William Otto Benitz

    In the days before airlines and motorships, radio and radar, and go-now-pay-later packaged tours made traveling as carefree as staying at home, what could have induced these gently broughtup women and girls to leave comfortable homes and good jobs for the unknown? And having finished their three-year contracts, what possessed them to stay longer in Argentina? - for stay most of them did. Of the sixty-five, thirty-six stayed beyond the contract time, and taught an average of thirteen years. Sixteen left at the end of the three-year contract; two married, with the consent and good wishes of the department of education, before their contracts were completed; five died within a year of arriving; and twenty lived out their lives in Argentina.

    Not for lack of good jobs in the United States did these teachers go. In 1869 a regent of the Albany normal school wrote to Henry Barnard, "We are in jumping want of a principal of this school." Similar places were open throughout the rapidly expanding West. When Mary Olstine Graham sailed with other teachers in June, 1879, the New England Journal of Education protested bitterly that good teachers were being induced to go abroad.

    So far as their motives for going can be unraveled - and when are motives ever simple and unmixed? - some were attracted by salaries that on their contracts seemed high; some by the prospect of less competition and quicker advancement than at home; some by a spirit of adventure. Clara Allyn and Clara Gillies and Jennie Howard - and who else, perhaps? - went to find what a change of scene might do for lacerated hearts. Isabel and Anna Dudley hoped to earn enough to lift the mortgage from their mother's home. Jeanette Stevens, a convert to Catholicism, wished to live in an entirely Roman Catholic country.

    Some, Mary Conway waspishly wrote her sister, came to find husbands. "They spend their entire salaries on dress and thus have a decided advantage over the women of the country, who although they are rich in silks and real laces, lack that peculiar style which is so distinctively American and is very charming. What with dress, cosmetics and jewelry, the North American teachers have completely captivated the minister of education, the native ladies say. It's easily done for he isn't over bright." Perhaps her ill humor arose from the fact that a husband to her taste had never presented himself, while six of her colleagues had already married well-to-do British or North American residents. None married Argentines.

    Whatever had been their motives for going, when they saw the utterly virgin field to work in and the gratitude of students and parents for efforts that would be taken for granted in the United States, they were stimulated to use every skill and talent and every bit of knowledge they possessed. Schools grew faster than they could be staffed and the teachers were always overworked. None ever refused regular or extracurricular activities, no matter how heavy the job became. Though Elizabeth Coolidge early wrote in the New England Journal of Education the gloomy warning that "sincere and earnest work rarely meets with encouragement and often its only visible result is the imposition of more work and the reduction of salary," that did not slow down Franc Allyn in Paraná, who (Sara Figueroa says) "taught at all hours." Even on Sunday mornings, strict Methodist though she was, Franc held a discussion meeting to air topics uppermost in the minds of her students. Her reward? Fifty years later she wrote to her daughter, "I am so thankful for my experience in going to Argentina."

C.7 The Teachers: FORTY-FIVE YEARS OF HARD WORK

    In her notes for the Winona Semi-Centennial in 1915, Franc Allyn said of the work of the twenty-two teachers who had gone from Minnesota: "Their schools created for the Argentine girl new aims, ambitions, and ideals of life. They awoke to intellectual life and vigor. Many have become teachers and are not only self-supporting but support entire families. Some have taken a University course and have devoted themselves to music and literature. One has gained fame as a sculptress, one of her works adorning a fountain in Buenos Aires.

    "In the far Andean provinces, by the wide waters of the Paraná, in the tropical north and in the wilder south, the normal graduate is found testifying to the results of the planting of seed by North American teachers during the past thirty-five years .... Many of the young men graduates in all parts of the country are teaching, writing, many of them physicians, lawyers, all testifying by the fine quality of their service and their success to the high ideals and aims set before them in their normal school life and training."

    Since the institutions of higher learning in Argentina are the universities, now open but long closed to women, and the normal schools, these latter have held an all-important place in the education and the affections of Argentine women. The Escuela Normal de Clara Armstrong and the Escuela Normal de Mary Graham, as well as those of La Rioja and Mendoza and Goya, and all the others, mean to the Argentine girl what Smith and Vassar and Wellesley - and the hundreds of denominational and nonsectarian colleges, the normal schools, state colleges, and universities across the plains and mountains to Mills and Pomona and Occidental - signify to her North American counterpart.

    Out of one hundred Argentines in 1870 only twenty could read and write, the census showed. Twenty-five years later the percentage had leaped to fifty. "This is the work of the normal schools, of which not one existed in 1869," wrote José B. Zubiaur, minister of education.

    Sixty-five North American teachers, invited by the Argentine government between 1869 and 1898, had founded or rehabilitated eighteen normal schools, each with its model grade school and kindergarten in which normal-school students could observe and practice modern methods of teaching.

....

