Frances Dana Gage / Catherine Fay Ewing

Side A: Frances Dana (Barker) Gage was born on October 12, 1808, in Marietta. She married James L. Gage in 1829 and they raised eight children, including four sons who served with Union forces during the Civil War. Throughout much of her life, Frances was deeply involved with the Temperance and Anti-Slavery movements and Women’s Rights issues. Presiding over the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron in 1851, she invited Sojourner Truth to give her famous “Ain’t I a Woman” speech. The Gage family moved in 1853 to St. Louis, the western extension of the Mason-Dixon Line, where her life was threatened whenever she spoke out against slavery. During the Civil War, she traveled south to aid Union soldiers and teach freed slaves. Though crippled and permanently disabled by a stroke, she continued to lecture on social issues until 1867. Frances Dana Gage died on November 10, 1884, in Greenwich, Connecticut. Side B: Catherine Fay Ewing is credited with starting the Children’s Home System in Ohio. Born on July 12, 1822, in Westboro, Massachusetts, her family moved to Marietta in 1835. At age sixteen, Catherine studied to be a teacher while attending Marietta Female Seminary. Moving to the Indian Territory in what is now the state of Oklahoma in 1840 to teach orphaned Indian children, the events there affected the rest of her life. Upon returning home and witnessing the poor conditions of orphans in the county infirmary, she determined to provide a home for homeless children. She purchased property at Moss Run ten miles from Marietta and built a two-room cabin. On April 1, 1858, she took custody of nine children and eight years later married Archibald Ewing. That same year the Ohio Legislature passed a law authorizing County Commissioners to use county taxes for the first public children’s home in the United States.