Jessie Daniel Ames: The early years

Our Hometown Shero Arrives

Where Jessie and Georgetown activists met to make things better

Unless you happened on it, you may not know about the hidden herstory at 1004 Church Street. Go there! Here’s the place where Jessie Daniel Ames made sure Georgetown got better for women AND men AND children. It’s here where Jessie brainstormed and carried out campaigns that improved conditions for Texans statewide, even as she and other women were belittled as ‘the petticoat lobby” by lawmakers at the Texas Capitol.

Here was the homebase where Jessie led the local and state Texas League of Women Voters, and helped it grow into its current powerhouse of voter advocacy chapters across the US—including Wilco’s currently thriving chapter. And it’s here where Jessie’s influence spread nationally as her passion for racial justice led to founding the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching.

And it’s here that she left every workday morning with her mother Laura to walk a few blocks to 824 Austin Avenue to their jobs running the Georgetown Telephone Exchange. Their business kept 600 telephones in Georgetown and over 2,000 more in rural Wilco ring-a-ding-dinging.

It is Jessie and Laura’s contribution to Georgetown’s economy and position as businesswomen that jolted Jessie’s motivation to work for women’s suffrage. She wrote: “All I wanted was the vote . . . for I was . . . the owner of property which voters could tax without the consent of the owners.”

Jessie already had a sharpened sense of social justice honed during her girlhood years. Let’s find out about Jessie’s girlhood—we’ll go over to Palestine and Overton in east Texas, where Jessie spent the first nine years of her life.

Palestine around the time Jessie’s parents arrived

Jessie’s father James Malcolm Daniel left Indiana to work for the International & Great Northern railroad in Palestine, a town bustling after the I & GN Railroad came to town.

Both his parents died when he was a child, so James was self-supporting at an early age. He had moved from his hometown of Buffalo, New York, to work as a railroad station agent. That’s where he met Jessie’s mother, Laura Maria Leonard.

James chose well his occupation. Railroads were a lifeblood for small towns, moving people and virtually all resources and products across Texas.

Railroads were critical to Texas daily life back then.

Georgetown depended on the rails as well to transport people and all manner of necessities—see us there on the list of railroad destination cities on the left near the bottom of this I & GN advertising?

Jessie’s mother Laura Maria Leonard met James when she was a schoolteacher in Indiana. Laura had attended Battle Ground Methodist Institute, and had taught for a year at a county school.

Laura and James had their first child, Lulu, less than a year after marrying. James left for Texas 10 days after the birth of their son Charley Leonard, leaving Laura with toddler Lulu and newborn Charley. Laura and the children soon joined James, who had a first brief assignment at the I & GN depot right up the road in Round Rock. The family lived in the back room of a railroad warehouse.

Soon after, James got assigned to Palestine, and the family boarded the train again for East Texas. Palestine was more bustling than Round Rock, but James soon got a new assignment.

Jessie was born on Nov. 2, 1883, and just a few months later, James took a job as train dispatcher in tiny Overton, about 60 miles northeast of Palestine. Laura found 1880’s Overton a somewhat desolate backwater. Baby brother James Junior was born the next year.

Early on, Jessie grasped the realities of class and race divisions that flavored life in Overton—one common to locales all over Texas as well as the rest of the US. See how the Overton city map shows the north-south rail tracks dividing the town? There were stores, houses, and churches on the east side where wealthier whites lived; industry and the boarding house and shacks on the other. That was the town’s dividing line of class and race segregation.

Jessie was an adventurous and observant girl.

Jessie described her Overton life in an unpublished autobiography. She recalls that every morning when it wasn’t a school day, she would head over across the tracks to meet up with her best friend Minnie, a Jewish girl whose mother, Mrs. Levi, ran a boarding house. Jessie didn’t fit in well with the more privileged white crowd on the “good” side of tracks where her family lived. Warning: Jessie uses a hateful term for the “bad side,” it was a term routinely used at the time.

Jessie (above) felt her father favored her sister.

As Jessie recalls, Minnie would arrive at Jessie’s house in the morning on her gray donkey. The two would then ride across the tracks on the donkey to play rough-and-tumble games with the “socially outcast” kids there, as Jessie described them.

Jessie could identify with a feeling of “not good enough,” especially in her father’s eyes. Jessie believed her father’s clear favorite was her big sister Lulu. Jessie wrote that her father saw her as “the fat, freckle-face child who made a splendid foil for the dainty beauty of his daughter Lulu.”

Jessie was largely left on her own by her mother. Laura and the other women in Overton were often called on to nurse the victims of epidemics that regularly ripped through the community—diphtheria, smallpox, and typhoid fever. Laura was also occupied with church work and keeping the family together while James was at the train station. Given freedom to roam, Jessie was a keen observer of the community, including the Reconstruction-era violence seething in the area.

Jessie remembered overhearing horrific details of a lynching in Paris, Texas, about 100 miles north. A black man, Henry Smith, was accused of raping and murdering a three-year-old white girl. Smith was captured, and without charges or trial, he was paraded through Paris, where 15,000 Texans from near and far had gathered by the scaffold in what would be called “spectacle lynchings.” As the crowd watched and cheered, the executioners rolled red-hot branding irons on Smith and gouged out his eyes with them. They cut off his tongue and genitals and slowly burned him alive. Spectators scrambled to get bits of flesh and bones for souvenirs. Photographers took photos to make into postcards and sell.

