Mary Louise Nash.

About Mary Louise Nash

Mary Louise Nash (1826–1896) was a 19th-century American educator and writer born in New York. She was descended from New England families with Puritan and Revolutionary War ancestry. Over the course of her career, she held administrative positions at several southern colleges, including Mary Sharp College in Tennessee and the University of Waco in Texas. After the Civil War, she and her husband founded the Sherman Institute in Sherman, Texas, a girls’ school that later became Mary Nash College, where she served as principal. Alongside her work in education, Nash wrote serials, sketches, humorous pieces, and dramatic works that appeared in newspapers and periodicals, and she published a school monthly. She was active in literary and scientific pursuits, conducting literary societies and clubs, and was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR).