Maria Caroline Swinney (maiden name: Savage) was born in Germantown, Kentucky on June 22, 1832, to James Savage and Sally Currens. Her father was a minister who owned at least 6 slaves and $100,000 in property. As a local writer later reported, she received a “good common school education at home” before attending the Hillsboro Female College in Ohio.

She married James Oswald Swinney in Mason County, Kentucky, on November 10, 1852, and the couple settled in Howard County, Missouri. They had two children together: Mary Ann, born around 1855; and William Daniel, who was born on June 5, 1858, and died of scarlet fever on November 5, 1863. “Oswald” (as his family called him) joined the Methodist Church in 1855, and Maria became a Sunday School teacher in Glasgow, Missouri, two years later. She held that position for the next thirty-six years.

Although Maria only had one surviving child, friends recalled, she had a strong “motherly mature” and “gladly joined her husband in caring for orphan children.” She and Oswald helped raise his niece, Berenice Morrison, and his granddaughter, Berenice Scarritt. The latter embroiled the Swinneys in a high-profile custody dispute. Their daughter Mary Ann died on August 28, 1876, and left her 1-year-old daughter in Oswald and Maria’s care. The child’s father, Edward Scarritt, agreed to let her stay with the Swinneys until she turned 10. In January 1882, however, he filed a petition with the state Supreme Court, demanding Berenice’s return. The justices ruled in Scarritt’s favor, but they praised the Swinneys for their “amiability, culture, and deeds of labor and love.”

Maria described the court case as one of the “bitterest trials of my life.” She viewed Berenice as her adopted daughter, and she denounced Missouri’s “unjust laws and oppressive social discriminations” for taking the child away from her. She confessed that she had “never troubled myself to woman’s rights until this great wrong has been brought upon me…I see now where the law as it stands is so oppressive.” She vowed to “do whatever I can do” to have “these oppressive laws changed.”

Maria’s health deteriorated in the 1870s, and she reportedly never fully recovered from the pain of losing her two children. Even so, she poured herself into her Sunday School classes and local religious work. In July 1893, she delivered a paper on “Juvenile Work” at the state Methodist Assembly, and that October, she presided over a two-day meeting of the Woman’s Missionary Society. Poor health finally forced her to stop teaching in the mid-1890s. She died in Glasgow, Missouri, on January 21, 1899, and was buried in Washington Cemetery. Her tombstone was dedicated “in memory of our beloved teacher from her Sunday school class.”