Abby Howland and J.S. and Georgeanne Woolsey

• Georgeanna Muirson Woolsey Bacon
• Born: November 5, 1833
• Died: January 27, 1906

Civil War relief and hospital workers and postwar hospital, educational, and charity activists, were the eldest, second, and fourth daughters, respectively, of Charles William Woolsey and Jane Eliza (Newton) Woolsey. Their sisters were Mary Elizabeth Watts, Eliza Newton, Harriet Roosevelt, and Caroline Carson. A brother, Charles William, was the youngest child. Their father descended from George Woolsey who had emigrated from England to Dutch New Amsterdam early in the seventeenth century. Jane Eliza Woolsey was the daughter of William Newton, a merchant in Alexandria, Virginia; she descended from John Newton, who came from England to settle in Westmoreland County, Virginia, in 1660. Theodore Dwight Woolsey, president of Yale College from 1846 to 1871, was an uncle, and among their cousins were Sarah Chauncy Woolsey, who wrote children’s books under the pseudonym of “Susan Coolidge,” and William Henry Aspinwall, a New York merchant and philanthropist. Abby, Jane, and Georgeanna Woolsey were born into the kind of cultivated and elite northeastern family with colonial ancestry that often was animated by humanitarian and idealistic aspirations.

Abby was born in Alexandria, Virginia; Jane on shipboard between Norwich, Connecticut, and New York City; and Georgeanna in Brooklyn, New York. They grew up on fashionable Sheafe Street in Boston, and attended the Misses Murdock’s School. Their father headed a prosperous sugar-refining business in East Boston. He died by fire on a steamer in 1840, and the Woolseys moved to New York City, finally establishing themselves at 8 Brevoort Place. After attending the Rutgers Female Institute, Abby and Jane went to finishing school for a year at Pelham Priory in New Rochelle, New York (run by the Boltons, English friends of the family), and Georgeanna to the Misses Anable’s Young Ladies Seminary in Philadelphia; they all toured Europe at various times. While growing up they took private lessons in music and language, attended the Dutch Reformed church devotedly and, with an intellectually religious bent, attended classes at the Union Theological Seminary. With their artistic, intellectual, and developing political temperament, they took advantage of the city, reading Horace Greeley’s The New-York Tribune, listening to lectures by Wendell Phillips, and forming abolitionist sentiments (which led to support for the Republican presidential candidacy of John C. Fremont in 1856 and a sympathy for John Brown’s raid in 1859), attending salons where issues of politics and art intermingled, and making contact with the active feminist movement. Cultivation of upbringing, refinement, and the “finishing school” culture led, in the case of this deeply rooted American family, to engagement in social activism.

Abby Woolsey’s delicacy of perception led to revulsion when she witnessed a slave auction and the degradation of blacks on a beautiful spring day in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1859. Shortly before Fort Sumter fell she wrote to a southern cousin, indicating her intellectual grasp of the issues of the war and her ability to articulate them; if slavery, she said, “surrounded by a cordon of free states, like a girdled tree, dies, then it cannot have that inherent vitality which has been claimed for it.” Abolition of slavery became the main goal of the Civil War for Abby Woolsey.

All three sisters engaged themselves unremittingly in the Union war effort, in hospital, nursing, and relief activities. On April 25, 1861, Abby Woolsey met with other socially prominent women at Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell’s Infirmary, laying the groundwork for the Woman’s Central Association of Relief of New York, which prefigured and later became part of the United States Sanitary Commission. The Woolsey home quickly became a center for bandage making, sewing, and the collection of hospital equipment and was a point of dispatch for hospital goods to the battlefields. Abby Woolsey concerned herself with furnishing supplies for the duration of the war. Garnering information about hospital needs from other nurses, she often financed the purchase of shirts, socks, bolts of unbleached cotton, handkerchiefs, and other necessary material.

