Mina Benson Hubbard

Mina Benson Hubbard was a Canadian explorer and was the first white woman to travel and explore the back-country of Labrador. The Nascaupee and George River system were first accurately mapped by her in 1905. She was the wife of Leonidas Hubbard who was famous for his ill-fated expedition to Labrador in 1903.

Mina Adelaine Benson was born on an apple farm near Bewdley, Ontario. Her father was James Benson, an Irish immigrant, and her mother was Jane Wood, from England. She was the seventh of eight children and received a primary education in the village school before teaching in Cobourg for two years.

After graduating as a nurse in 1899 from the Brooklyn Training School for Nurses, she went to work in a small hospital in Staten Island, New York, United States. In 1900, she nursed the journalist Leonidas Hubbard whilst he was hospitalized with typhus. They married on January 31, 1901.

After the trip Hubbard carried out a lecture tour of England, where, in 1908, she met and married Harold Ellis, a businessman and the son of John Ellis, MP and his wife Maria.

The couple lived at Wrea Head Hall at first, but in 1913, they purchased The Wabe, a large detached house in Hampstead, London, from its designer and original owner, the academic and mathematician William Garnett.

Together they had three children, but divorced in 1926.

She returned to Canada in 1936 to accompany George Elson on a canoe trip down the Moose River in northern Ontario.

Hubbard died in Coulsdon, United Kingdom, in 1956 at the age of 86, when she was hit by a train while crossing railway tracks.

Mina Benson Hubbard Ellis was designated a National Historic Person in 2018.