It seems I’ve been doing microhistory all these years…

After all these years, I finally find out that I am apparently a microhistorian.

Not that I’m that small, of course. Just like you, I could stand to lose a little weight. No, I’m talking microhistorian as a person engaging in a specifically narrow kind of history.

According to biographer Jill Lepore, microhistory can be defined as the history of “hitherto obscure people” that “concentrates on the intensive study of particular lives” to reveal “the fundamental experiences and mentalités of ordinary people.”

And what, I imagine you are wondering, is a mentalité? Well, according to Wiktionary, it’s a French word meaning “A person’s feelings about the wider society and world they live in, and their place within it; a worldview, outlook.”

From my point of view, microhistory is all about telling the stories of mostly unheralded people and how those people’s stories fit into the overall flow of the rest of history. And that’s what I’ve been trying to do on this here blog since my first post back in early March 2010—not to mention the local history column I started writing for the old Fox Valley Sentinel back in 1977, and continued after the creation of the Ledger-Sentinel in 1980.

Local history is replete with people who slogged their way through exciting times, made their contributions, and then faded from view after making their presence known, sometimes locally, sometimes statewide, and sometimes nationally. Those are the stories that fascinate me. And there are a lot of those stories to tell right here in our own Fox River Valley of Illinois.

A July 1893 portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Nathan Hughes. The descendants of Hughes, an escaped slave and Civil War veteran, went on to become educators, jurists, and other professionals. (Little White School Museum collection)

There were, for instance, the African American farm families that moved to Kendall County after the Civil War, settling out in the Minkler-Reservation Road area south of Oswego. Almost all were former slaves who, for one reason or another, decided to settle amongst an entirely white neighborhood after the Civil War to farm and raise their families. The Lucas, Washington, Hughes, and a few other families eventually made their mark, not only on the Oswego area, but also on the nation as a whole.

One of those settlers, Nathan Hughes, not only escaped from slavery in Kentucky, but also volunteered to fight for his own freedom against the south during the Civil War, where he was wounded, recovered, and then went back to fight and be wounded again.

His son-in-law, Robert Ridley Smith, likewise escaped enslavement and then fought for the Union during the war before coming to Kendall County, where he married one of Hughes’ daughters. After the war, Hughes went back down to Kentucky to find his family and bring them north. He brought his children, although his wife decided to stay in a place that was familiar to her and not come north to the strangeness of the Illinois prairies.

Smith’s children became the first African Americans to graduate from high school in Kendall County, Ferdinand with the Oswego High School Class of 1903 and his sister, Mary, with the OHS Class of 1904. Their descendants went on to contribute to the nation as they carved out careers as public school educators, college professors, and, for at least one of them, as a federal judge who eventually served on the FISA Court.

Sarah Raymond Fitzwilliam in a 1914 portrait. (Little White School Museum collection)

Strong women made their marks in local history as well. Sarah Raymond began her educational career teaching in one-room Kendall County schools during the Civil War and ended it as the superintendent of schools down in the normal college town of Bloomington. She was the first female school district superintendent in the nation when she was appointed in 1874. After her retirement in 1896, she moved to Boston for several years where she married and hobnobbed with such luminaries as Jane Austin, Mary Livermore, Julia Ward Howe, and Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Emily Murdock lost her brother, Alfred, to a rebel bullet during the Civil War Battle of Ezra Church outside Atlanta. She went on to become a mystery novelist, writing several bestsellers under the pen name of Lawrence L. Lynch, the name of her first husband. This was at a time when women simply didn’t write mysteries, so she adopted the subterfuge of writing using a male pen name.

Emily Murdock Van Deventer wrote mystery novels under the pen name, Lawrence L. Lynch. (Little White School Museum collection)

Other local historical heroes include Alfred Browne, who came and went in Kendall County’s history, first as a young soldier in the Union Army. He was tapped as one of the honor guards for Abraham Lincoln’s funeral car at Springfield after the President was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. After the war, Browne, a strong believer in emancipation and racial equality, joined the Freedman’s Bureau in Montgomery, Alabama during Reconstruction to help educate former slaves. He found the struggle against the violent racism and terrorism turned against the South’s former slaves too much to bear, and returned to Kendall County. Taking up agriculture on the family farm outside Newark, Browne taught himself Norwegian so as to better communicate with his numerous Norwegian immigrant neighbors.

