The Edward and Maxine Wells Scholarship was endowed to continue the lifelong work of Edward Stemple Wells (1906–1982) and Maxine West Wells (1909–1999). It was their desire to open young people’s awareness of language and history. Edward graduated from Wellington High School in 1924 and attended Oberlin College and The Ohio State University. He earned a master’s degree in American history. He taught and served as principal at Huntington School in the early 1930s. He then taught history and government in Wellington until the early 1950s, with a break for Army duty during World War II. Maxine graduated from Wellington High School in 1926 and also attended Oberlin College. After 1932, she taught a wide variety of subjects in Wellington, including French, Latin, English, biology, and mathematics. She continued her studies in 1938 at the Sorbonne, and completed her master’s degree in guidance work at Kent State University.
Mr. and Mrs. Wells moved to Bay Village in the 1950s where he continued to teach and serve as high school principal. He was an ardent student of Ohio’s local history, especially in the early statehood and civil war periods. An eager and driven antiquarian, he helped found and served as curator of the Bay Village Historical Society museum. Maxine continued to teach French and Latin, while working to develop Bay High’s guidance counseling program. They traveled widely in North America and Europe doing historical and genealogical research, with additional visits to Africa, India, China, and Southeast Asia.
In 1975, they returned to the old Wells family home in Wellington. Tragically, Edward was already suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and eventually passed away in 1982. Maxine continued to work tirelessly, caring for her husband and maintaining ties with a wide body of friends. After his passing, she served as one of the founding Trustees of the Wellington Schools Endowment. In later years, a steady procession of former students visited her, many of them already retired. With sparkling eyes, she never failed to remember them and loved to recount tales of their days as students at Wellington. Their family hopes that this scholarship will serve as an ongoing echo of two lives passionately dedicated to teaching and learning. The Edward and Maxine Wells Scholarship is awarded to the best high school student in foreign language and/or social studies as determined by the high school social studies and foreign language teachers. It was first awarded in 2003.
