Exean Woodard is my 1st cousin, 3x removed, on the Woodard branch of the tree—grandpa’s mother’s branch. Her father, Charles Lawton Woodard, and my 2nd great-grandfather, William Arnold Woodard, were brothers.
Charles Lawton & Margaret (Atkinson) Woodards’ oldest daughter, Exean, led an interesting and independent life. Her early history is hazy, though sometime in the 1890s she received her Bachelor’s degree at Ohio Wesleyan and, according to the 1900 Census, worked as a teacher in Grover Hill, Ohio. Then in 1913 she earned a Master’s degree from the University of Chicago. The subject of both degrees is unknown, but likely English.
Woodard does not appear again in the public record until 1917, when she was named Dean of Women at Washington State Normal School at Bellingham (today Western Washington University), a teaching college. Woodard regularly addressed the students and local community on civic issues. In 1918 she urged local residents to collect postage stamps for the YWCA, which then sold them to collectors so the funds could be used to feed war refugees in Belgium. In 1919 she lectured on “Teaching of Morals in the School and Home.”
But as Dean of Women, much of her public work related to the needs of young women attending the college, specifically housing. The college did not have enough dormitory space for its enrollees, so Woodard routinely spoke to local groups and newspapers asking Bellingham families to take in student boarders. She strongly felt that it was important for young women to study at universities away from their families, as homelife obligations often distracted them from academics.
In 1921 she was given leave to study at Columbia University in New York, and returned to Bellingham with new civic enthusiasm. Later that year she spoke to university women in a lecture at the Congregational Church titled “Give Our Girls a Chance.” (Simultaneously, Dr. L. R. Markley spoke to the men on “Sex Hygiene.”) In 1922 she lectured about “The Attribute of Christian Character,” and a year later addressed the League of Women Voters on “Better Citizenship.” She entered a 1923 essay contest sponsored by the National Woman’s Suffrage Association, writing on the theme “How Women Can Best Effect Good Citizenship,” and won a copy of The History of Woman’s Suffrage by Ida Husted Harper.
Woodard also loved the natural world. According to an article titled “200 Elk in One Band Seen by Miss Woodard” (The Bellingham Herald, September 10, 1920): “Two hundred elk in one band was one of the remarkable sights enjoyed by Miss Exean Woodard, dean of women at the Normal School, on three weeks’ vacation into the heard of the Olympics. Miss Woodard took a freighter for sixty-five miles on the sea, starting from Hoquiam, going to the Hoh River district, where she was a guest of the Misses Anderson, former students of the Normal School, and of the Huelsdonk family. Accompanied by her hosts she took to the trail, riding on horseback for 100 miles. At times only an elk trail was followed. In one place 200 of these animals were rounded up on a sandbar by a gentleman member of the party. At one time Miss Woodard was forty miles from a wagon road. In the interior of the mountains she visited three schools and saw Normal girls installed as teachers in each instance. She describes the trip as wonderful.”
In 1923 Woodard left Bellingham for the Midwest, where she continued her graduate work at the University of Chicago, though it does not appear that she finished her doctorate. In 1929 she was listed among the faculty at McKendree University in Lebanon, Illinois, across the river from St. Louis, and for a time was the Chair of the English Department. In April 1931 she addressed the Emerald Mound Grange Hall on “Beauty Spots of Illinois,” and that summer sailed to England where she studied at the British Museum and the Bodleian Library at Oxford. She also visited Scotland.
Always a naturalist, Woodard was an active member of the Wilson Ornithological Club, and appeared in a photo in The Wilson Bulletin in 1937. Exean Woodard is #9 in the front right.
In the late 1930s Woodard appears to have retired, moving to Fort Wayne, Indiana, to be near family; her half-brother Charles and his wife Margaret raised their children there, and though they were dead at this point, many of Exean’s nieces and nephews still lived in the area.
Exean Woodard died in Fort Wayne of cardio-renal disease on July 30, 1945, at the age of 70. She was buried at the Middle Creek Cemetery in Grover Hill, Ohio, the same cemetery where her sister Harriet was laid to rest in 1906.
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