queerplaces - May Stone

Queer Places:
Wellesley College (Seven Sisters), 106 Central St, Wellesley, MA 02481
The Lexington Cemetery, 833 W Main St, Lexington, KY 40508, United States

May Stone (May 1, 1867 - January 29, 1946) was born on May 1, 1867, in Owingsville, Kentucky, to affluent parents Henry L. and Pamela Bourne Stone, and she grew up alongside her brother Junius. Benefiting from her family's social standing, she attended private secondary schools in Owingsville and Mount Sterling before pursuing higher education at Wellesley College, where she studied German. After leaving Wellesley in 1887, she returned to Kentucky and immersed herself in civic life, becoming active in the Louisville chapters of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Federation of Women's Clubs, eventually serving as the secretary of the state federation. Through her work with the Federation of Women's Clubs, Stone met Katherine Pettit in 1899, marking the beginning of a lifelong personal and professional partnership that would profoundly shape Appalachian education and reform.

Choosing reform work and an independent life over traditional marriage—a path shared by several prominent female reformers of her era—Stone teamed up with Pettit to spend three summers conducting educational programs near Hazard and Hindman, Kentucky. Prompted by a local resident named Solomon Everage, who urged them to establish a permanent presence in the Troublesome Creek region, Stone and Pettit co-founded the Hindman Settlement School in Knott County in 1902 with backing from the Women's Christian Temperance Union. Within this partnership, Stone primarily managed administrative and financial operations, calculating program costs and utilizing her personal wealth to sustain the institution, particularly through the financial hardships of the Great Depression. Under her leadership, the school offered traditional academics, industrial arts, and medical clinics while improving rural education throughout the county. Stone also cultivated a deep passion for local genealogy and Appalachian handicrafts, becoming an expert collector of coverlets and a founding member of the Southern Handicrafts Guild.

When Pettit departed in 1912 to help found the Pine Mountain Settlement School alongside Ethel de Long, Stone remained at Hindman, serving as its principal until 1936. Over her lifetime, she extended her civic engagement to numerous historical and hereditary organizations, including the Filson Club, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Daughters of the Confederacy, the Transylvanians, and the Virginia and Kentucky historical societies, while also helping establish the Conference of Southern Mountain Workers and serving on the board of the Frontier Nursing Service. As she aged, she relied increasingly on assistant director Elizabeth Watts, transitioning to summer-only visits by 1924. After stepping down as principal in 1936, Stone remained active on the board of directors until her death on January 29, 1946, in Louisville. She was buried in the Lexington Cemetery.

Stone's lifelong domestic and professional partnership with Katherine Pettit places them within a rich tradition of turn-of-the-century women who forged independent lives together, often referred to historically as "Boston marriages." While a 1923 novel titled The Quare Women described Appalachian settlement workers using the local dialect word "queer," historical analysis notes that this term at the time denoted outsider strangeness rather than modern understandings of sexual orientation. Nevertheless, Stone and Pettit's deliberate rejection of traditional marriage in favor of a dedicated, lifelong partnership with another woman mirrors the relational frameworks frequently explored in modern LGBTQ history as significant alternatives to conventional societal norms.

References:

Hindman Settlement School Records (1899–1979): Contains core administrative, legal, and operational files, board minutes, treasurer's reports, and historical photographs.
Hindman Settlement School Collection: Features the original Pettit-Stone diaries (1899–1902), business correspondence, annual progress reports to donors, ballad and folksong files, and biographical materials on early school figures.
Stoddart, Jess, ed. May Stone & Katherine Pettit’s Summers in the Kentucky Mountains: The Diaries of the Founders of the Hindman Settlement School. This volume features the primary source journals kept during their early settlement work at Camp Cedar Grove, Camp Industrial, and Sassafras, along with a historical introduction detailing their backgrounds and the turn-of-the-century reform movements.
Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia (Entry on Katherine Pettit, which details the joint professional and administrative work alongside May Stone in establishing both the Hindman and Pine Mountain settlement schools).
The Quare Women: A Story of the Kentucky Mountains (A 1923 novel by Lucy Furman, reflecting contemporary Appalachian perspectives and local terminology regarding the settlement school women).

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