Meet Mary Gentry Kavanaugh, Baylor Class of 1855 — and BU’s first female graduate
…h’s life from a young age. The daughter of Nelson Kavanaugh, one of BU’s original trustees, Mary began attending Baylor at the age of seven when the university opened in 1846, according to Lois Murray’s seminal history of Baylor’s original campus, Baylor at Independence. (Universities were very different places back then.) Kavanaugh would have spent her formative years surrounded by Baylor and Texas legends like Sam Houston, who is reported to hav…