Mabel L. McCoy (1856-1928) was born and died in Dexter, Maine. She worked early in life as a music teacher and stenographer and would eventually become a pastor, prohibitionist, and suffragist. She married James S. McCoy, a pastor, in New York, New York, in 1882. They moved to Tombstone, Arizona, but they eventually divorced after a few years and McCoy moved back east. In 1892, after one year at the Meadville Theological School in Pennsylvania, McCoy enrolled as one of the first women at Tufts Divinity School in Medford, Massachusetts. In 1895, she was installed as pastor of the First Universalist Church of Mansfield, Massachusetts, and is credited with being the first woman ordained to the Universalist church in Massachusetts. She married Francis J. Irwin, a journalist, in 1899 in Dexter; however this marriage also ended in divorce. McCoy traveled the world, writing and lecturing on religious and moral issues. She was a representative to the National Convention of the Women's Christian Temperance Union and later became the Maine representative to the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage. In 1915, she was a representative to the International Congress of Women in The Hague, Netherlands. McCoy was the sister of Mary H. Plunkett, a student of Mary Baker Eddy's and president of the Emma Hopkins University of New York. Although she expressed an interest in studying at the Massachusetts Metaphysical College, there is no record of McCoy doing so.

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