Mary Kies
In the early morning hours of December 15th, 1836, the United States Patent Office in Washington caught fire.
It started in the basement, in a wooden box where ashes from the stoves had been stored before they had fully cooled. The box sat next to a pile of firewood, and the buried embers ignited.
Inside the building were the original specifications and drawings for nearly every patent issued by the American Republic in its first forty-six years. About ten thousand of them. Patents tied to the cotton gin. The steamboat. The cast-iron plow. Documents detailing all the clever improvements people had made and petitioned the country to protect were, for the most part, turned to ash.
Eight hundred miles to the north, in a house in Brooklyn, New York, a woman named Mary Kies was about eighty-four years old and living with her son, Daniel. She had been living with him for twenty-three years, since her second husband died.
Mary likely did not know about the fire. But the fire was, in a sense, about her. Among the documents burned that night was a patent issued on May 5th, 1809, signed by President Madison, granting to Mrs. Mary Kies of South Killingly, Connecticut, the rights to “a new and useful improvement in weaving straw with silk or thread.”
History generally remembers it as the first U.S. patent ever issued to a woman in her own name.
But the patent itself is gone, and so is the technical description Mary sent to Washington with it. The First Lady, Dolley Madison, is said to have written her a note of congratulation — though that note, too, is missing. There is no portrait of Mary. No letter she wrote. No diary or account book. Her grave in Brooklyn is unmarked. What we have is a date, a village, and a twelve-word description in a ledger. Much of the rest, we have to reconstruct from the world around her.
In 1809, the U.S. patent system was not quite nineteen years old, after the Patent Act of 1790 specified that patents could be issued to “any person or persons.” In the earliest years, the system had been almost absurdly intimate: every patent application was reviewed, in person, by a board of three — Thomas Jefferson, the Secretary of State; Henry Knox, the Secretary of War; and Edmund Randolph, the Attorney General. They sat together and read the specifications, examined the model, if you sent one, and decided, between running a country, whether your invention was, in the language of the law, “sufficiently useful and important.” Fifty-seven patents were issued in the first three years.
Despite the law’s language allowing any person to apply, by 1809, no one had done so unambiguously in her own name. Hannah Slater had been granted a patent in 1793 for cotton sewing thread. But the document was issued to “Mrs. Samuel Slater,” her husband’s name. A patent for a cheese press was issued on December 28th, 1808, to a person recorded as Hazen Irwin, of Boston, five months before Mary. Some later sources have identified this patentee as a woman named Hazel Irwin, but the original record gives the name as Hazen, and we cannot confirm who the inventor was, or even whether the name in the ledger was a man’s or a woman’s. And the patent itself, like Mary’s, burned in 1836.
So the honor goes to Mary. Because what she did was insist, in writing, in the specification she sent to Washington, that the inventor was Mary Kies. Not Mrs. John Kies. Not the wife of. Mary Kies.
Beyond that, we don’t know much. We know that her invention belonged to the cottage industry of New England hat-making — the long winter labor of farm women braiding straw into bonnets to bring in extra household income. We know that Britain and France were at war, and that both nations had been seizing American merchant ships and, in Britain’s case, pulling American sailors off them and forcing them into the Royal Navy. We know that in December of 1807, after a British warship fired on an American frigate off the coast of Virginia, President Jefferson responded by signing an embargo that closed American ports to foreign trade entirely.
American exports collapsed by roughly eighty percent in a year as a result. The New England hat industry, which had depended on imported European bonnets to set the fashion, was suddenly cut off from its supply, and American hat-makers had to make their own. So whatever Mary’s invention actually was, it likely made cheaper, sturdier hats. The technique caught on. Massachusetts straw-bonnet production in 1810 was valued at over half a million dollars.
Given the situation, one might think that Mary became rich. Yet there is little evidence that Mary profited much from it.
By the 1820s, fashion moved on, and whatever foothold Mary had built was likely gone. She moved in with Daniel, and the documentary record from there out, just as with most of her life, is almost completely blank, until she passed away on the first day of 1837, just two weeks after the patent that bore her name burned.
Sources:
Blakemore, Erin. “Meet Mary Kies, America’s First Woman to Become a Patent Holder.” Smithsonian Magazine, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/meet-mary-kies-americas-first-woman-become-patent-holder-180959008/
Khan, B. Zorina. “Married Women’s Property Laws and Female Commercial Activity: Evidence from United States Patent Records, 1790-1895.” The Journal of Economic History, vol. 56, no. 2, 1996, pp. 356–88. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2123970. Accessed 6 May 2026.
“Mary Dixon Kies.” National Inventors Hall of Fame, https://www.invent.org/inductees/mary-dixon-kies
“Mary Kies.” Lamelson - MIT, https://lemelson.mit.edu/resources/mary-kies
“Patent History Materials Index - List of all U.S. Patents and Patentees -- 1790 - 1829.” IP Mall, The University of New Hampshire Franklin Pierce School of Law, https://ipmall.law.unh.edu/content/patent-history-materials-index-list-all-us-patents-and-patentees-1790-1829
“The Embargo of 1807.” Digital History, University of Houston, https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?psid=2986&smtID=2