Jessie’s family moves to Georgetown

In the summer of 1893, the family moved to Georgetown. Lulu had graduated from high school in Overton, and James wanted her to continue her education and not marry a local boy. He transferred with I & GN to a train dispatcher job in Georgetown so that Lulu could attend Southwestern University.

Here’s the Georgetown train, headed out of Round Rock and crossing Brushy Creek, steaming toward the Georgetown I & GN depot. Back then, the I & GN depot was located at the intersection of Martin Luther King Street and 7th Street.

Like most other American towns, the railroads were critical to Georgetown back then, with spurs heading all the way into downtown and over by Southwestern. The railroads brought in just about everything Georgetown residents needed, from building material to food for the table.

Lulu started college at Southwestern’s Ladies Annex, which was then located a chaste four blocks from the male students and classrooms. (You can learn more about women’s progress at Southwestern in the Southwestern University Hidden Herstories blog.)

Lulu went to Southwestern’s Ladies Annex.

Jessie enrolled at Southwestern University’s preparatory school. This “Fitting School” was intended to “fit” young students for entering Southwestern University.

Young Jessie found that Georgetown was much different from Overton—in a good way. She recalls that she marveled at all the variety in the stores, getting water from a faucet and not a well; getting milk delivered and keeping it in the ice chest; and the gala social events and parades. “There were more two-story houses than a child could count,” she remembers.

Some of Georgetown’s marvelous two-story houses

But while the Daniels had been the more affluent citizens in Overton, here in Georgetown, James’ salary was quickly drained by higher living costs and school tuition.

Jessie went to school with families of college professors and professional wage-earners. Her “unworthiness” increased. She remembers that “I tried humbly and painfully to be like them. But I never learned to feel at home.”

Georgetown girls all ready for SU’s May Fete

Jessie’s dad did not expect her to graduate.

The family foundered under James’ iron rule. Lulu graduated from Southwestern, but she didn’t do as well as James wanted. She married a Southwestern man and moved to her new home in Georgetown. Brother Charley tired of his father’s frequent tongue-lashings and thrashings and ran away at 15 to California.

After Jessie finished the Finishing School, she was excited to enroll at Southwestern’s Ladies Annex. But her father told her he doubted she’d succeed there. She recalls that he said coldly: “I’m sending you to college because there is nothing else to do with you. But I want you to understand that the first time that you fail in your classes, you come out of school and go to the kitchen. I don’t expect you to graduate.”

Nevertheless, Jessie persisted, and she graduated in 1902. Her senior presentation was titled, “Aeschylus and Shakespeare: A Parallel,” clearly the work of a failure and dimwit.

A move to Laredo and marriage

Sadly, after graduation, Jessie considered herself a failed spinster who was forced to live in her father’s house. Jessie’s father was looking for a change. A new railroad had come to Georgetown, the “Katy” (Missouri, Kansas, and Texas line), and it took some business from the I & GN. Jessie’s father was also despondent that Lulu was out of his house and control. He decided to transfer to the more thriving I & GN railroad station in Laredo. Jessie moved with the family.

Jessie’s father worked here at the Laredo I & GN station.

Jessie enjoyed the switch from “quiet, conservative, religious” Georgetown. The palm trees, steamy temperatures, and the colorful Mexican-flavored culture and music “appealed to my senses in a most un-Methodistic manner,” she wrote later.

Through her father, Jessie met Roger Post Ames, an Army surgeon from New Orleans 13 years her senior.

She saw Roger as an exotic man of the world. Marrying him seemed like a triumph over spinsterhood and her perpetual feelings of not being feminine enough.

From the outset, the marriage was difficult. Roger’s family considered Jessie socially inferior, as she discovered on their honeymoon to the family summer house in Pascagoula, Mississippi.

The family WAS once wealthy. But Roger’s father was injured in the Civil War, his brother was disabled, and the two sisters were unmarried and dependent. So now the family relied on Roger for support, and they didn’t want to share his income with Jessie. Also, the couple soon discovered their match was rocky and that they were sexually incompatible.

Yellow fever broke out in New Orleans, and Roger was ordered to barracks. He pressured Jessie to return to her family, and thus began a familiar pattern in which Jessie felt banished. Roger was a tropical medicine specialist, and the Army regularly sent him off to Honduras or Guatemala or New Orleans.

Jessie would travel to meet him at times and hope that their marriage would improve. She’d return to stay with her sister Lulu, now with her husband and family in Tennessee.

Jessie got pregnant with baby Frederick in 1907 and baby Mary in 1912. In 1914, she took the two children with her to spend time with Roger in Guatemala. Jessie felt optimistic that Roger was finally ready to settle down and be happy with her.

Jessie (pregnant with Lulu), Frederick, and Mary joined Roger in Guatemala in 1914.

She returned to Texas pregnant again and excited to find a home for the family.

