 and died at home in Chilliwack on 10 May 1931.

A Childhood Sweetheart in Ontario

Mary Ann Nelmes was born on August 5, 1839, in Burford Township, Brant County, Ontario (some records say Woodstock), the daughter of William Nelems and Eliza Jane Gay. The family started out in a one-room farmhouse sixteen by twenty-two feet, later lived in a log cabin north of the stage road in Burford, and by 1861 had a two-story frame house in East Oxford Township. Mary Ann helped her mother sew the family's clothes: flannel or cotton dresses for the girls and full cloth suits for the boys. She went to school with Isaac Kipp and had known him since they were both babies, since their families were neighbors. Isaac asked her to marry him before he went west, but her father insisted she wait until she was twenty-five.

The Journey West

In late January 1865, some five months after her twenty-fifth birthday, Mary Ann left her parents' home in Oxford County to marry "her old sweetheart" on the far side of the continent. Her brother went with her as far as New York. From there she sailed to Aspinwall, Panama; with the Civil War still on, her ship was escorted by an armed steamer and carried twenty-six soldiers. She crossed the isthmus by rail and mule train, sailed to San Francisco, spent a few days there, and went on by ship to Victoria, about thirty-two days in all. The Fraser was frozen when she arrived, so she had to wait at Victoria until the ice broke. She finally reached New Westminster by river steamer and married Isaac there on March 22, 1865, the day after she arrived.

She brought a small, practical frontier kit with her: a six-candle mould, tomato seeds, a dinner set, a kitchen table (her daughter Jenny still had it in 1940), several white homespun blankets (which she later gave to her daughters as they married), and a medicine chest, a gift from the doctor who had taught her, with five medical books inside. Family stories also say she brought her piano the whole way. The day after the wedding the couple reached Chilliwack aboard the steamer Onward. There was snow on the ground, and a wagon met the boat with planks laid across its bed for seats.

Frontier Life

In those first years Mary Ann sometimes went seven months at a stretch without seeing another white woman. Apart from Mrs. D. W. Miller, who had arrived at Sumas a few months earlier, she was the first in the district. Indigenous women would crowd around her log cabin to watch her through the windows. In time she made friends with a young Indigenous woman and taught her English while learning Chinook in return, and when her own babies came, an Indigenous friend served as her midwife. Her first, Mary Jane, arrived in 1866 and was said to be the first child of European descent born in the Fraser Valley; people came from all around to see the pale baby.

Her Chinook came in handy around 1870, when Isaac's brother Henry brought his new bride, Caroline, to live with them while his own house was being built. One day the two women were sitting in the parlor when the room suddenly went dark: the windows were full of First Nations people peering in. Caroline, raised on Ontario fears of Indigenous attacks, was terrified. Mary Ann calmed her, went out, and spoke with the visitors, who turned out to have brought two or three wheelbarrow-loads of gifts to welcome the newly married Caroline. Caroline was still anxious to get back inside.

Frontier housekeeping meant making everything. Mary Ann sewed the family's clothes by hand from cloth Isaac brought back from New Westminster, and to get to church at Atchelitz the family rode part of the way by wagon and paddled the rest by canoe, since there were no bridges. Each September she took butter to Victoria in hundred-pound tubs to pay for the Christmas flour, sugar, raisins, and currants. She fried lard for shortening, made candles from the tallow and soap from the fat that was left, and on Christmas Eve fried a milk pail full of doughnuts before she went to bed.

The Valley's Doctor

For the valley's first fourteen years, until 1879, there was no doctor any closer than New Westminster. Mary Ann had studied the basic principles of medicine under a Dr. Black (or Blake) before she left Ontario, taking a two-month course in its fundamentals and studying Latin, so the sick and injured came to her, settlers and Indigenous people alike. She rode out on horseback at all hours, often leaving at night; if she still had a baby at the breast, her oldest son would bring it to her on horseback in the morning to be fed. Her remedies were those of her day: beef, iron and wine tonic, blue mass pills, calamine, Epsom salts, cayenne pepper, sulfur and molasses, and a chest rub of goose grease saved from the family's Christmas goose, mixed with turpentine and olive oil. She delivered nieces and nephews through the 1870s and grandchildren into the 1890s.

Soon after Mary Jane was born, a group of Indigenous visitors came to the house, and one man stayed outside on the woodpile. A horse had bitten his hand, and it was infected. With the chief's permission Mary Ann washed it with warm water and carbolic, bound it in a cloth spread with a heated salve of mutton tallow and resin that she kept for cuts and splinters, and told him to come back in three or four days. When he finally returned after six she feared the worst, but the hand was healing, and after a few more dressings the pain was nearly gone, though one muscle stayed stiff. Her own children got the same care. Around 1871 a hired boy named Sam left little Jenny alone in the hayloft and she fell to the barn floor, breaking her nose. With the nearest doctor still at New Westminster, Mary Ann set it herself, and she said the tip of Jenny's nose always turned a little to the left afterward.

