Mary Sophia Hyde Rice (October 11, 1816 – May 25, 1911), known as Mother Rice, was an American missionary and educator from the United States who settled in the Hawaiian Islands. She was a teacher at Punahou School and matron of Mills College. She was the last surviving member of the original twelve companies of American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) missionaries sent to Hawaii between 1820 and 1848.
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Early life
Mary Sophia Hyde was born in the Buffalo Creek Reservation, in western New York State near current-day West Seneca. Her parents were Rev. Jabez Backus Hyde, a missionary to the Seneca nation, and Jerusha Aiken Hyde. As a girl, she learned to read from the future President Millard Fillmore.
Career
On September 29, 1840, she married William Harrison Rice. Her father performed the wedding ceremony.
In 1840, as a new bride, she left New York for the Oregon Territory via the Hawaiian Islands, where her husband was assigned as a missionary. The Rices sailed in the ninth company of missionaries to Hawaii from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) on the ship Gloucester, leaving from Boston on November 14, 1840, and arriving in Honolulu on May 21, 1841. Also in this company were John Davis Paris, Elias Bond, and Daniel Dole.