Mary Dixon Kies was born on March 21, 1752, in South Killingly, Connecticut, into a farming family of modest means. Her father, John Dixon, had been born in 1679 in Ulster, Ireland, and immigrated to New England, where he worked the land like most settlers of the time. Her mother, Janet Kennedy, was Dixon’s third wife; the couple married in Voluntown, Connecticut, on August 7, 1741. Little is recorded of Mary’s childhood beyond the ordinary labors of a rural household in colonial Connecticut. She grew up in a world where women’s work was essential yet rarely recognized in law or public record.
She first married Isaac Pike and in 1770 gave birth to a son, Isaac Pike II. After Pike’s death she married John Kies, born around 1750. With Kies she had additional children, including a son named Daniel and, according to some genealogical accounts, Harvey and Abigail. John Kies died on August 18, 1813, at about age sixty-three. After his death Mary eventually went to live with Daniel in Brooklyn, New York.
The event that secured her place in history occurred late in her life. On May 5, 1809—some contemporary accounts give May 15—Mary Dixon Kies received a United States patent for “a new and useful improvement in weaving straw with silk or thread.” President James Madison signed the document. The patent covered a method of incorporating silk or thread into straw as it was woven, producing hats and bonnets that were stronger, more flexible, and more attractive than those made of straw alone. The silk held the cross-hatching together and gave the finished piece a refined appearance that appealed to both working women who needed practical sun and rain protection and fashionable women who wanted something finer than plain straw.
The timing was fortunate. The Napoleonic Wars and the Embargo Act of 1807 had cut off imported European millinery. American women still needed hats for fieldwork and for town wear. A few years earlier, in 1798, Betsy Metcalf of Rhode Island had popularized a method of braiding straw that could be done at home from local materials; she employed many women and girls but never sought a patent, later saying she did not want her name sent to Congress. Kies took the further step of protecting her improvement under the Patent Act of 1790, which allowed “any person or persons” to apply. In practice, married women in most states could not independently own property, so few bothered. Kies applied in her own name and succeeded.
The New England straw-hat industry expanded rapidly. In 1810 Massachusetts alone produced straw bonnets valued at roughly five hundred thousand dollars—equivalent to several million dollars today. First Lady Dolley Madison, known for her interest in fashion and in encouraging domestic manufacture, praised Kies for helping American industry and wrote her a complimentary note. The technique was widely adopted and continued in use even after the original patent papers were lost in the great Patent Office fire of 1836, which destroyed nearly ten thousand records.
Kies and her family tried to turn the invention into a lasting business. Her son Daniel and others invested capital, but changing fashions soon reduced demand for the particular style her method produced. After her husband’s death she lived with Daniel and died in 1837 at the age of eighty-four or eighty-five, with little money to her name. Some accounts place her death on January 1 of that year and say she was buried in a pauper’s grave in Brooklyn; her remains were later associated with Old South Killingly Cemetery in Connecticut, where an uninscribed fieldstone originally marked the spot.
For more than a century her grave remained almost anonymous. In 1965 members of Killingly Grange No. 112 learned of her story and erected a proper headstone that identified her as the first woman in the United States to apply for and receive a patent. Samples of the straw-and-silk fabric she wove survive at the Danielson Public Library, donated by a great-granddaughter. In 2006 she was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
Historians still debate whether she was strictly the first woman to receive a U.S. patent. Hannah Wilkinson Slater received a patent in 1793, but it was issued in the name of “Mrs. Samuel Slater.” Hazel Irwin received a patent for a cheese press in 1808. Kies is generally credited as the first to obtain one in her own name. By 1840 only about twenty patents had been granted to women. Her case remains important because she acted when custom and law discouraged women from claiming legal ownership of their ideas.
Kies’s life illustrates both opportunity and constraint in the early republic. The patent system was theoretically open to all citizens, yet social and legal realities kept most women from using it. She lived through the Revolution, the early industrial stirrings of New England, the embargo years, and the War of 1812. Her invention met an immediate economic need and briefly supported a cottage industry that employed many women at home. When fashion moved on, the commercial value faded, and she died poor. What remained was the legal precedent and the later recognition that a farm-raised Connecticut woman in her late fifties had claimed, in her own name, the protection the law offered inventors.
Her story is incomplete in many details. The original patent description is gone. Portraits do not exist. Everyday correspondence has not survived. What is known comes from genealogical records, contemporary newspaper notices, later local histories, and the official patent date. Those fragments are enough to show a woman who observed a practical problem, devised an improvement, and took the unusual step of securing legal rights to it. In doing so she became a small but lasting figure in the history of American invention and of women’s participation in the public economic life of the new nation.