FOLLANSBEE, ELIZABETH (ATCHISON) (1862-1937)

FOLLANSBEE, ELIZABETH (ATCHISON), teacher and retail merchant; b. Newcastle, 26 Feb 1862, d/o Alexander Atchison and Elizabeth Jane Hill; m. 1900, John A. Follansbee, of East Whitman, Mass.; d. Newcastle, 31 Oct 1937.

Elizabeth (Atchison) Follansbee was educated at Harkins Academy and the Provincial Normal School and was employed as an elementary teacher in Newcastle for a number of years. She was thirty-eight years old when she was married in 1900 to John Follansbee, who was somewhat younger. He was one of the early electricians on the Miramichi and became the first full-time electrician of the town of Newcastle in 1905. In 1910 he resigned to join the Western Electric Co. He was residing in Toronto in 1912. In 1914 he joined the Queen's Own Rifles as an electrical engineer and spent five years overseas. He visited Newcastle both before and after the war but did not return to stay.

Soon after her marriage Elizabeth Follansbee began a stationery store in her home in Newcastle under the name of Follansbee & Co. When her husband moved to Toronto she remained and continued to operate the store, in which she also sold fancy goods and confectionery. She had been in business for more than thirty years by 1935 when her store was burned in the fire which consumed the Lounsbury Block.

A member of the Methodist-United Church, Follansbee was active in the Women's Missionary and Ladies' Aid societies, as well as the temperance movement. She was widely-travelled and well-informed, and was the only Miramichi woman to have an entry in the 1922 volume entitled Prominent People of the Maritime Provinces.