Mary Monnett Bain dating history

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Mary Monnett Bain (Mary Monnett; September 21, 1833, in Marion County, Ohio – July 30, 1885, in Osawatomie, Miami County, Kansas), following her mother's death, came into a very large sum of money. She is known for the construction of Monnett Hall in 1856, a cutting edge, Midwestern 19th-century female college, built at a time when many Ohioans still lived in log cabins and most colleges did not accept women or did not provide boarding for them if they wanted to study away from home. The college (and Mary's building - a grand Second Empire styled Victorian building) was absorbed into Ohio Wesleyan University (OWU) after a few decades, but addition upon addition made the building grow to mammoth size. Monnett Hall provided the female dormitory space for all of OWUs women students for decades, until it was abandoned in the 1960s and torn down in the 1970s. Mary Monnett's donation of initial funding for the building provided generations of women with a kind of freedom she herself never enjoyed.