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Going back to the basics
Tammara Green/Post-Register
Mary Gillmore teaches classes on the Constitution in her spare time.
Mary Gillmore moved to Quincy from the Ellensburg area about 24 years ago. On their small farm, they raise horses, cows and chickens, and have a big garden. She has raised her brood of five boys and one girl in the Quincy Valley and has home-schooled all of them. “We wanted to be independent of what the state was offering in education. I gathered the best materials available on my own,” said Gillmore.
Gillmore was used to moving when she came to Quincy, since she spent her life moving around with her father who was in the Air Force. “We moved from Denver to Hawaii to Cheyenne, Wyoming to the Azores Islands off of Portugal. After Portugal we moved back state-side to Utah and then Alaska. In Portugal we weren’t allowed to display American flags. When we came back, my mother said, ‘I spent years in a place where I couldn’t wave the American flag. Now I am going to,’” said Gillmore. She recalled that her mother made sure the American flag was proudly displayed outside of their house every day.
She stressed the importance of teaching her children to read and helping them to become good readers. “The most important thing kids need to learn is to read. If they can learn to read, they can learn anything they want to learn,” she said. Gillmore combines teachings of history along with reading, and brought up the point that most of America’s founding fathers were either self-taught or had a tutor available to them. “Thomas Jefferson knew five different languages including Anglo-Saxon,” said Gillmore. Her true passion is history and learning about the foundations of our American union.
Her youngest daughter is home-schooled and attends the Kimber Academy in Moses Lake. Her oldest son, Buck followed in his father, Jim’s, footsteps and is a lineman with the Grant County PUD. Her son, T.J was working in Mullan, Idaho at the Lucky Friday Mine, which recently experienced a collapse. Luckily, he was not working that evening.
“My son, Jesse is a cowboy/welder. He came up here after working on a ranch in southern Oregon. He is a cowboy because he loves it, and he welds because it feeds him,” Gillmore quipped.
In her spare time, Gillmore teaches classes on the Constitution of the United States. She loves to study the Constitution and teach others about it. “I love finding out about what lit the flame of freedom in our country,” she said.
She rides and works horses at home. She has a draft team of Belgian mares that weigh in at about 1,900 pounds each. “The difference between them and a regular horse is the difference between a sports car and a diesel tractor,” said Gillmore. She likes living in George, and is thankful that there are good people living here who look out for each other.