Selected by the Woman’s Central Association of Relief as one of a group of a hundred chosen for leadership potential, Georgeanna Woolsey undertook a month-long nursing training in New York. She and her sister Eliza went to Washington, D.C., after Eliza’s husband Joseph Howland had gone there with his New York Volunteers. Visiting soldiers and nursing them in hospitals, they became informal representatives of the Central Association, providing supplies and delicacies sent from home by families, friends, and societies. In Washington, Georgeanna Woolsey was to develop the acquaintance of Dorothea Dix, who active in the war effort. With her sister Eliza she also responded to the request of Dr. Blackwell to receive nurses arriving in Washington, help with the practical details necessary to locate them in productive work (such as obtaining passes and government ambulances), and then report on their services. Socially prominent and financially independent, the sisters were skilled at making their way through the chaos and bureaucratic barriers of the early war effort. It took some time for the virtues of organized nursing and the Sanitary Commission to be recognized officially. In early 1862 Georgeanna Woolsey began to work with Frederick Law Olmsted, then secretary of the Sanitary Commission, to introduce more planning into their work: the two sisters became “nurses at large” in a new hospital transport service. They helped in preparing hospital ships for service, returning in July to New York. And in September 1862 Georgeanna Woolsey began five months of work with her sister Jane in the United States General Hospital near Newport, Rhode Island. Having helped Abby Woolsey distribute supplies, nursed soldiers in New York hospitals, and worked at the United States General Hospital, Jane Woolsey went with Georgeamia to Hammond General Hospital at Point Lookout, Maryland and then to Fairfax Theological Seminary Hospital near Alexandria where she stayed until the end of the war.

After working with Jane Woolsey to direct the nursing and dietary departments at Fairfax, Georgeanna spent three weeks at Gettysburg in 1863, joining her mother in organizing help for wounded soldiers. Making it clear to the Sanitary Commission that she could be called to the front at any time, she spent time in 1864 setting up relief stations for soldiers wounded in the Wilderness battle; in June 1864 Georgeanna Woolsey returned to New York, where she helped organize an army hospital in New Jersey.

The three sisters worked well in pairs, but their closeness apparently supported their individuality and the ability of each to utilize her own talent. The literary products of their war experiences support the impression of sharply defined individuals working closely with each other. Georgeanna and Eliza Woolsey compiled the two-volume Letters of a Family During the War for the Union (1899). Shortly after Gettysburg, Georgeanna sought to arouse the “sewing circles” with her Three Weeks at Gettysburg, written for the Sanitary Commission. After the war, Jane Woolsey wrote her thoughtful, privately printed, Hospital Days (1868). Always frail of health, with an “illuminated face” and memorable eyes and smile, she wrote with an analytic bent reminiscent of her sister Abby (in her discussion of slavery before the war). Describing the experience that she and her sisters had undergone Jane Woolsey remarked sharply that “There never was any system. That the presence of hundreds of individual women as nurses in hospitals was neither an intrusion nor a blunder, let the multitude of their—unsystematized—labor and achievements testify. So far as I know, the experiment of a compact, general organization was never fairly tried.” All with a literary talent, the sisters differed in personality: Abby was apparently somewhat serious and melancholy, Georgeanna was sprightly with a sharp sense of humor.

After the war the three sisters continued their work primarily on an administrative basis. On June 7, 1866, Georgeanna Woolsey married Dr. Francis Bacon, Professor of Surgery at Yale Medical School, son of the antislavery preacher the Reverend Leonard Bacon and member of a socially prominent New Haven family. Together, Georgeanna Bacon and her husband helped found the Connecticut Training School for Nurses in the New Haven Hospital. Established in June 1873, this school was one of the first to be organized on the Nightingale plan, named for Florence Nightingale, the British nurse who instigated the reforms that led to the establishment of the modern nursing profession.

Bacon was an assertive member of the school’s executive committee and active on its visiting committee, supervising daily operations and patient care in the hospital. The school published her Hand Book of Nursing for Family and General Use (1879), which circulated widely among hospitals, other nursing schools, and the public.

A member of the Connecticut State Board of Charities from 1883-93, Bacon inspected state prisons, reform schools, insane asylums, almshouses, and children’s homes in New Haven and New London counties. Due to their concern with children, she and her husband established and directed Playridge, a country home caring for crippled children. Without children of her own, Bacon worked in many ways for their welfare, helping to found and incorporate (in 1896) the Connecticut Children’s Aid Society.

