Brown, Martha McClellan (1838–1916)

American temperance leader. Born Martha McClellan in Baltimore, Maryland, on April 16, 1838; died in Dayton, Ohio, on August 31, 1916; graduated from Pittsburgh Female College, 1862; married Rev. W. Kennedy Brown (a Methodist minister), 1858.

Martha Brown, the wife of a Methodist minister, first gained recognition in the temperance movement as a lecturer during the Civil War years. A member of the Order of Good Templars, a fraternal temperance society, she served the state executive committee of the Ohio Templars as grand vice-templar and in 1867 became editor of the Alliance Monitor, a post she held until 1876 (the paper was owned by her husband from 1870). Martha Brown helped lay the groundwork for the national Prohibition Party in 1869. Elected world supreme vice-templar in 1874, she was instrumental in founding in Columbus, Ohio, in February of that year, what may have been the first women's state temperance society. In August, she and two others planned a national temperance society, and Brown is believed to have drafted the call for the convention that met in Cleveland in November to organize the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. Unable to win the presidency of that group, possibly because of her identification with the Templars, she withdrew from the organization. She also later withdrew from the Templars when they refused to admit black members. Continuing her efforts through the Prohibition Party, she served on the executive committee from 1876 to 1880. Brown was also a force behind the National Prohibition Alliance, a speakers bureau, of which she served as secretary and principal lecturer until the Alliance's dissolution in 1882. She served variously on the Prohibition Party's executive committee until 1896, when she broke with the party over their failure to adopt the woman suffrage plank. Brown rejoined the Templars in 1881, making several lecture tours of Great Britain. She devoted her later years to local philanthropies in Cincinnati.