Maria Bissell Hotchkiss

Who was Maria Bissell Hotchkiss?

Maria H. Hotchkiss was the wife of U.S. engineer Benjamin B. Hotchkiss. After his death in 1885, she founded the Hotchkiss School in her husband's native Connecticut in 1891.

Maria Bissell Hotchkiss was born in 1827 in Salisbury, Connecticut as one of three children of to William Bissell and Eliza Ann Loveland. Hotkiss grew up in Sharon and was a member of the famed Bissell family and related to President Benjamin Harrison.

Then in 1892, she founded the Hotchkiss Library in Sharon, Connecticut, where her husband had grown up and worked as an ordnance engineer in his father's factory.