Mrs. M. L. Rayne

Martha Louise Rayne (1836-1911) was an American who was an early woman journalist. In addition to writing and editing several journals, she serialized short stories and poems in newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune, the Detroit Free Press, and the Los Angeles Herald. In addition to newspaper work, she published a guidebook of Chicago, etiquette books, and several novels. In 1886, she founded what may have been the first women's journalism school in the United States and four years later became a founding member and first vice president of the Michigan Woman's Press Association. Rayne was posthumously inducted into the Michigan Journalism Hall of Fame in 1998 and the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame in 2002. Martha Louise Woodworth was born on August 1, 1836 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada to John B. and Martha Woodworth. She came from a literary family, as on her father's side, she was related to Samuel Woodworth and on her mother's side to William Knox. She attended Truro Academy and from an early age had a gift for storytelling and writing. In 1854, she immigrated to Boston, Massachusetts and two years later on April 9, 1856, Woodworth married Robert Weir Rayne in Roxbury. They had four daughters, Gladwing, born in 1857 in Truro, Nova Scotia and died that same year in Roxbury, Massachusetts; Bessie, was born in 1858, but died in the Dixon Bridge collapse of 1873; Lula G. born in 1859 and Grace I. born in 1862.