1/6 plate daguerreotype depicting a woman identified as Myra Newton, holding a piece of paper with child seated next to her.
An unmarried woman, Myra (1807-1890) became a school teacher in Templeton, Massachusetts. She then moved to South Boston and worked under Dr. Samuel G. Howe as a teacher, then matron, at the Perkins Institution for the Blind. In the mid-1850s (the time this daguerreotype was taken), she worked at the Massachusetts School for Idiotic and Feeble-minded Youth. By 1870, she served as matron’s assistant to Alice E. Bartlett at the Female Orphan Asylum. Per a written account from her niece, Myra “was a lovely woman, and taught us both by precept and example, what we ought to be.”