Evelyn Louise Way Kendall Papers

Evelyn Louise Way was born in North Bay, Ontario, Canada to William Beall Way, a superintendent in the Canadian railway system, and Mary Louise Deacon Way. She attended Albert College in Belleville, Ontario and Pickering College in Newmarket, Ontario, and graduated in the class of 1916 from the Royal Victoria Hospital Training School for Nurses in Montreal. Evelyn met Henry P. Kendall, a rising American textile businessman from Massachusetts, on a transatlantic crossing. They were married Feb. 11, 1926 in Montreal. They had three children; Henry Way Kendall (1926), John Plimpton Kendall (1928), and Helen Louise Kendall (1930). While a nurse by profession, Mrs. Kendall was by avocation both an artist in her own right and a wide-ranging collector of art and antiques. She played a leading role in assembling and continually building the art collection of the Kendall Whaling Museum, founded in 1956, and her husband’s collection of South Caroliniana donated to the University of South Carolina in 1961. She also amassed a significant doll collection (sold in 1999 at Sotheby’s in London), a costume collection (donated by her to the Royal Ontario Museum), a shell collection (since lost, probably in a barn fire), and a major collection of artworks, artifacts, photographs and documents related to ballooning and early aviation (donated to the Smithsonian Institution in 2014 as the Evelyn W. Kendall Ballooning and Early Aviation Collection). While she spent her married life in the United States, predominantly Massachusetts and South Carolina, she retained Canadian citizenship and strong Canadian ties throughout her life.