Ruth Elaine Poulter Bailey (1858-1940) worked with the Harvard College Observatory from 1888 to 1925.¹ She helped to manage Harvard’s Boyden Station in Arequipa, Peru, assisted with some processing and analysis of glass plates in Arequipa, and served as a hostess for observatory social life in both Arequipa and Cambridge.

Poulter Bailey’s first astronomical work was as a volunteer assistant during Harvard’s expedition to California to view the total solar eclipse of January 1, 1889.² In February 1889, Poulter Bailey, her husband Solon, and her young son Irving traveled to Peru, where Solon had been tasked to scout locations and establish Boyden Station, an observatory from which Harvard astronomers could view the skies of the southern hemisphere. Poulter Bailey helped to manage the construction and day-to-day life of both the initial temporary station and the later permanent facility in Arequipa, Peru.³ In their early years in Peru, due to the insufficient number of astronomical assistants at the site, Poulter Bailey often helped her husband with his astronomical research.⁴ She collected meteorological data for the expedition ⁵ and, in 1892, she and Solon collaborated to count over 6,000 faintly visible stars in the globular cluster w Centauri.⁶ In all, Poulter Bailey and her husband spent over ten years in Peru over the course of five expeditions between 1889 and 1925.⁷

Poulter Bailey managed the station household under difficult, lonely conditions,⁸ especially during their first 1.5 years in Peru, when they lived on a temporary site with paper houses, no modern infrastructure, and a muleteer traveling 8 miles to the site daily to drop off food and water.⁹ Entertainment on the isolated mountain often consisted of going for walks accompanied by the station’s motley collection of cats, dogs, and goats.¹⁰

Once Boyden Station was fully established in its permanent location near the city of Arequipa, Poulter Bailey played a central role in maintaining cordial relations between the observatory and the local communities in Arequipa and Lima. She hosted teas for both Peruvian and American visitors on the observatory balcony, showcasing their beautiful view of the surrounding mountains and her own well-kept, “luxuriant” flower garden.¹¹ After the Peruvian civil war from 1893-1895 (during which, among other things, Poulter Bailey, her husband, and her son spent an evening trapped under siege in an acquaintance’s home in Lima), Poulter Bailey fostered relations with the new revolutionary government by hosting Peru’s revolutionary leaders at her home and giving them a tour of the observatory.¹² She was a similarly generous hostess for the HCO community while her husband was acting director of the HCO from 1919-1921.¹³

Poulter Bailey was born on November 23, 1858 in Saint Louis, Missouri to Charles T. Poulter and Rebecca Poulter, both of whom were born in England.¹⁴ She was living in Concord, New Hampshire and teaching art when she met her husband, Solon Irving Bailey, and they were married on July 10, 1883.¹⁵ She gave birth to her first son, Irving Widmer Bailey, in New Hampshire on August 15, 1884.¹⁶ Her second son, Chester R. Bailey, was born in Cambridge, MA on January 31, 1892, but he died of cholera as an infant.¹⁷ Irving traveled back and forth from Peru with his parents from 1889 to 1897, when he began boarding school in Cambridge,¹⁸ and he would later credit his isolated, nontraditional upbringing in rural South America as the inspiration for his career as a prominent botanist at Harvard.¹⁹ Ruth Poulter Bailey died in 1940 in Massachusetts at the age of about 80, leaving behind her son and two grandsons.²⁰

Written by Elizabeth Coquillette, 2022

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