Mary Coltman Grew

Mary Coltman Grew (1757-1834) was raised in Leicester with her talented sister Elizabeth Coltman  (1761-1838) in the Great Meeting during the ministry of Hugh Worthington. In the late 1770s she married John Grew of Birmingham, and they emigrated in 1795 to America, living in Boston and then New Haven, Connecticut. They were members of the Independent meeting in Carrs Lane, Birmingham, and after removing to America, were members of Congregational and Baptist congregations. In the succeeding years, Florence Skillington writes that the Grews “helped to form in America, a stratum of society which was the counterpart of that to which the Coltmans belonged England” (33). In 1840 Henry Grew, a Philadelphia minister and grandson of John Grew, came to London with his daughter Mary (d. 1896) and a young Wendell Phillips to attend the inaugural World Anti-Slavery Convention. They also spent three weeks in Leicester at the Coltman home in the Newarke, just two years after Elizabeth Coltman’s death. Mary Grew never married, continuing to work for abolition and, after 1863, the crusade for women’s rights. Phillips married Mary Green of Boston, another granddaughter of Mary Grew. See Florence E. Skillington, “The Coltmans of the Newarke at Leicester,” Transactions of the Leicestershire Archaeological Society 18 (1934–35): 3-40.