Mary Gates
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The Original Porcelain 8” marionette
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The True Story of Mary (Crowell) Gates. Wife of Theophilus R. Gates, Unwilling Battle-Axe member, and quiet survivor of Free Love Valley.
Life with Theophilus
Mary Crowell Gates: Life with Theophilus Gates
Very little is recorded about Mary Crowell before she stepped into the path of Theophilus Ransom Gates, but we know that on November 16, 1822, she married the already-controversial preacher in Philadelphia. He was a restless, sharp-tongued critic of churches and clergy; she became his partner, following him through years of itinerant ministry, radical publishing, and finally into the strange experiment that would become Free Love Valley. Their marriage produced no children, but it did pull Mary into the center of one of the most notorious religious scandals in nineteenth-century Pennsylvania.
By the late 1830s and early 1840s, Theophilus had turned his attack on organized religion into a full-blown assault on the institution of marriage itself. His talk about “cats and dogs fighting” probably reflected on his unhappy marriage to Mary.
When he and his followers settled in rural North Coventry Township, Chester County, Mary was among the small circle who tried to live out his doctrines of shared property and “free love.” She appears in historical lists of Battle-Axe adherents, named simply as “Mary Gates, the wife of Theophilus”, and contemporary court records show that she paid a personal price for this allegiance: in 1843 she served four months in prison for fornication, one of several Battle-Axes jailed during the county’s crackdown on the sect.
After Theophilus’s death in 1846, Mary’s path changed. The man whose sermons and tracts had reordered her life was buried at Oak Grove Cemetery near Parker Ford, and Mary left the valley that had made them infamous. She moved to Woodbridge, Middlesex County, New Jersey, where she quietly joined the community of the First Presbyterian Church and lived out her remaining years in far more conventional surroundings. She died on 13 August 1861 and was buried in the churchyard there.
Mary’s story is harder to trace than her husband’s—her voice survives only in court dockets, membership lists, and a weathered gravestone—but those fragments are enough to show her as more than a footnote. She was a woman who followed a charismatic husband into a daring, chaotic experiment in faith and freedom, endured public trial and imprisonment, and eventually chose a quieter ending for herself in a small New Jersey parish.
Meet Lerin Ott- The Voice Actress Behind Mary Gates
Meet Lerin, the talented voice behind Mary Gates. Lerin does puppet voices in between Being a mother of two active toddlers and being a Super Nurse!
