Mabel H. Grosvenor

Mabel Harlakenden Grosvenor (July 28, 1905 – October 30, 2006) was a Canadian-born American pediatrician. She was a granddaughter and secretary to the scientist and telephone pioneer Alexander Graham Bell. She lived in both Beinn Bhreagh, Nova Scotia and Washington, D.C. Grosvenor oversaw the steward ship of Bell's legacy Canadian estate at Beinn Bhreagh, Baddeck, Nova Scotia, until her death, and was also the Honorary President of the Alexander Graham Bell Club (founded in 1891), Canada's oldest continuing women's club. The club grew out of a social organization started at Beinn Bhreagh, by Mabel Bell, Alexander's wife. When Grosvenor died in 2006, at age 101, she was likely the last surviving individual to have personally known and worked with Alexander Graham Bell. Grosvenor was the third of seven children born to Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor (1875–1966), the father of photojournalism, and the first full-time editor of National Geographic Magazine, and to Elsie May Bell (1878–1964), the first child born to Alexander Graham Bell and Mabel Gardiner Hubbard. Grosvenor was named after her maternal grandmother, Mabel, who was struck with deafness at age five and became, apocryphally, the reason for the invention of the telephone by Mabel's fiancée. She lived and grew up in both the Beinn Bhreagh estate where she was born, as well as her parents' home near Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C. In 1912, her parents moved to a large farm in North Bethesda, Maryland, at what later became the Grosvenor Metro station. Grosvenor was described as intelligent, modest and optimistic, and became one of the first female graduates of the Johns Hopkins University medical program in Baltimore, Maryland. She had earlier studied at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, a liberal arts college for women and one of the oldest of the elite "Seven Sisters" universities in the United States. She graduated from Mount Holyoke Phi Beta Kappa in 1927 and completed her medical degree in 1931. She then became a pediatrician and worked with disadvantaged children in Washington, D.