Freedom, Fraternity, Chastity:

The Memnonia Institute

In 1856, Mary Gove Nichols, with her husband Thomas, founded and ran the Memnonia Institute in the Glen.  The Nichols’s leased the Yellow Springs Water-Cure for 5 years.  Though the central building comfortably housed 100 people, members from the time never reported more than 20 attendees. 

The couple taught and healed based on their motto: Freedom, Fraternity, and Chastity.  Memnonia advocated a vegetarian lifestyle, daily cold-water baths from the Spring, abstinence from tobacco, neat attire and polite actions.  However, the group was overshadowed by the Nichols’ unorthodox views of marriage.   Nichols and her husband believed that many marriages were loveless and hurt those involved, and as a result people should not marry unless they were having children.  Consequently the Nichols’, and the group they founded, were labeled “free lovers.” 

Memnonia was disbanded only one year after it opened, in part due to the village’s reaction to the Nichols’ marriage views.  Antioch president Horace Mann also inflamed villagers’ opinion by repeatedly denouncing the group.  In 1857 Memnonia broke up and the Nichols’ converted to Catholicism. 

Image from Memnonia Prospectus, courtesy of Antiochiana. 

<< Back to the history timeline