The youngest of eight children, Mary was the last of John and Susan Shaffer’s children living at home when they sold their Illyria Township farm and moved to Elgin that spring. A few months after the family settled into their new house, Mary left for Fayette, where she enrolled in summer school at Upper Iowa University. Her first job was teaching at Lime Springs, where her sister, Hazel Whitford, lived. Mary’s father took her to Lime Springs in his car, dropping his youngest child off a few days before she began her first term September 10, 1917.
At the close of the fall term Mary returned to Elgin, where she remained through the summer. On September 30, 1918, she left to enroll in a business course at Coe College. She was there only a few days before the college was forced to close – Spanish Influenza was raging in Cedar Rapids.
By fall 1918 the flu was a global pandemic that had claimed millions of lives. Newspapers carried obituaries every day with people young and old across the state succumbing to the disease. When Mary returned from Cedar Rapids complaining of a cold, her parents didn’t take it lightly. The cold quickly became pneumonia. Her parents called a physician, and her family tried to nurse her through the worst of it, but by the morning of Wednesday, October 18, 1918, there was little hope of recovery. Her parents and siblings gathered at their house in Elgin and watched as their little sister slipped away shortly before sunset. She was 19 years old.
Her death was a heavy blow to the entire family, especially her 18 nieces and nephews, who were not much younger than their aunt Mary and grew up playing with her like a big sister. The family gathered at the Shaffer home for a private service before they traveled to the Illyria Church, where the large funeral was held in the fresh air of the cemetery, where she was laid to rest.
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