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Eloise Butler and Her Wild Flower Garden

© Mary Henry

What? You never heard of Eloise Butler? Let me tell you about her. She was a nobody in her time. A spinster school teacher with no important family connections, no money to speak of and no connections to people in high places. Yet she persisted to overcome many obstacles put before women interested in botany. Against the dismissive treatment of the Minneapolis Park Board she founded a native wild flower garden that was one of the first and certainly the most complete of its time.

Eloise was born on a farm in Appleton, Maine, the third child and second daughter of schoolteacher parents of limited income. She and her adored older sister, Cora, had, in their childhood spent as much of their time as possible roaming the woods and bogs around their home finding and identifying the plants that grew there. They called it "botanizing" and it would remain their favorite shared pastime throughout their lives. She and her four brothers and one sister were fortunate to have parents who believed in education and saw to it that all their children received the best one they could provide. That meant they helped her pay for college with what money they could spare to supplement the $38 a month she made from teaching in local one room schools. She had begun this teaching while she was still in high school. Eloise got her college degree from newly opened Eastern State Normal School in Castine, Maine in 1873.

In those days most school boards changed teachers often, so anyone in the profession moved often and earned little. Schools were mostly the one room variety where the teacher worked with all levels and all abilities and had to do almost all the upkeep and maintenance by themselves.

When her family left Maine and moved west to Indiana she followed when her current teaching term was over. But, since she found only more of the same employment conditions, she made up her mind to go to Minneapolis where they were advertising for teachers for their public schools. She joined the faculty at Center School, a facility with four classrooms on each of two floors and a large assembly hall on the third. The school taught primary through high school students, had one male principal, seven female teachers and 700 students that had to be taught in two separate sessions per day. Eloise earned the sum of $50 a month. Later, she moved on to newly built South High School and taught botany there until her retirement from teaching in 1911.

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