Ada Mayo Stewart was born on December 2, 1870, in Braintree, Massachusetts, to William Henry Stewart (1831 – 1913) and Roline Mayo (1839 – 1883). Stewart graduated from Vermont Academy in Saxton’s River, Vermont, in 1889 and attended the Waltham School of Nursing in Waltham, Massachusetts.
Waltham specialized in private nursing as well as in district and visiting nursing. When Fletcher Proctor, president of the Vermont Marble Company, decided to hire a nurse to provide care for his employees and their families, he asked for advice from the superintendent at Waltham. The superintendent recommended Stewart, a recent graduate with special training in surgical and dispensary work.
In March 1895, Proctor hired Stewart, and she began working at Vermont Marble Company in Proctor, Vermont; and thus became the first official industrial nurse in the United States.
The nursing service was provided free to families of the Vermont Marble Company employees and to other families who were unable to pay. Ada Stewart visited families at their homes. She wore her Waltham school uniform and a plain coat and hat. She often rode her bicycle, but at times drove the company furnished horse and wagon, or took a trolley to visit the families. Her salary was $900 the first year and $1,000 the second year of employment. Many of the company’s employees were Hungarian, Polish, Czech, Swedish, and Italian immigrants who spoke little or no English, and Stewart eventually learned these various languages at the conversational level. She delivered babies with no running water or electricity, took care of children with bad vision and scalp conditions, and began treating workers with strains, sprains, gashes. In time she established a rapport with these families, in part due to her efforts to use their cultural customs and practices of caring for the sick whenever possible.
A friend who was a teacher in one of the village schools asked Ada to speak to her class about health and what Ada called “right living.” This prompted Fletcher Proctor to encourage her to speak to the students in the local schools.
Fletcher Proctor also hired Ada’s sister, Harriet Wyman Stewart (1872 – 1949), to work in a similar capacity in West Rutland.
Proctor also founded a hospital in 1896, a year after hiring Stewart, and because of Stewart’s training with surgical and dispensary work, made Stewart the first superintendent. Before the hospital was built most injuries had been cared for in a physician’s office.
Ada left the hospital in 1900 and worked as a nurse in various parts of the United States but in 1918 on a visit to her sister in West Rutland, she met Henry J. Markolf. They married on March 14, 1918, in West Rutland, Vermont. She retired soon after.
Near the end of her life, she wrote: “The Proctor district nurse went about her daily task of giving advice and comfort, bathing new babies, caring for the mothers, helping in emergencies, dressing wounds and teaching ways of health and good habits in seven languages as well as she knew. She did not know that she was an industrial nurse nor did she dream that these and other small beginnings would grow to the splendid work that the modern public health nurses are doing in the world.”
