Mary Simmerson Cunningham Logan

Mary Simmerson Cunningham Logan (née Mary Simmerson Cunningham; pen name, Mrs. John A. Logan; August 15, 1838 - February 22, 1923) was an American writer and editor from the U.S. state of Missouri.

It was near the present village of Sturgeon, Missouri then known as Petersburg, in Boone County, Missouri, that Mary Simmerson Cunningham was born, on August 15, 1838. Her American ancestry went back to an Irish settler of Virginia and a French pioneer of Louisiana. Her great-grandfather, Robert Cunningham, of Virginia, was a soldier of the war for Independence, after which he removed to Tennessee, thence to Alabama, and thence to Illinois, when still a Territory, and there manumitted his slaves.

Her father, Captain John M. Cunningham of Marion, Illinois, had been engaged in both the Black Hawk and Mexican-American wars. He was twice elected sheriff and county clerk of Williamson County, Illinois, U. S. marshal of the southern district of Illinois, and President Franklin Pierce appointed him register of the land office at Shawneetown, Illinois. He was also a member of the Legislature of Illinois in 1845 and 1846. Her mother was Miss Elizabeth Fontaine, of a distinguished family of that name which had arrived in Louisiana during the French occupancy of that country and had thence journeyed up the Mississippi River and settled in Missouri. It was here that John Cunningham met Elizabeth Fontaine and they married.

When Mary was one year old, her parents removed to Illinois and settled at Marion, her father's home town. By the time she was nine years old, she encountered the dangers of a frontier home, when her father went forth to fight in the Mexican-American War, and braved the miner's life in the Sierra Nevada of California. Mary relieved her mother, who was not strong, of most of the household work, while attending the primitive school of the neighborhood, and trained herself in needlework. In 1853, she was sent to the Convent of St. Vincent, near Morganfield, Kentucky, a branch of the Nazareth Institute, the oldest institution of the kind in the US. This was the nearest educational establishment of sufficient advancement in the higher branches of education.

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