Mary Dixon Kies

For a number of years we have had a lot of inquiries about Mary Dixon Kies, the first woman in the U. S. to receive a patent in her own right on 5 May 1809, which was for a method where straw was woven with silk to produce material for bonnets.   Even President Madison's wife Dolly expressed her appreciation of the fact by sending a note.  Unfortunately, fashions changed and this wasn't needed anymore.
But the main reason I am writing something about her is that there is so much misinformation on the internet about her.   And it just keeps being perpetuated as no one bothers to discover the real story.  
There is a "picture" of her in a fancy bonnet on the internet, and many people think that it is really her or they call us to ask us for a picture.  Well, I tell them, photography was not invented in 1810 and the family did not have the money to have a portrait painted.   As for the bonnet, I tell them that what she was weaving was not fancy, it was for a country woman who worked on the farm. 
She was born Mary Dixon in South Killingly on the 21 Mar. 1752 daughter of John & Janet (Kennedy) Dixon.  She married first on 21 Mar. 1770 to Isaac Pike and they had one child, Issac, born 27 Dec. 1770.  The father Isaac died ca 1772 and Mary married second John Kies but there is no marriage date that we have found.
In the Windham County Transcript dated 18 Aug. 1897 they copied a letter that was published in the Norwich Bulletin about Mary Kies and it was so absolutely wrong that in the next paper, dated 25 Aug. 1897, is a letter from "One of the grandchildren" in South Killingly to correct it:  "If the writer of the article you quoted last week from the Norwich Bulletin had consulted Miss Larned's History of Windham County he would have seen that the person who obtained the patent was Mrs. Mary Kies of South Killingly.
  Mrs. Kies' maiden name was Mary Dixon.  She was the daughter of John Dixon, who lived in South Killingly in the house now owned by Cyrus Battey, or perhaps an earlier house standing on the same site.  The patent was obtained in 1809.  Her husband, John Kies, died in 1813.  But she lived to be over 80 years of age, dying in 1837.  She had a large family, and her descendants are numerous, and while the sixth generation has its representative, there are at least three of her grandchildren living and two reside in Killingly, one of whom has keepsakes that her grandmother gave her which show her skill in the manufacture of straw.
   Mrs. Kies lived for several years in the house that formerly stood near where the Leonard Day barn now stands.  She afterward built a house on the Green Hollow Road, a short distance south of Lysander Warren's, in which she was living at the time of her death.  The house stood on the east side of the road and was burned several years since."

The Lysander Warren house is still standing.  A big old colonial and I believe it was one of the Hutchins houses earlier.  Everything we have seen in print says that Mary Kies died in Brooklyn, CT but this article by a grandchild says she died in her house in Killingly.   In any case, there is no death record for her.   Nor was there a gravestone, but there was one for her husband John Kies, in the Old South Killingly cemetery.
In 1965 the Killingly Grange #112 under the Grange Master Mervin Whipple erected a commemorative headstone to this remarkable woman next to her husband in the Old South Killingly cemetery.