“I was always too independent,” Bloomington resident Annie May Christian confided in a remarkable scrapbook she compiled around 1903.
Unabashedly independent yes, but Christian also knew the value of community, especially one alive to the fine arts. From 1910 to 1923, May Christian (she went by May, not Annie) headed the Amateur Musical Club, a dominant force in the city’s “aesthetic life” for much of the 20th century.
She led the club through a period of “outstanding growth in numbers and prestige,” observed The Pantagraph upon her death in 1941, “establishing a standard for musical appreciation and interest on a scale seldom attained in a community of this size.”
May was nine or ten old when the Christian family came to Bloomington in 1876. Her father, Matthew, was a former Springfield, Ill. dry goods merchant in poor health who would spend the next 25 years in Bloomington physically disabled.
May’s mother, Elizabeth Mitchell Christian, was from McLean County pioneer stock. Elizabeth’s father, Ebenezer Bridge Mitchell (sometimes spelled Mitchel with one “L”), built one of the first log cabins in Stout’s Grove, a forested area west of Danvers. It’s said he moved the family to Bloomington to provide better educational opportunities for his children. Before the Civil War, the family built a home on the 500 block of East Front Street (yes, it’s still there!) And sure enough, in 1860, Elizabeth graduated from Normal University (now ISU) as part of the first class in school history.
With Elizabeth’s husband Matthew disabled, the Christian family moved to Bloomington and into the old Mitchell house, with financial support likely coming from farmland on the Mitchell side.
May Christian, the subject at hand, was an 1883 graduate of Bloomington High School, this at a time when few children enjoyed public education beyond what we’d call junior high today. As such, Christian’s graduating class was all of fourteen students, thirteen of those being girls. She continued her education by way of musical training, both in voice and piano, and by the age of 17 she was considered “among [Bloomington’s] best instrumental talent.”
Her long affiliation with the Amateur Musical Club began in the late 1890s, and soon she was doing things like delivering a paper to members titled “Grand Opera from 1800 to Wagner,” and helping organize the annual Charity Day concert.
But it’s as club president for more than a dozen years that Christian made her widest and deepest mark on the Twin Cities. Free Sunday concerts began during her tenure, and the club enjoyed great success bringing nationally known composers, conductors and performers to Bloomington. During her years as president, the club staged a Liszt centenary concert with American tenor Riccardo Martin and pianist and composer Rudolf Ganz; hosted performances by the Chicago Opera Quartet and the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra; and welcomed tenor Enrico Palmetto, violinist and composer Fritz Kreisler, pianist Josef Hofmann and others.
May Christian and the Amateur Musical Club were exemplars of a cultural scene dominated by the likes of music instruction, literary societies, piano recitals, poetry, afternoon teas and the reading of history papers. Bloomington-Normal, home to a solid representation of the well-educated middle and upper-middle class, had plenty of whip-smart women who felt constrained and burdened by a patriarchy and its pernicious social, political and economic barriers. Women such as May Christian found outlet in club activities where one could do things like organize fundraisers, study current events and tackle community-wide problems.
Christian, for instance, was a member of the influential History Club of Bloomington most of her adult life, serving as president for several terms. She was also one of the organizers of the Bloomington Women’s Club, with its mission to “make it easier for the sentiments and convictions of the women to find expression.” Churchgoing was also a major part of May Christian’s self-identity, as she was long associated with First Presbyterian of Bloomington.
In mid-Jan. 1911, she represented the Amateur Musical Club at the 18th annual “Congress of Clubs.” This was a gathering of some 300 members of the “city’s elite” representing more than a dozen local literary and musical associations, including the Longfellow Club, the Four O’clock History Club, Ein Dutzend Club, College Alumni Club, Margaret Fuller Club and the Clio Club. Happily, some of these clubs are still active today!
The collections of the McLean County Museum of History archives include a 17-page scrapbook compiled by May Christian around 1903 (see accompanying images.) Each page of this brief autobiographical statement—really a manifesto of sorts—features a clipped illustration from a magazine advertisement or similar source, accompanied by a handwritten observation or declaration.
In this work, Christian, who at the time was in her late thirties, unflinchingly addresses her unmarried status. “Some women have men to work for them” is the caption on page five. “I have to work for myself,” is her follow-up on the next page. Yet there is no self-pity, as Christian also expresses her disappointment in—even indifference to—men. Page eight offers a drawing of a man seated at a table and engrossed in a newspaper. “This is the way some men entertain their wives,” she writes. The following page includes an amusing scene of a young man on his knees, in the midst of a proposal, but with the look of shock on his face. “I have had chances to marry,” she notes, before adding on the next page, “But he might have been cross.”
“I never would be spoony,” she says a few pages later, “spoony” here meaning behaving unduly sentimental or acting foolishly in love. That page is followed by a well-dressed woman and the aforementioned declaration: “I was always too independent.”
Two of the scrapbook’s final pages feature a woman gesturing at an empty chair and the caption, “Still unoccupied,” followed by a woman playing the piano with the observation, “I spend my evening alone.” The last page is an illustration of a cat and the phrase, “My constant companion.”
Christian is one of seven real-life local folk from the past showcased in this year’s Evergreen Cemetery Walk. The event, now celebrating its 25th anniversary, is presented by the McLean County Museum of History and Illinois Voices Theatre-Echoes. It’s being held today, Sun., Oct. 6, and next weekend, Oct. 12-13.
Annie May Christian passed away on Apr. 14, 1941, at the age of 74. “Such a life of service for others in the interest of artistic culture,” eulogized The Pantagraph, “bequeaths to the city and all Central Illinois a name and a memory which shall last long and with undimmed fragrance.”