Maggie Shepard Edwards and her husband pose with her bicycle outside their Oswego home and millinery shop about 1890. (Little White School Museum collection)

Margaret “Maggie” Shepard started out teaching country school before moving to Oswego to open her own millinery business. It proved so successful she became a major property owner in the village as well as a businesswoman. She also bucked the odds to adopt a daughter while still an unmarried single woman, before later marrying Oswego hardware retailer Tom Edwards.

Indefatigable educator Nancy Hill.

And we can’t forget Nancy “Nannie” Hill, a Yorkville girl who went into teaching Kendall County rural schools before moving to Aurora to eventually become principal of Oak Street School on the city’s West Side. While she and one of the school’s female teachers toured Europe in the summer of 1914, World War I broke out. That required Hill and her companion to display large helpings of both pluck and luck to make their way through war-torn Europe to England and then back to North America despite the dangers of armies clashing on land and the threat of German submarines on the sea voyage home.

In April 1892, Florence K. Read became the first woman office-holder in Kendall County when she was elected to the Oswego School Board, which was quite an achievement.

But she wasn’t the first Kendall County woman actually nominated by a political party for a countywide office. That honor goes to Nettie Chittenden. She was nominated by the New Party in 1873 as the nation was beginning to suffer from one of its longest financial depressions. Called the Long Depression and the Panic of 1873, economic conditions didn’t improve for a decade. Farmers and laborers, desperate for change and fair treatment from railroad and other monopolies, formed the New Party in 1873 to elect candidates sympathetic to their issues. Chittenden, 26, was nominated for the office of county superintendent of schools, running against the GOP’s popular candidate, John R. Marshall, publisher and editor of the Kendall County Record, the county’s newspaper of record. Although they managed to elect a local circuit court judge, the rest of the New Party’s candidates, including Chittenden, did not fare well in the November election. Even so, a few New Party candidates were elected to the Illinois General Assembly as well as to local offices elsewhere in Illinois.

So, yes, there’s plenty of microhistory around these parts. Sometimes, those whose stories I’ve told realized they were having an impact beyond their small community on the wider world. Most did not, as they just kept on living their lives as best they could given the circumstances in which they found themselves. Their stories, and how they fit into the great mosaic of the history of the region, state, nation, and world continue to offer plenty of interesting grist for a microhistorian’s mill.

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It wasn’t easy: Celebrating 100 years of women’s suffrage

Last week, women had a prominent role in the Democratic National Convention and it looks as if they will also have a substantial role in this week’s Republican National Convention.

While women are now playing an important role in today’s politics, it wasn’t always so. It wasn’t until August 1920—just a century ago this month—that the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified and women were finally granted the right to vote in all elections—local, state, and national. And so, women and women’s organizations across the nation are marking the 100th anniversary of universal women’s suffrage in the United States.

What many probably do not realize is that here in Illinois, women had the right to vote, for at least some local and state offices, several years before the rest of the U.S. got up to speed.

It might seem strange to us today that half of the adult citizens of the U.S. and all of the talent they had to offer were once disenfranchised, but that was indeed the case until the 19th Amendment was finally passed.

In frontier areas, however, the idea of women being able to vote was apparently a little easier to swallow than in the settled East, where religious bigotry had long resulted in women’s political and economic subjugation. As the frontier moved west, first across the Appalachians into the old Northwest Territory, of which Illinois was once part, and then across the Mississippi, the importance of women continued to grow.

While they couldn’t vote, women could become property owners on the frontier, something that began to earn them political influence. Here in Kendall County, for instance, a number of single women and their families settled on the prairie. When Kendall County’s land was offered for sale by the federal government, 23 women purchased 29 parcels in the county. Abby Bulloch purchased the largest amount—400 acres in today’s Lisbon Township—in 1836.

Women’s land purchases in the county weren’t limited to the early settlement era, either. In 1854, Nancy Hogsett Elliott, a widow with four sons and two daughters, determined to move west from Indianapolis to a place with more opportunity. Elliott eventually settled here in the Fox River Valley where she raised her children and carved a living out of the rolling prairie that then made up Kendall County.

