Bishop, Harriet E. (1817–1883)

Harriet Bishop, best known as the founder of St. Paul’s first public and Sunday schools, was also a social reformer, land agent, and writer. In the 1840s, she led a vanguard of white, middle-class, Protestant women who sought to bring “moral order” to the multi-cultural fur-trade society of pre-territorial Minnesota.

Bishop was born in Panton, Vermont, in 1817. Deeply religious and schooled in moral righteousness, she exemplified nineteenth-century middle-class women’s values—what historians have deemed the “cult of true womanhood.” She believed that, as a woman, she had a calling to champion moral reform and Christian piety.

Bishop spent ten years as a teacher in Essex County, New York. In 1847, unwed at age thirty, she found inspiration in a training course led by the reformer Catharine Beecher. The course was designed to recruit and prepare teachers to bring moral guidance to the new U.S. territories.

Bishop was the first of this cohort to go west. In 1847, Thomas Williamson, a missionary to the Dakota, wrote to Beecher describing the roughshod village of St. Paul and its need for a teacher. Bishop immediately volunteered, though Williamson warned that the village had few creature comforts and was awash in alcohol.

Bishop arrived in St. Paul in July 1847. She soon began teaching classes to seven students in a log cabin at present-day Kellogg Boulevard and St. Peter Street. On July 25, she established a Sunday school that served as the forerunner of the city’s Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian congregations.

Williamson had specified that teaching in the region required an openness to cultural differences. Bishop, however, called the Dakota people who welcomed her “grotesque.” She dismissed her French-Canadian and mixed-blood Catholic neighbors as un-Christian. As for her students, they were for the most part “a dark forbidding group.”

Though famed as St. Paul’s first teacher, Bishop lasted only a few years in her classrooms. In 1850, she founded a seminary and boarding school to teach and shelter new instructors. She made a greater impact as the first of a group of white, middle-class women who strove to transform the Northwest from the multicultural meeting ground of the fur-trade era into an equivalent of their Eastern home towns—with the same prejudices as well as refinements.

As St. Paul grew in the 1850s, Bishop dedicated herself to social and religious reform. She became a founding member of the First Baptist Church and established a Sewing Society to pay off its mortgage. She helped organize groups to raise money for a new schoolhouse and to aid the needy. For cultural edification, she hosted the Philecclesian Literary Society in her home.

Bishop was most passionate, however, in the battle against “demon rum,” which made her unpopular with many St. Paulites. Unfazed, she kept up her crusade, from 1849, when she helped found the Sons of Temperance Society until 1877, when she became the first paid organizer of the Minnesota Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.

Despite her reformist zeal, Bishop was no radical. Like her mentor, Catharine Beecher, she opposed woman suffrage. In fact, evidence suggests that she hoped to make a conventional marriage. In 1850, her engagement to a young lawyer ended in separation—a public humiliation in the small community of St. Paul.

To make her way as a single woman was no easy task, but in the boom years of the 1850s, Bishop found lucrative work as a land agent and Minnesota booster. In 1857, she published Floral Home, a somewhat exaggerated account of the territory’s beauty and potential. She married John McConkey, a widowed harness-maker with four children, in 1858. The relationship eventually soured, and Bishop accused McConkey of “habitual drunkenness.” The couple divorced in 1867.

In spite of her personal disappointments, Bishop continued to pursue her literary interests. She found some success in publishing Dakota War Whoop, a sensational account of the U.S.–Dakota War of 1862. As the years passed, she cobbled together a difficult living as a writer and lecturer. She helped organize both the St. Paul Ladies Christian Union (1867) and the Home for the Friendless (1869).

Near the end of her life, Bishop embraced the cause of woman suffrage. In 1881, she was involved in the founding of the Minnesota Woman Suffrage Association. She died in St. Paul, in 1883, at the age of sixty-six.