Remember When: A temperance advocate had local roots

Mary Helen Peck Crane was a busy lady.

Married and living in New Jersey with her clergyman husband, the former Wyoming Valley resident helped the Rev. Jonathan Crane in his many duties while bearing 14 children and nurturing toward adulthood all of those who survived the rigors of 19th-century life.

In her time, Mary Helen also achieved recognition for speaking, writing and in other ways playing a tireless role in the national campaign for “abstinence,” which despite its mild-sounding name was actually an aggressive movement to ban alcohol from American life.

Today, though, when her name comes up it’s generally not within the context of her now-forgotten social commitment but of her youngest child’s more lasting accomplishments.

That youngest child of Mary Helen Peck Crane, the religious woman and reformer who had grown up in Kingston and Wilkes-Barre, was Stephen Crane, best known for his classic war novel “The Red Badge of Courage.”

Though Stephen Crane never lived in or even visited Wyoming Valley, he still had family roots here.

Mom Mary Helen Peck was born into a local churchly environment. Her father, the Rev. George Peck, was pastor of the Kingston Methodist Episcopal Church. Her mother, Mary Myers, was a member of an early West Side family.

The family’s writing talent showed itself early. Rev. Peck wrote several volumes on his Methodist faith and edited a magazine for Methodist clergy. He also found time to write his personal memoirs and a lengthy history of Wyoming Valley. He is credited with being one of the founders of Wyoming Seminary.

It was through her father’s activities that Mary Helen met the Rev. Jonathan Townley Crane. By mid-century the couple were living in New Jersey. It was there that Mary Helen, who had studied at Wyoming Seminary and the Rutgers Female Institute, began her family and supplemented her church work with membership in the abstinence movement.

Abstinence was what we would call today a “hot button” issue. Brutal working conditions for American men led many to find solace and relaxation in alcohol to the point that drunkenness was rife and family life suffered.

The nationwide campaign to counter that indulgence, called the temperance movement, attracted many activist women and brought decades of marches, demonstrations and political maneuvering.

Mary Helen Peck Crane, as a member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, frequently wrote and spoke on behalf of the cause and presented pleas to the New Jersey Legislature on temperance-related bills. She contributed articles to major newspapers and headed publicity in New Jersey for her temperance group.

Sadly, she did not live to see her youngest son grow up and be hailed as one of America’s finest writers. She fell ill at a temperance convention in Boston and returned home to New Jersey, where she died Dec. 7, 1891 at 64.

Two years after his mother’s passing, Stephen Crane authored the story “Maggie, a Girl of the Streets,” that was so upsettingly realistic about life in the poor section of a big city that its publication was held up.

Shortly thereafter, he gained still more fame for his novel “The Red Badge of Courage,” about a young man’s coming of age in the heat of Civil War battle. Additional works of realism followed.

Stephen Crane didn’t have much time to enjoy his celebrity, dying of tuberculosis at 28 on a trip to Germany, but leaving behind a small collection of works that continue to be read today. His grandparents are interred in the Forty Fort Cemetery.