Prestonia Mann Martin and the Mann Family of New York

Mary W. Green Lorenz

LORENZ In this city, January 28, 1909, suddenly, of angina pectoris, Mary W. Green, wife of William A. Lorenz, aged 61. Funeral at her late residence, No. 96 Garden street, Saturday at 2 p.m. Interment at Cedar Hill.

The news of Mrs. William A. Lorenz s departure for the better country has come as a shock to the friends who had met her within two or three days in one or another of the clubs of which she was a leading member, and the many others who had known her in her home life.

She had so much individuality that no one can make her place good, and yet, she was thoroughly sane-minded and fee from fads. She came of a family of reformers. Her grandfather, Beriah Green, studied for the Presbyterian ministry, but formed a creed of his own, and became professor of sacred literature in the Western Reserve College. He was a friend of prominent abolitionists, and at one time president of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Later he founded a manual labor school in or near Utica, and fell dead at the polls in 1874, while waiting to vote for prohibition. His son, Mrs. Lorenz s father, was also an abolitionist, and he and her mother, with a large family of young children, more than once found room for fugitive slaves in their house in Brooklyn, where their daughter grew up and was graduated from Packer Institute, a school which still keeps up its reputation for fine and thorough scholarship.

Mrs. Lorenz s home and school training were of the best. Her musical ability was of a high order, and was cultivated both in this country and in Leipsic, where she also learned to speak German fluently. A few years later she married and came to Hartford. She had been a member of Der Verein for all the years of its existence, always ready to play at the meetings, and was on the committee which plans its evening, contributing much of herself not only musically, but in arranging meetings, suggesting subjects or writing introductions in German. The last time that her friends of Der Verein saw her was last Tuesday evening, when she played the accompaniments for ten German folk-songs, every one of which was encored. She had not been well that day, but refused to stay at home and even with pain about her heart, insisted on doing what she had promised. At the Monday Afternoon Club this week, when it was announced that some one was unable to prepare a paper, Mrs. Lorenz said, I have as much time as any of you, and if you will let me consider it for two or three weeks, I think that I can do it. Her club work was always thorough, and she spent months in reading for and preparing every subject that she undertook.

She will be remembered also as a home-maker by the friends who had been fortunate enough to enjoy the hospitality of the house where she has lived for more than twenty years. What her friend, Mr. Warner said, I want my hearthstone to be an emblem of the best things, might well have been her motto. So might another that is sometimes on walls, Bring no tattle in, take no tattle out, and yet, like Mrs. Browning s Kate, she never found fault with you, never implied your wrong by her right. There have always been so many interesting things in the house to talk about, so many of the best, new books, so much music, gifts from Germany, Hawaii, or California, that there was no time for trivial personalities. It is worth remembering in Hartford, who in thirty years of housekeeping had had but three servants, one of whom stayed thirteen and another ten years, till they were ready to be married. This shows something of the large-mindedness and human way of dealing with the domestic problem which characterized the mistress of the house. She could find the best in her friends Do you know so-and-so? she would say. You ought to. They are real folks; and she herself, who had learned to take hold on the eternal verities, knew how to separate the important things of life from the unimportant.

She loved out-of-doors, and in late years had become as intimate with the White Mountains as with her old summer haunt in Vermont. She was looking forward this year to revisiting Germany renewing old friendships there, and seeing Switzerland again.

What the loss of her visible presence means to her large family connection and all her friends, cannot be expressed, but she has made the world better by living in it.
C. M. H.