    José Torres, who succeeded George Stearns at Paraná was emphatic in his report of 1885: "Although normal schools have existed only fourteen years in Argentina, their influence on the common schools is notable ... they not only turn out excellent teachers . . . more, through their model schools they improve the education of the children of each town where they are situated."

    To Franc Allyn Morgan, Torres wrote: "Every day I am more and more grateful to you and Professor Phelps for the very fortunate selection of distinguished teachers. All are excellent not only for their qualifications of character but also for their ability and intelligence. My desire to procure new teachers from the United States has been more than realized. Those whom Miss Armstrong selected are also very good. With the addition of these new teachers, the normal schools have received a great impetus and are on the road of progress."

    Maximo Victoria, the third head of the Paraná school, himself a pupil of the North American teachers, insisted, "The objectives which President Sarmiento, with his far-seeing prevision, set forth for the Paraná school, it has filled with greatest amplitude."

    To her schoolmate Franc Allyn, Susan Wade handed the torch as head of the model grade school at Paraná when she went home in 1877 at the end of her three-year contract. Franc had graduated from the Winona normal school six years before, and had been busy keeping a home for her widowed father in Rochester, Minnesota, being a mother to her little sister Clara, and teaching in Rochester grade schools. Among her pupils were two bright and sometimes mischievous playmates of Clara's -Willie and Charlie Mayo. Hers had been a serious life since her mother died when Franc was only ten, and it was a great adventure to embark on the luxury liner City of Berlin for Liverpool at the beginning of 1877.

    Not for longer than the boat trip was she able to live in comfortable idleness - not when people around her needed anything she could do - and she found plenty to do in Paraná. She was a complete extrovert, always happiest in the company of others, doing something for them, preferably with a child on her knees, says her daughter. The job at Paraná called for all her skills of which she had many, and she threw all her wiry, ninety-five pounds into her tasks.

    Sara Figueroa writes that she "taught at all hours," and when she left Argentina, the head of the Paraná school said: "The North American normal profesora, Miss F. Allyn, has fulfilled her contract, and I, for love of Argentina, desire fervently that every person who comes into this country to lend any service will fulfill his or her contract as has this most estimable young lady." One Argentine pupil, Señora Rita Lallatada de Victoria, long fondly remembered the Sunday morning discussion hour that Franc Allyn headed, when students brought up problems that could not be covered in classrooms, with free discussion and criticism. "Of all the teachers," she recalled, "the nicest and prettiest was Miss Franc Allyn." She was not actually a beauty, her daughter thinks, but with gray-green eyes and light-brown hair, and alive in every fiber, she was winsome and lovable.

    An attractive twenty-one-year-old cousin of Franc's came from Minnesota to pass five months with her at the end of her contract in 1881. "The school is very nice," the visitor wrote in her carefully kept journal, "and they evidently appreciate and prize Franc . . . . The examinations lasted through five evenings. The gymnastics were very pretty; boys one night in blue and white Louis XV suits; little girls in pale blue, pink and scarlet and white, with their wands, bells, etc., tied with ribbons to match. Everything went off well and I was very proud of Franc's work and success .... The day we left crowds of people saw her off. She received puddings, cakes, and flowers in abundance .... At the last I was afraid Franc would break down but she did not." [WebNote: More of Harriet Packard's diary entries are available at the foot of this web-page.]

    Six happy months the cousins spent sightseeing in Europe, then Franc went back to teach in Winona. Within a year she married Stephen Morgan, a well-established jeweler of Winona, a widower with nearly grown children. She was as devoted to them as to her own boy and girl who came along soon, and her daughter says that the stepchildren turned to Franc as readily as her own children did.

    Her life was typical of that of active and intelligent women who have made Main Streets in their Minnesota towns, or towns of other states, places that American soldiers over the globe remember with longing. With a highly informal approach, Franc served wherever she was needed, whether giving a hand in the Winona normal school that had meant so much in her life, in the local grade schools, the library, civic betterment, or cultural clubs, or in her favorite, a home for elderly people not eligible for public relief. Her greatest contribution, perhaps, was in her day-to-day contact with people - stimulating them, giving them heart, liking them. Her friends were always amused at the fact that in travels around the world with her husband, he described the political set-up, economic status, architecture, or scenery, while Franc wrote or spoke with fervid interest and sympathy and skill about the people whom she encountered.

    Through her comfortable and well-staffed house a stream of long staying guests flowed: nieces from Argentina who needed schooling; old friends and, equally welcome, the children of old friends; a student struggling through school; a lonesome young teacher or businessman away from home. Katharine Grant Hope, her successor at Paraná, passed months with her.

    "She got younger as she got older," her daughter said. As a girl, her strict Methodist training had made dancing unthinkable, but at eighty her great joy was to go to the country club and watch her grandchildren dance.

