MacMillan, Miriam (1905 - 1987)

Genre: General Fiction, Non-Fiction

Miriam Look MacMillan was born and raised in Massachusetts. At age 30, she married her childhood hero, Donald MacMillan, the Arctic explorer and spent most of the rest of her life accompanying him on his expeditions north on the schooner Bowdoin. She was chief photographer and took copious notes during the nine expeditions in which she was involved and used these to later write books about them.

After her husband's death, she moved to Owl's Head, ME and served as the honorary curator of the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum (Bowdoin College) where she worked at arranging and cataloguing the thousands of photographs, slides and artifacts she and her husband brought back from the Arctic. In recognition of her accomplishments, she received the honorary degree of Sc.D. from Bowdoin College in 1980. She spent a great deal of her time in Maine working to raise money for the restoration of the schooner Bowdoin.