Mary Ann Nelmes

Born August 5, 1839, in Burford Township, 122/Woodstock, Brant County, Ontario, Canada. She married March 22, 1865, in New Westminster, British Columbia, Canada and worked as mary ann owned a farm. She died May 10, 1931, at home on Wellington Avenue in Chilliwack, British Columbia, Canada.

A Childhood Sweetheart in Ontario

Mary Ann Nelmes was born on August 5, 1839, in Burford Township, Brant County, Ontario, and grew up on her family's farm helping her mother sew the family's clothes — flannel and cotton dresses for the girls, full cloth suits for the boys. She had known her future husband, Isaac Kipp, since they were both babies, as their families were neighbors, but her father insisted she wait until she was twenty-five to marry him. In late January 1865 she finally left her parents' home in Oxford County to travel alone to British Columbia to marry her “old sweetheart.” Her brother accompanied her as far as New York, and family memory holds that she brought her piano the entire way.

The Journey West

Mary Ann's journey to Isaac took about thirty-two days: by steamboat from New York to Panama — escorted by an armed steamer and twenty-six soldiers because the Civil War was still underway — across the isthmus by rail and mule train, then by sea again to San Francisco and north to Victoria. She found the Fraser River frozen and was stranded in Victoria until a thaw allowed her to continue by river steamer to New Westminster, where she and Isaac were married on March 22, 1865, the day after her arrival. They reached Chilliwack the next day aboard the steamer Onward, with snow still on the ground, and were met by a wagon whose passengers rode on planks laid across its bed.

Frontier Life and Medicine

For years Mary Ann went as long as seven months at a stretch without seeing another white woman; she was, apart from one other settler's wife, the first white woman in the Chilliwack valley, and local Indigenous women would crowd around her log cabin windows to watch her. She became friends with a young Indigenous woman who taught her Chinook Jargon while Mary Ann taught her English — a skill that later let her calm her sister-in-law Caroline, who was terrified when a group of Indigenous visitors filled the windows of the Kipp parlor bearing gifts to welcome the newly married Caroline to the valley. In 1866 Mary Ann gave birth to her daughter Mary Jane, said to be the first child of European descent born in the Fraser Valley, drawing Indigenous visitors from the surrounding area curious to see the pale infant. With no doctor closer than New Westminster for the valley's first fourteen years, Mary Ann — who had studied basic medicine under a doctor back in Ontario and carried a medicine chest and five medical texts west with her — became the settlement's de facto physician and midwife, riding out on horseback at all hours to treat the sick and injured, delivering nieces, nephews, and grandchildren over four decades, and once amputating and stitching the shattered fingers of a Fraser Douglas man named Sammit after he survived a shooting. Her obituary later said she “quietly, modestly, but most efficiently went from home to home bringing comfort and ease of mind and body to many afflicted.”

The Valley Queen

The Kipps' home on the Fraser Valley Trail became a fixture of Chilliwack life: in the early years it was the finest habitation in the settlement, and winter travelers heading to and from the Cariboo goldfields — including two of British Columbia's early chief justices — regularly stayed the night. Mary Ann was active in the Methodist church from its first service, held in her own home in 1865, was a prizewinning quilter and needleworker at the Chilliwack Fair, served as a delegate to the Women's Christian Temperance Union, and in 1895 was elected a school trustee with the most votes of any candidate — only to have the result overturned because women were then ineligible to serve in rural districts. Known in later years as “the Valley Queen” and “Mother of the Valley,” she and Isaac traveled widely in retirement, wintering in California, driving five hundred miles around Vancouver Island, and touring Southern California by car and train. She helped nurse two of her dying daughters, Nellie and Gertie, in her own home, and in 1915 she and Isaac celebrated their golden wedding anniversary with an open house decorated in daffodils, at which the Methodist church presented them a bouquet of fifty roses and carnations and the town's mayor delivered his own letter of congratulations.

Her Final Years

After Isaac's death around 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 1929 with a cake bearing eighteen candles, one for every five years, and was cared for in her final illness first by a hired nurse and then by her own granddaughter Frankie, freshly trained as a nurse. 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.” Mary Ann died at her home on Wellington Avenue in Chilliwack on May 10, 1931, at the age of ninety-one.