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Haynes, Laura Nixon

Main entryHaynes, Laura Nixon
Birth placeBaltimore, Hamilton Township, Northumberland County, Ontario
Birth date8 March 1876
Death placeOshawa, Ontario
Death date1971
Identifier0084
Birth nameEllen Laura Nixon
Married nameHaynes
Marital statusmarried
Religious affiliationFree Church; Anglican
Paid workteacher (school)
BiographyRaised and educated in the countryside around Coburg, Ontario, Ellen Laura Nixon (1876-1971) qualified as a teacher at the Ottawa Normal School. Until her marriage in 1916 to Frederick Charles Haynes (1875-1948), Laura taught in the communities of Pelham, Stamford, and Grantham Townships, where her first poems were patriotic verses for her pupils to recite on Empire Day. She contributed poetry to the MAIL AND EMPIRE and the periodicals which circulated in rural districts, including the CANADIAN COUNTRYMAN, FARM AND DAIRY and the FARMER'S ADVOCATE. For four years she was a school trustee. Her five volumes present a variety of subjects in styles ranging from traditional forms to modernist free verse. She composed witty epigrams, whimsical children's rhymes, more serious devotional poems and stirring narratives based on her research in the rich historical field of the Niagara area. Laura and Frederick lived on the Haynes Family Homestead in St. Catharines, on ground granted to his Loyalist ancestors in 1784. In 1948, Laura dedicated COMING MY WAY? to the memory of her friend, Nina Moore Jamieson.* That same year, Frederick passed away; four years later, Laura sold the homestead, now a St. Catharines heritage site. She died in 1971 and was buried beside Frederick at Maple Lawn Cemetery in St. Catharines.
Other notesStarting in about her teens, went by "Laura Eleanor Nixon."
ResidencesHamilton Township, Northumberland, Ontario (1881, 1891); Pelham Township, Welland, Ontario (1911); St. Catharines, Ontario (1926); Oshawa, Ontario (-1971)
Geographic regionsOntario
Primary genrespoetry
BooksWHEN YOU AND I REMEMBER (1900); PIONEERS (1938); LANTERNS IN THE DUSK (1944); COMING MY WAY? (1948); AN HOUR OF LEISURE (1955)
PeriodicalsCANADIAN COUNTRYMAN; FARM AND DAIRY; FARMER'S ADVOCATE; MAIL AND EMPIRE
Other publicationsAnthologized in: Creighton and Ridley, NEW CANADIAN ANTHOLOGY (1938)
OrganizationsWomen's Literary Club of St. Catharines, Athanaeum Club
Father's nameGeorge Birney Nixon
Life dates of father17 July 1830, Grafton, Hamilton Township, Northumberland County, Upper Canada (now Ontario) - 4 April 1915, Hamilton, Ontario
Father's notefarmer
Mother's nameAnna Jane ("Jennie") Henderson
Life dates of mother26 November 1841, Ireland - 5 May 1917, Hamilton, Ontario
Spouse 1Frederick Charles Haynes
Life dates of spouse 125 August 1875, Grantham, Lincoln, Ontario - 12 January 1948
Spouse 1 notefarmer; warden of Lincoln County
Marriage 1 date7 October 1916
Marriage 1 placeSt. George's (Anglican) Church, St. Catharines, Lincoln, Ontario
Biographical referencesWHO WAS WHO AMONG NORTH AMERICAN AUTHORS 1921-1939; 1881 Census of Canada; 1891 Census of Canada; 1911 Census of Canada; Ontario, Canada Births, 1869-1913; Ontario, Canada Marriages, 1801-1928; special thanks to John C. Haynes, distant cousin of the author, for family contributions
Bibliographic referencesWatters, CHECKLIST OF CANADIAN LITERATURE...1620-1960 (1970), p. 88; Amicus (National Library of Canada)
Research referencescomplete
Archival referencesletters and essays, Women's Literary Club of St. Catharines Fonds
Image creditsImage from Alan Creighton and Hilda M. Ridley, eds., A NEW CANADIAN ANTHOLOGY (Toronto: Crucible, 1938).
CopyrightThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/. Please cite Canada's Early Women Writers. SFU Library Digital Collections. Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada. 1980-2014.