One of her patients was Sammit, an Indigenous friend of the Kipps who was shot at by men from Fort Douglas while he was out in his canoe. He dove overboard and hid behind the canoe, but a bullet shattered his hand. He managed to drift away from his attackers and came to Mary Ann, who amputated the ruined fingers and stitched the wound. Her obituary said that she "quietly, modestly, but most efficiently went from home to home bringing comfort and ease of mind and body to many afflicted." For her own ailments she was less keen on doctors. She had bad gallstones as a young woman but never had surgery, and she swore by blue mass pills followed by calomel.

Hostess, Churchwoman, and Would-Be Trustee

The Kipp house was the valley's gathering place. In the early years winter travelers to and from the Cariboo stopped there because there was nowhere else, among them Judge Matthew Begbie, Judge Walkem, "cattle king" Jerome Harper, and Captain "Gassy" Jack Deighton. The valley's first Methodist service was held in her home in June 1865, and in the 1890s the Methodist Ladies' Aid held its parlor socials and Easter Monday "at homes" there. A reporter wrote in 1897 that the Kipps "thoroughly understood the art of making everybody feel 'at home' in the best sense of the word." Mary Ann served on the Ladies' Aid committee, was a delegate to the Women's Christian Temperance Union convention in 1900, held office in the Rebekah lodge, and won prizes at the Chilliwack fair for her quilts and embroidery.

In June 1895 the ratepayers elected her a trustee of the Chilliwack school. She had 47 votes to her nearest rival's 28, but it was then ruled that women could not serve as trustees in rural districts, and she resigned a little over two weeks later. In 1907 she performed statute labor, the road work each landowner owed the municipality. At the 1910 pioneers' banquet a speaker credited her and Mrs. A. C. Wells with being a good influence on the valley and doing well at keeping its young people straight. She was known as "the First Lady of the Land," "the Valley Queen," and "Mother of the Valley." Family members remembered a strong-minded woman whose word was usually final, and whose voice was soft and low and never rose above a certain volume.

Travels and Golden Years

Mary Ann made several trips back to Ontario, and in 1887 her father came back with her for a visit. In 1906 she spent several months in Elk Grove, California, for her health, and in 1913 she and Isaac toured some 500 miles of Vancouver Island by car before spending the winter in Southern California, where they drove down to Tijuana during the Mexican Revolution. She came home with pneumonia in the spring of 1914, when she was the oldest resident of Chilliwack, and after a relapse she pulled through.

Those years also brought grief. In 1904 she drove her granddaughters Gladys and Frankie by horse and buggy to the funeral of their other grandmother, Anne Jane McConnell. She nursed her daughter Nellie through her last illness in 1914 and her daughter Gertie in 1918, both in her own home, and Gertie's funeral was held at the Kipp house. There were happier days too. On March 22, 1915, she and Isaac celebrated their golden wedding with an afternoon open house decorated in daffodils and jonquils. They had asked for no presents. Their granddaughter Irene Knight sang "Silver Threads Among the Gold," the Methodist church board brought fifty roses and carnations, and the mayor came with his own letter of congratulations. In 1919 the couple were invited to meet the Prince of Wales in Victoria with other old settlers, but they arrived late and had to settle for seats near him in the stadium.

Her Final Years

After Isaac died in May 1921, Mary Ann, in the words of a contemporary account, "lived very quietly, content with her garden and her home, but interested in all that was going on around and oftimes contrasting the modern way with the way of her youth." She celebrated her ninetieth birthday in August 1929 at the Sardis home of her late daughter Gertrude's family, with a cake bearing eighteen candles, one for every five years. When she fell seriously ill around that time, her bed was moved into the parlor alongside one for her nurse, Miss Denham. Later her granddaughter Frankie, just finishing her own nurse's training, took over. Mary Ann kept a glass of water with a little brandy in it by her bed at night, and even as a patient she told Frankie to wake her if Frankie needed anything.

Her grandson Oliver Wells remembered that "Mrs. Kipp's home was known for its hospitality, and her service to the community extended into every home where there was need or suffering." She died at home on Wellington Avenue in Chilliwack on May 10, 1931, at the age of ninety-one. Her medicine book passed down to her great-grandson Ray Lobb, who became a doctor himself.