Typewriter Pioneer Virginia Henry McRae: A Tribute on International Women’s Day

EGARDING International Women’s Day, it's about time we gave some long-overdue recognition to the typewriter pioneer, Virginia Henry McRae. Virginia hasn’t received much in the way of acknowledgement since November 1883, when the New York Journal saluted her with a lengthy and widely syndicated article titled, “Beauty’s Nimble Fingers”. “A southern young lady of former wealth and position gracefully earning her living, Miss McRae and her bevy of type-writers” the headline went on. The story began in a predictable way, with the Journal’s reporter climbing a flight of stairs at No 245 Broadway, Manhattan, asking for a “Mr McRae” and being told by Virginia, “I am Mr McRae”. He found himself “in an unusually tasteful and well-kept office, and the reply to his question came from between lips that would make a cherry blush. Looking up at him were a pair of blue, mischievous eyes that sparkled out from beneath a cloud of wavy, brown bangs.” The “V.H. McRae Esquire” the journalist was looking for turned out, much to his surprise, to be a then 35-year-old Miss McRae. But he knew he was in the right place, because soon enough he heard a “click, click, click, now faint and slow, like the evening song of a cricket, and now in great volume and loud and fast, as though a whole army of the little fireside insects were battling with a Wagner opera.” [Little would the Journal’s man have known it, but another Wagner probably had had something to do with the machine producing such noise.]

The reporter said there were 15 “neat and intelligent looking maidens” working McRae’s typewriters. “This is indeed a new field for women,” Virginia told him. “This office is the agency of the Remington type-writer and I am manager of it. I keep … the young ladies continually busy.” McRae went on to say that typing was “about the only business outside of the school room and the newspaper office in which a woman can engage and retain her social position, free from contaminating influences [my italics]. Young ladies make between $5 to $15  a week … my girls are all good workers and write at the rate of from 60 to 70 words per minute, and can duplicate eight and 10 copies at a time.” Apart from English, McRae’s typists also worked with French and Spanish language keyboards.

McRae said she had started the business in 1880 with one typewriter and was planning to introduce to the market her own typewriter – she believed the cost of going into manufacturing typewriters would be about $150,000, based on the Remington enterprise. But with wealthy clients needing their work copied by McRae’s typists, the money was rolling into McRae’s establishment. She told the Journal that she sold more Remingtons than the company’s general agent and that “if her health was spared she felt sure she would make a fortune [and] that she had yet never lost a client”.

Among the playwrights using her “copyist” services was Margaret Julia Mitchell (above, 1832-1918), the New York actress, who like McRae had had southern sympathies. Mitchell had befriended both John Wilkes Booth and Abraham Lincoln. Other clients were James O'Neill (1847-1920), the father of Eugene O'Neill, and the comedy team of Tony Hart (1855-1891) and Edward Harrigan (1844-1911). But most of McRae’s work was for lawyers, architects and railroad companies.

McRae remained in the “copyist” business at 245 Broadway until 1890, when she became editor and general manager of The Phonogram, “The official organ of the Phonograph Companies of the US”. The journal was launched in January 1891 and McRae was based in the just-opened New York World Building (also the Pulitzer Building) in the Civic Centre of Manhattan, along Park Row between Frankfort Street and the Brooklyn Bridge. She brought out at least 23 editions until 1893.

The Phonogram also covered new typewriters on the market:

Virginia Henry McRae was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, on October 28, 1848, the daughter of Duncan Kirkland McRae (right) and his wife Louise Jane Virginia (the daughter of state legislator Judge Louis Debonair Henry). Duncan Kirkland McRae (1820-1888) was an attorney, diplomat, state legislator and newspaper editor. He was an officer in the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War, the wounds received in it complicating his later life. Born in Fayetteville, at the age five of five he delivered a welcoming speech to Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, during the marquis’s visit to the first city named in his honour. In 1842 McRae was elected into the North Carolina House of Commons as Democratic representative for his native Cumberland County. The family moved to Wilmington three years after Virginia’s birth.

McRae served as Consul to Paris with the US Ambassador to France during the administration of President Franklin Pierce from 1853-57. When the American Civil War began McRae was appointed commanding officer of the 5th North Carolina Infantry Regiment with the rank of Colonel in the Confederate Army. He commanded his regiment during the Peninsula Campaign and fought in the Battle of Williamsburg. There he was wounded while leading a charge. He returned to command his regiment during the Maryland Campaign, leading it into the maelstrom of the Battle of Antietam. McRae was badly wounded and resigned his commission in 1862.

In 1863, when Virginia was 14, her father was appointed a special envoy and purchase agent charged with finding a market for cotton and to procure badly needed supplies in Europe. During this time Virginia and her mother travelled with US Minister to France John Adams Dix (right, 1798-1879) to Rome, where Virginia was blessed by Pope Pius IX.

On their return to the US, Virginia “made her debut” in November 1871, just turned 23, at the Washington DC home of Katherine Jane Chase Sprague, left, the society hostess and daughter of Ohio politician Salmon Portland Chase. Virginia was the first to dance with the visiting Grand Duke Alexei Alexandrovich of Russia. “[I] was a giddy, young flirty girl in those days and never thought I would have to work [for a living],” Virginia recalled in 1883. The McRae family settled in Memphis, Tennessee, where Virginia’s elder sister Margaret Kirkland McRae lived her husband, Judge Samuel Polk Walker, the nephew of President James Knox Polk. But Duncan McRae lost everything in “The Panic of 1873”, a financial crisis that triggered an economic depression in Europe and North America until 1877. The McRaes returned to Wilmington in 1880. In May 1887 Duncan McRae and his wife moved to Brooklyn to live with Virginia and Duncan died there nine months later.

Virginia and her mother lived on Washington Avenue in The Bronx; Jane McRae died in New York 1906 and Virginia died in The Bronx on January 11, 1918, aged 69.