Amanda Theodosia Jones died on March 19, 1914, in Junction City, Kansas, at the age of 78.
Amanda Theodosia Jones died on March 19, 1914, in Junction City, Kansas. By the time of her death, she had lived a long and varied life as a poet, teacher, spiritualist, inventor, and businesswoman, leaving behind a body of published poetry, a patented food-preservation technology, and the legacy of the Women's Canning and Preserving Company, which she founded and staffed entirely with women in an era when few such enterprises existed.
Her death came two decades after she had largely stepped back from active management of her canning enterprise, having already secured her place as one of the more unusual and determined women inventors of nineteenth-century America. She had also been active in spiritualist circles and had written extensively about her psychic and religious experiences, publishing an autobiography, A Psychic Autobiography (1910), late in her life.
Jones's legacy endured chiefly through her contributions to food preservation technology and through her pioneering effort to create economic opportunities for women by employing an entirely female workforce and leadership team in her manufacturing company—a radical structure for the period. Her story has since been revisited by historians of women's labor, invention, and entrepreneurship as an example of the intersection between unconventional spirituality, feminism, and technological innovation in the Gilded Age United States.