    At eighty-one she started to burn accumulated letters, but put them aside. "I might want to read them when I get old," she said. Her engagement book reads like that of a particularly active debutante, and to the last she made yearly visits across the United States.

    "I am so thankful for my experience in going to the Argentine," she wrote her daughter in an anniversary letter reviewing her life. "And I have always had so much to be thankful for,, the many blessings that have come to me all these years . . . such a good husband . . . such a nice home with a good income . . . and my dear children and grandchildren, all of help and comfort."

    Clara Allyn was even tinier than Franc, and eight years younger. She finished at the Winona normal school just as Franc was sailing for Argentina, and she taught for a year in the grade schools of Duluth, Minnesota. When Franc was granted an assistant in the Paraná school, she sent for Clara, who was not in the least unwilling to go, for her twenty-three year heart was lacerated by a romance that had gone wrong.

    On the river steamer from Buenos Aires to Rosario, where Franc was coming to meet her, she saw standing at the rail a lean and tanned young man with a poncho thrown about his shoulders. The dropping sun was turning his curly beard and fair hair to golden. "He looks like pictures of Christ," she murmured to herself in awe.

    Franc had written that Clara was to go to the house of the Reverend Thomas Wood, the Methodist pastor in Rosario [WebNote: also US Consul], whose kindly wife often sheltered North American girls, since Argentine convention did not permit them to go alone to hotels. Mrs. Wood had invited a group of young people to meet the sister of her favorite Franc, and one of the guests was the picturesque young man of the boat, William Benitz. He was the son of a North American estanciero who had been associated in California with Captain Sutter - at his sawmill, gold was discovered in 1848 - and emigrated to Argentina and bought and stocked the estancia "La California" near Rosario.

    When the second year of Clara's contract was finished and she confided to Franc that she and young Benitz were planning to be married, Franc in alarm packed her off to Corsicana, Texas, where their father was living [WebNote: Per family lore, he was postmaster]. "I don't know enough about men to judge whether he is suitable," the older sister insisted. "If he is serious, he can go up and talk to father." He was serious and he went, and on April 25, 1881, they were married in Corsicana, eventually going back to "La California." Until 1962 this estancia remained in the Benitz family. [WebNote: It still remains in the family. April 2000 it was the main site of the Benitz-2000 family gathering.  A grandson of Clara still lives there today with his family.]

    Clara Allyn's contribution to Argentina was not in years of teaching but in giving it useful citizens. Eight children she had, her oldest son an aviator did not return from World War I.

    The house, which stood three miles back from the front gate, was always open to Argentine and North American friends. Life was lived on horseback, and rodeos, deer hunts, polo games, and gallops to neighboring estancias several leagues away were frequent diversions. Distances were so great that they were reckoned by leagues - three miles - and are to this day. Photographs of Clara on horseback in the palm-bordered driveway, with her blond-haired troop of children ranged alongside her on their ponies, make her look like the sweet-faced head of a royal family. Happily she lived out her life at "La California," and on it in 1930 she was buried.

    During the summer holiday of 1878, Miss Nyman, Sarah Boyd, and Franc Allyn went over the Andes in a mule train to Santiago and Valparaiso. During the steep climbs when they had to walk most of the way, they developed such ravenous appetites that they could eat with relish, even though the peon who roasted meat over the campfire at mealtime tidily wiped his knife on the mule's tail before cutting the bread.

    After the trip Miss Nyman was suddenly seized with violent headaches and became demented. No doctor in Mendoza could say what was the matter, and Franc Allyn decided to take her to Rosario to English-speaking doctors. During the four hundred miles by stagecoach, Miss Nyman, a robust woman, was disturbed and restless, but so great was her affection for tiny Franc and so complete her trust, that her little friend was able to take her safely on the long trip. A brain tumor was found after her death, which came within the month.

    (p.52): $100-150 gold pesos fuertes / month, initially more than a dollar subsequent devaluation of the dollar to 0.78 in 1870. Living conditions were expensive (rent was $35 / month). Return fare to the US was included.

    (p.64) "Few trains were equipped with toilets, and Franc Allyn recalled that at long intervals the train stopped on the shrubless short-grass plains, men scattering to one side, women to the other."

    (p.142-143) Bernice Avery's home in Rochester, MN, was "like a home to the motherless Allyn girls." Bernice married Richard Agar at "La California", 19 Jan.1886. [WebNote: Clara's second son, William Agar Benitz, was named after Richard Agar, of Agar, Cross & Co., well known providers in Argentina of farm equipment & supplies, e.g. the many Aermotor windmills which still dot the countryside today.]

Sesenta y Cinco Valientes

(Sarmiento y las Maestras Norteamericanas)

    May Watt de Mohr-Bell (nieta de Clara) muy amablemente nos hizo copias de la versión impreso en la Argentina.