Lucy Skidmore Scribner

Lucy Skidmore was born on July 4, 1853, the daughter of Lucy Ann Hawley and Joseph Russell Skidmore. Her mother died soon after Lucy's birth, and the baby was baptized at her mother's funeral. Raised by her paternal aunt, Mary Jane Skidmore, in her grandparents' home on Henry Street in Manhattan, Lucy moved to the home of her father and stepmother, Anna Holmes Krebs, in her early teens. Joseph Skidmore was a prosperous coal merchant, a Presbyterian elder active in civic affairs, and largely self-educated; he sent his daughter to be educated at the finishing school of the Misses Perrine and later at the school run by the Misses Murray rather than to one of the emerging women's colleges.

Lucy was also a devoted Presbyterian who believed in the importance of service to the community, teaching in her leisure time at a mission school connected with her church. She was introduced to society at 19 and at 21 married John Blair Scribner, who had taken over the publishing company started by his father five years before, when the young man was only 20. After a honeymoon in Europe, the couple settled in New York, and Lucy's life seemed set to follow the conventional pattern of young women of her class: making a home for her husband, raising her children, and devoting her remaining energies to good works and high culture.

But tragedies awaited the youthful bride: Her two children died in infancy, and in 1879, her husband died suddenly of pneumonia. Lucy moved back to the home of her father and stepmother, and three years later she lost her father as well. For the next dozen years she lived with her stepmother, who was apparently a loving companion, and not twenty years older than her stepdaughter. Lucy studied piano, attended concerts and traveled with her stepmother. She brought meaning to her life through charity work, reading to the blind, teaching sewing to poor girls at the mission school, and she even organized a children's club for the little girls of Jackson, New Hampshire, where she spent several summers. After her stepmother's death in 1894 she continued to visit members of her extended family, including an aunt and uncle in Saratoga Springs, where in 1897 she purchased a summer home on North Broadway.

At the turn of the century she decided to settle permanently in Saratoga Springs, joining the Second Presbyterian church and looking around for appropriate charitable work. Inspired by stories of a Brooklyn settlement house which was the beneficiary of work by several of her friends, Lucy approached four women of her church and asked them to join her in establishing the Young Women's Industrial Club to "help little girls and young women to become self-supporting and to provide a social center for them." The five church ladies met on January 23, 1903, and opened the club, in the old church parsonage on Spring Street, in June of that year.

Unusual for that era, the club's bylaws specified that it would be open to all girls and women of good character, regardless of race or religion. Boys and men were allowed to participate in all club classes and activities except for physical culture (although their tuition was 10 cents more each term), and once the YWIC had evolved into the Skidmore School of Arts in the 'teens, there were even a few male graduates of the programs in business and music.

Skidmore College · 815 North Broadway · Saratoga Springs, NY · 12866

Skidmore College Main Links
©2009 Skidmore College · Contact Information
Home | About Skidmore | Prospective Students | Current Students | Faculty & Staff
Parents & Friends | Alumni