Martha McClellan Brown (April 16, 1838 – August 31, 1916) was a lecturer, educator, reformer, newspaper editor, and major leader in the temperance movement in Ohio. In 1861, Brown joined the fraternal organization Independent Order of Good Templars, beginning her temperance career. The organization promoted total abstinence and state prohibition. In 1868, she was editor of a local newspaper in Alliance, Ohio, The Alliance Monitor, where she and her husband turned it into a temperance publication during their tenure until 1878. She served as Grand Templar of Ohio from 1872–1873. Brown helped form the Women's Temperance Association of Ohio in 1874 by drafting a plan and called for the First Woman's National Temperance Convention in November 1874 after realizing new supporters of the temperance movement were unwilling to join the Good Templars. At the convention, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was founded. She wanted to be president of the new organization, but the post went to Annie Turner Wittenmyer because of Brown's ties to the Good Templars. In 1876, Brown was named vice president of the Prohibition Party and advocated for women's suffrage as part of the platform. She moved to New York City in 1877, leaving her family in Pittsburgh and spending her time as secretary of the National Prohibition Alliance. Brown broke with the party in 1896 when the party dropped its commitment to suffrage. Brown served as vice-president of the Cincinnati Wesleyan Women's College from 1882 to 1892. In Cincinnati, she became prominent in civic affairs, including organizing school mothers’ clubs; launching a summer program from the city's poor children; and president of the Woman's Rotary Club in 1914. She was a contributor of current articles to dallies and monthlies. Early life and education Martha ("Mattie") McClellan was born in Baltimore, Maryland on April 16, 1838. Her parents were David and Jane Manypenny McClellan. On the father's side she is descended from the McClellans, Covenanters of Scotland, and on the mother's side from the old Maryland families of Manypenny and Hight. In 1840, the family relocated to Cambridge, Ohio. She was orphaned at eight years old. Martha and an only older sister were admitted to full family privileges in the home of neighbors, Thomas and Nancy Cummings Cranston, the husband a Protestant Irishman, and the wife of the old Quaker Cummings family, of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In the fall of 1860, she was a pupil in the