African American - Black History · Mary Fields, also known as Stagecoach Mary, (born 1832?, Hickman county, Tennessee, U.S.

Mary Fields, also known as Stagecoach Mary, (born 1832?, Hickman county, Tennessee, U.S.—died December 5, 1914, Cascade county, Montana), American pioneer who was the first African American woman to become a U.S. postal service star (contract) route mail carrier.
Fields was born into slavery. Little is known of her early life or what she did in the years immediately following the end of the Civil War and her emancipation. In the late 1870s, she became a housekeeper at the Ursuline Convent in Toledo, Ohio, where she had a close relationship with Mother Amadeus. Various accounts posit that Mother Amadeus was a member of a family that owned Fields when she was a child and that this early acquaintanceship accounted both for their close relationship and for Fields’s presence at the convent. It is known that Fields was about 6 feet (1.8 metres) tall and weighed about 200 pounds (91 kg) and was capable of doing what was then regarded as men’s work as well as more-standard housekeeping chores. When Mother Amadeus was sent to St. Peter’s Mission outside Cascade, Montana, Fields initially remained in Toledo, but about 1885 Mother Amadeus sent for her (most accounts say that Mother Amadeus was near death with pneumonia and asked for Mary to take care of her), and Fields relocated to Montana.