But three months later, Roger died of blackwater fever in Guatemala. Roger’s resentful family gave her only $1,000 from his estate.

Luckily for Jessie, she had a good place to land in Georgetown. Her father had invested in the Georgetown telephone exchange a few years before. He had wanted to leave Laredo, disconsolate after their youngest son, Jamie, had been killed with a blow to the head during a fight between baseball teams that broke out after a contested game. Her father never recovered from this and the other ways he felt angry and dissatisfied with his life. He died in Georgetown in 1911.

See what happens next in Jessie’s life here!

Here are some key spots focal to Jessie’s early Georgetown years. If you walk or bike-ride this tour, you’ll see some lovely Old Town—and you’ll clock nearly two miles!

☛ Begin at Jessie Daniel Ames’ home at 1004 Church Street where she lived for a big part of her adult life. Take a look as well at the other two Hidden Herstories for Jessie’s suffrage years and anti-Lynching advocate years. Imagine ALL the work and strategizing that went on in this house over the years, while Jessie and her mom also ran a business and raised Jessie’s three children.

Jessie and Laura’s house is in red; check out the neighborhood in the 1930s. The Baptist church is to the right, so this view shows the northern side of the house.

☛ Walk from Jessie’s home to 824 Austin Avenue, the former office of the Georgetown Telephone Exchange, just as Jessie and her mom Laura did every work day. Picture the women operators at work, connecting folks all around Georgetown and the rural Williamson County areas.

These telephone operators worked in Lockhart in this 1920s photo. Things likely looked similar right here!

☛ Walk up Austin to 7th Street and take a left, continuing to Martin Luther King Jr. Street. Look to your right at the mostly empty lot—here’s the site of the former I & GN train depot. That’s where Jessie’s father James went every day for work, working with trains that brought passengers and freight. Look at the 1916 city map below; the train depot is at center top on the street then called Timber, north of where 7th (then also called San Gabriel) crossed today’s MLK. Look at all the businesses and community anchors that once bustled in this part of town: The City Ice and Bottling Words, lots of lumber commerce, and the St. Paul M. E. Church that was the Black community’s first church.

Wooo-wooo! Here comes this I & GN train, shown where it headed north from Round Rock. This photo shows the train crossing Brushy Creek on a bridge still there near Chisholm Trail and Round Rock Avenue in Round Rock. James Daniel would be there to meet the train. Surely Jessie and the other Daniel kids came to the depot at times as well.

The train up to Georgetown was sometimes called the Jimmytown Express.

By the way, a jaunt to this same spot by the railroad bridge over Brushy Creek in Round Rock is a treat. Park in the lot at the Chisholm Trail Park, and cross over to the east side of Chisholm Trail Road to gaze upon the impressive Round Rock of Round Rock. Then check out the sculptures and markers about the Chisholm Trail, including one of “The Pioneer Woman” who typified intrepid women like Hattie Cluck. Learn more about Hattie at the Cowgal Bosses Hidden Herstories. Plus, you might catch the train barrelling just past the Brushy Creek bridge while you’re there!

☛ Walk north on MLK to 6th Street and turn right. Look at the historical marker at 401 W. 6th. for this building that used to be a produce warehouse. Think about the produce that awaited distribution to stores, all of it kept cool via the building’s thick stone walls and the spring water channeled through the basement.

☛ Turn right on Rock St. and left on 7th Street. As you near the square, look at the Bank of America on your left. Imagine walking in to this scene when it was the National Bank, one of the town’s leading banks. Perhaps Jessie’s family banked here, or maybe she did later as a business owner and single parent.

☛Cross the street and sit a spell on a bench on the west side of the Courthouse. Look across Austin to the west side of the square. Here it is as Jessie would have seen it as a young woman. See the Farmer’s State Bank where the Williamson Museum is?

☛ Then walk around to look at the east side of the square. This is what girl-aged Jessie would have seen.

☛ Make your way through any number of scenic Old Town streets to 705 E. Third Street. This is where the family first lived when they moved from Overton. As you enjoy your saunter (or bike ride or car drive), visualize the young Jessie frequenting these streets to get to school and do errands for the family and play with friends. Notice the two-story houses that so impressed young Jessie—many of them she saw remain. And, of course, she got to live in one!

Picture Jessie and her family living here! This house is one of many preserved in the Old Town neighborhood that look pretty much the way Jessie saw them.

☛ Now choose any scenic Old Town Street to head toward 507 East University Street. Here’s the original site of Jessie and Lulu’s college experience, studying at the Ladies Annex. Read the historical markers in front of the building. Picture SU grad families and townspeople enjoying the 1912 graduation barbecue.

This entire block fronting University has long hosted educational institutions, from the first Southwestern buildings to Georgetown High School (built as the present structure) to Williams Elementary to the current Hammerlun Center for adult learning and staff and teacher development. Thanks to all the educators who enriched our young people over the years!

Head back to Jessie’s home on Church Street or explore more of Georgetown!

Our Hometown Shero Arrives

Jessie’s family moves to Georgetown

A move to Laredo and marriage

Women Rock the House

Women Making Georgetown Shine