Maria Bissell Hotchkiss was the wife of U.S. engineer
Benjamin B. Hotchkiss. After his death in
1885, she founded the
Hotchkiss School in her husband's native
Connecticut in
1891.
Then in 1892, she founded the Hotchkiss Library
in Sharon, Connecticut, where her husband had grown up and worked as an ordnance engineer in his father's factory.