Concerned with the welfare of blacks, Jane Woolsey taught at Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia, where from 1869 to 1872 she directed the girls’ industries. Then she became resident director of the new Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. Abby Woolsey became acting clerk and the sisters organized the structure of the hospital. Maintaining the high work standards of her family, Jane developed a corps of nurses, established drug, kitchen, supply, and other departments and furthered the coordination of a complex operation. Jane and Abby Woolsey both resigned in 1876. Jane Woolsey’s health, problematic during the war, grew worse as she struggled with members of a medical staff who were uneasy about having a woman director, despite the support she received from the board of managers. Now she became a regular member, rather than an advisory member, of the New York State Charities Aid Association, founded in 1872 by Louisa Lee Schuyler; she made generous financial contributions to this cause. She was plagued by ill health for the rest of her life.

Abby Woolsey had acted as executive officer at Presbyterian Hospital during Jane Woolsey’s absences, as well as fulfilling her own duties. An original member of the State Charities Aid Association, she served on the board of managers, as the first chairman of the library committee, and as the librarian; and she applied her previous experience as a member of the committees on hospitals, on the insane, and on hospital construction. An influential member of the special committee appointed to visit public hospitals in New York City, and of the ensuing committee which drafted a plan for nurses’ training, she was instrumental in the 1873 founding of the Bellevue Hospital Training School for Nurses, the first in this country based on Florence Nightingale’s principles. With Elizabeth Hobson and others she was a member of the school’s first managing committee and of its first board of managers after its incorporation in February 1874. Abby Woolsey’s written reports were particularly valuable to the Charities Aid Association. A Century of Nursing (1876) deals with the history of systems of nursing that she had inspected in Europe and makes proposals to organize a school of nursing. Lunacy Legislation in England (1884) and handbooks of hospital issues are amonganion her other works: her writing is well organized and researched reflects her knowledge of several languages’, and is emblematic of the efficacy of her ‘life’s work as a whole.

Jane Woolsey died of septicemia in Matteawan, New York, at the age of sixty-one. Abby Woolsey died of nephritis and heart disease, at the age of sixty-four, in New York City. Georgeanna Woolsey Bacon died in New Haven of a heart ailment at the age of seventy-two.

Reform for the Woolsey sisters, members of an affluent family with deep roots in America’s past, meant the use of a discriminating education and background as the basis for deep involvement in the practical day-to-day activities of health care and its modernization, even if those activities brought them in contact with squalor and suffering. They also made good use of their literary talents, reflecting on health care issues in war and peace and proposing reforms appropriate to the needs of their profession.

For genealogy see Eliza Newton Woolsey Howland, Family Records 1620-1840, in the custody of Caroline Woolsey Ferriday of New York, and J. R. Delafields, “Woolsey Family of Great Yarmouth and New York” in Delafield: The Family History, vol. II (1945). The modern account is A. L. Austin, The Woolsey Sisters of New York: A Family’s Involvement in the Civil War and a New Profession (1860-1900) (1971). For their wartime activity see L. P. Brockett and M. C. Vaughan, Woman’s Work in the Civil War (1867); K. P. Wormely, The U.S. Sanitary Commission (1863) and The Other Side of War (1889), and F. L. Olmsted, Hospital Transports (1863). On their postwar careers see R. J. Carlisle, An Account of Bellevue Hospital (1893); J. S. Billings and H. M. Hurd, eds., Hospitals, Dispensaries and Nursing (1894); E. C. Hobson, Recollections of a Happy Life (1916); M. A. Nutting and L. L. Dock, A History of Nursing, vol. II (1907); E. A. Talbot, Samuel Chapman Armstrong (1904); D. B. Delavan, Early Days of the Presbyterian Hospital (1926); A. R. Lamb, The Presbyterian Hospital and the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center 1868-1943 (1955); Annual Reports of the N.Y. State Charities Aid Association 1874-92, of the Connecticut Training School for Nurses 1875-1907, and of the Connecticut State Board of Charities 1884-1890; G. W. Bacon “Connecticut Training School,” Trained Nurse and Hospital Review, October 1895; M. Stack, “Resume of the History of the Connecticut Training School, The Hartford Courant, January 5, 1903; and New Haven Morning Journal, January 29, 1906. Georgeanna Woolsey’s wartime manuscript “History of the Woolsey Family”; her wartime journal “Sept 25, 1861-July 14, 1862” (two manuscript volumes); Abby Woolsey’s diaries from 1849–51; and newspaper clippings are in family hands. See also Notable American Women.