When their men had to be absent during that pioneer era, it was up to frontier women to look after things until they returned. When Capt. David Beebe decided to sail to California, joining the “Forty-Niners” looking for gold, his wife, Nancy Steward Beebe, stayed behind in North Ridge, Ohio where she ran the couple’s farm and looked after their children until David’s planned return from the gold fields. Unfortunately, he did not make it home, but died during his return trip and was buried at sea.

Mrs. Beebe was a determined woman who apparently never let her gender get in the way of her aims in life or doing what she considered was right. While the family lived in Ohio, she served as a postmaster and was also a conductor on the Underground Railroad. After moving to Kendall County with her second husband to join her sons and her brother, Lewis Steward, she wrote poetry, was active in the Underground Railroad here helping escaped slaves get to freedom in Canada, and was an organizer of the local Women’s Christian Temperance Union.

So maybe it was because of that strong streak Western women developed that the right to vote—in some elections, at least—came early in Illinois. The extreme financial problems of the 1870s prompted all kinds of activism, including that on behalf of women. Down in Springfield, Judge James B. Bradwell and his activist wife had been working hard on women’s suffrage, starting with legislation to allow women to be elected as county superintendents of schools. The law, “An Act to Authorize the Election of Women to School Offices,” passed April 3, 1873, and went into effect July 1. The strange result was that while women couldn’t vote for themselves, for the first time they could be elected to local political office.

By that summer, the devastating Panic of 1873—also known as The Long Depression—was in full swing and feelings in rural and urban areas alike was running high against those blamed for the financial troubles. On July 4, the county’s farmers held a huge Fourth of July gathering at Yorkville that generated support for political action against railroads and other monopolies. That was followed on Sept. 16 by the first county farmers’ political convention at Yorkville that approved a sweeping resolution blasting moneyed interests. “We hail with satisfaction the arousing of the farmers and working men to a clear and proper comprehension of their just rights,” the resolution stated. “We take our stand on the principles of equal rights and exact justice for all and exclusive privileges to none…we are opposed to every form of thieving by which the farmers and laboring classes are robbed of the legitimate fruits of their labor…we are in favor of controlling by law the railroad corporations of our State.”

The convention was a contentious gathering, with many opposing establishing a third party, but the majority favoring it. The upshot was the nomination of an entire county officers’ slate, including that of county superintendent of schools, followed by the walk-out of a sizeable minority. Taking into account the new law, the meeting took the momentous step of nominating 26 year-old school teacher Nettie Chittenden for county superintendent of schools.

Incumbent county school superintendent John R. Marshall, who was also the editor and publisher of the Kendall County Record, the county’s paper of record, perceiving the winds of change might have begun blowing, gingerly congratulated Chittenden: “Miss Chittenden, I don’t know but she is an excellent lady—all ladies are excellent—and would doubtless would make an excellent Sueprintendress.”

He needn’t have worried, however, because she subsequently declined the nomination. Even so, Chittenden’s nomination established a new political first for Kendall County women.

Agitation for women’s suffrage continued and in 1891, Illinois women were given, for the first time, the right to vote for school board members or any other school official except the state superintendent of public instruction and the county superintendent of schools. Women were not allowed to vote for the state and county superintendents because those offices were specifically enumerated in the 1870 Illinois Constitution, which made no mention of allowing women to vote.

As a result of that legal ruling, while women could vote for school board members and other locally elected school officials whose offices were not mentioned in the constitution, they could not cast ballots on any educational propositions, such as tax rate referendums.

Locally, women wasted no time in taking up the franchise. At the election for Oswego Township School Trustees on April 9, 1892, Mrs. Mary Frances (Porter) Hunt, wife of Oswego businessman and politician John B. Hunt, may have become the first woman in Kendall County to vote for a school official.

That was only the beginning. When local school board elections were held a week later, women all over Kendall County not only voted, but helped elect two of their number to previously all-male boards. In balloting on April 16, voters in Oswego elected Florence K. Read to the Oswego School District 4 Board, while in Newark, the unmarried Martha Olson soundly beat Will Manchester for a school board seat, 26-16.

“Six ladies cast their first ballot and are pleased that a lady so worthy in every respect and well qualified for a position was elected school director by a good majority,” wrote Julia Hull, the Record’s Newark correspondent.

