Hahn The Life And Times Of Mary Musgrove Summary

Steven C Hahn, author of “The Life and Times of Mary Musgrove,” earned his bachelor’s degree in anthropology, and his master’s degree at the University of Georgia. He completed his doctoral work at Emory University, specializing in Native Americans of the colonial South. Hahn is a professor of history at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota where he has taught since 2000. Hahn has served as a peer review for several scholarly journals and university press, and has served on dissertation committees for Ph.D. candidates at the University of California-Berkeley and the University of Oklahoma. (1)
Mary Musgrove was born around 1700 in her mother’s village Coweta (present day Macon, Georgia), where she spent her early years. Born the daughter of a British trader and a Creek Indian mother, Mary was a child of mixed heritage. Her mother died when she was around seven years of age. After her mother’s death her father took her and her only brother, Edward Griffin, to live in Charlestown, South Carolina where she spent most of her time in school.

The English children had a much more formal childhood than the Creek children, and Mary would have to convert to the proper ways of the English. While Mary was settling into the frontier community “Ponponne” where English and Indian people lived among one another in Colleton County, her father Edward Griffin spent an extensive amount of time away from Ponponne on business. During this time, Mary lived at St. Bartholomew’s parish where she studied with the assistance of Ross Reynolds, a schoolmaster that arrived in the parish around 1709, as well as the Reverend Nathaniel Osborn who moved to the colony in 1713. Mary learned not only to read and write during her time at St. Bartholomew’s, but it was during this time that she was baptized, and received her Christian name,