Her father, Samuel Bent, was a manufacturer previously of Mass., and the old church at Holden still stands in which her grandfather, Joseph Avery, ministered as pastor for the long period of fifty years.

Mrs. Blanchard's life-work began very early. Consecrating herself in childhood to the Master, she had only reached the age of 12 when she helped form a Christian's temperance society, and she has shared in every movement since, against the rum power as far as duties would permit.

At the age of sixteen, she set out from her home for the then distant state of Penn. where for two years she taught with such success that when she determined the following year to go south with the family of an Episcopal Clergyman with whom she had boarded, the Board of Education at Harrisburg were glad to secure her sister in her place.

After teaching one year in Alabama she returned to New England, but only to leave it for the trying position of the pastor's wife of an anti-Slavery church in the city of Cincinnati, just across from a slave state and almost in sight of auction block and slave gangs, as they were sent down the river.

Here as in the different causes of reform in which her heart was afterward engaged, she showed the same Christian fortitude, willing to suffer affliction with the despised Abolitionists, rather than enjoy the popularity of a religion consistent with or silent in the presence of injustice and crime.

In 1847 her work as president's wife at Knox College began and many who shared then or later in this place her motherly care and Christian counsel are working for the Master now.Enroute for California, where we hoped her failing health might be benefited by the mild climate and a visit to a long absent daughter,the summons came and with the name of that Savior on her lips in whose service her life had been spent, she passed into the skys.

"Oh friends of mortal years,
The trusted and the true;
Ye are watching still in the valley of
years,But I wait to welcome you.
Do I forget? O no!
For Memory's Golden chain
Shall bind my heart to the hearts
below
Till they meet to touch again.
Do you mourn where another star
Shines out from the glittering sky?
Do you weep when the raging voice
of war,
And the storms of conflict die?
Then why should your tears run
down,
And your hearts be sorely riven.
For another gem in the Saviour's
crown,
And another soul in heaven!"

Mary Avery Bent was one of 10 children. She married Jonathan Blanchard on Sep 17, 1838 at her home in Middlebury, Vermont. They had 12 children. Only 9 of their children lived to adulthood.