In 1894, the Illinois Suffragette Convention persuaded state officials to allow women to hold the kinds of school offices for which they could vote. That year, Lucy Flower, a well-known social worker of the time, became the first woman to hold statewide office here in the Prairie State when she was elected as a trustee of the University of Illinois.

Then in 1913, Illinois women were given the right to vote for any elected official whose office could be abolished by the General Assembly. The rationale was, again, that those offices were not mentioned in the state constitution and so were fair game for the female underclass.

Suffragists in New York State got behind an effort to pass a Constitutional amendment to allow women to vote in 1917 and then in 1918 President Woodrow Wilson announced his support for women’s suffrage. Congress passed the 19th Amendment in early June 1919 and sent it to the states for their approval. And on June 10, 1919, Illinois won a three-way tie with Wisconsin and Michigan to be the first states to ratify the amendment, allowing women to vote for all state and national offices.

Just a few months before the General Assembly ratified the 19th Amendment, long-time Kendall County Circuit Clerk Avery Beebe died following years of illness. The county board, with the enthusiastic support of Circuit Court Judge Mazzini Slusser—one of the great local historical names of all time—appointed Beebe’s popular assistant, 34 year-old Frances Lane, as clerk pro tempore. Lane’s grandparents settled in Kendall County in 1837. Her father, Charles E. Lane, was an itinerate journalist, and Frances was born in Kansas. Her father later returned to Illinois, where, among other jobs, he managed the Kendall County Record. Frances graduated from Yorkville High School in 1902 and taught school for several years before Beebe tapped her for his assistant clerk.

In March 1920, Lane announced her candidacy for clerk—permitted under the 1913 legislation—much to the chagrin of Earl Weeks, who had announced for the office in February. In a letter to the editor of the Record, Weeks suggested Lane was not permitted to run for clerk. In the March 31, 1920 Record, Aurora attorney John M. Raymond, himself a Kendall County native, and Lane herself made spirited rebuttals to Weeks’ charges.

As a Record columnist dryly observed that same week: “When the efficient little clerk pro tempore of the circuit court announced her candidacy for the office of clerk she surely started something upon which every Tom, Dick, and Harry thinks he is eminently qualified to pass a judicial opinion.”

It was a short-lived controversy, however. Weeks dropped out and Lane, “the efficient little clerk pro tempore” won the uncontested GOP primary and with it the general election in rock-ribbed Republican Kendall County becoming the county’s first female elected county official.

With Lane’s example and the 19th Amendment on their side, Kendall County women didn’t waste much time running for other local offices. In the April 1922 primary election, Ella D. Hill won the Republican nomination for county treasurer over popular former sheriff Martin Hextell, 1,495 votes to 1,316. In those days, just like Lane’s election, the winner of the Republican primary was assured success in the general election.

Two years later, in 1924, Louetta B. Davis won the April Republican primary election for Circuit Court Clerk. She, also, went on to win election the following November.

Then in 1926, Laura Nichols handily won the GOP nomination for Kendall County Treasurer over male candidates Frank Crum and Frank Weber. Nichols polled 1,402 ballots to 1,006 for Crum and 464 for Weber.

While lots of women served as school board members and local officials, it took many more years before females were trusted enough to be elected to statewide office. In 1955, Mrs. Earle Benjamin Searcy of Springfield was appointed to fill the unexpired term of her late husband as State Supreme Court Clerk. Mrs. Searcy was subsequently elected to the post, the first women to serve in a statewide office in Illinois.

Other women, however, had been elected to other positions of power before that. For instance, Winifred Mason Huck of Chicago was elected Congressman-at-large in 1922 to replace her father, William E. Mason, who had died. Lottie Holman O’Neill of Downers Grove was the first elected female member of the General Assembly, with the voters sending her to the house in 1922. She served until 1964, with terms both in the Illinois House and Senate.

Today, with numerous female office-holders at the local, state and federal levels, we take women in politics so much for granted that it looks as if Kamala Harris has a good chance of becoming the first Vice-President of the United States. It is sobering to recall that within the lifespan of some Kendall County residents, women were forbidden to vote for those who were making decisions that affected their very lives.