Jessie Daniel Ames: Suffrage and Civic Activism

From widowed mother of three to state-wide leader

Jessie grew up in a household where politics was debated, and her mother Laura had always been involved in measures to help the community, first in Overton and then in Georgetown. But when Jessie returned to Georgetown after her husband Roger died, her innate sense of fairness and justice kindled quickly as she became a business owner and widow supporting three children.

Jessie’s mother Laura had taken over the Georgetown Telephone Exchange when her husband James died, and Jessie joined her in the business. The two widows became competent and tough-minded competitors in a male-dominated and often sexist business community. Recalled Jessie’s secretary, “Most of the men thought it was just terrible that she was trying to wear the pants.”

Jessie was outraged that as a business owner responsible for her employees and the sole support for her family, she wasn’t allowed to vote on the many matters affecting her business, family, and community. She started doing precinct organizing for the Texas Equal Suffrage Association or TESA. Jessie couldn’t agree more with their suffrage activism. After all, as this TESA flyer notes, “women need the vote for the same reason that men need it.”

In 1916, Jesse launched the Georgetown Equal Suffrage League with a first meeting held at her home, 1004 Church Street. Jessie was promptly elected its president. She knew that many Georgetown women were ripe for the suffrage fight. And Williamson County women had been part of earlier suffrage battles going back decades, joining suffrage sisters all over Texas.

Suffragist Martha Goodwin Tunstall also fought against slavery at high personal cost.

Suffragists had been fighting for the vote in Texas since 1868, the FIRST time that a suffrage measure was voted down in Texas. Several movements to get suffrage surged up over the mid 1800s and early 1900s. Meet just a few of the Texan suffrage sheros: Martha Goodwin Tunstall was a leader in the first attempt to pass female suffrage in Texas in 1869. She was also a dedicated anti-slavery activist in east Texas whose family was the brunt of ex-Confederate and Ku Klux Klan violence that included poisoning the family well and causing two of her children to die.

And here are the Finnegan femmes and mom (from left clockwise: Annette, Katherine, mom Katherine, and Elizabeth). From girlhood on, the sisters and their mother organized groups for suffrage in the early 1900s in the Houston and Galveston area.

Locally, women were forming thriving suffrage groups in Taylor and Circleville and Granger and other Wilco spots starting in the late 1800s. The Granger chapter, for instance, formed in 1893.

A Granger newspaper account reports that the chapter was named The Lucy Stone Equal Rights Association. Lucy Stone, right, was the Massachusetts suffragist and abolitionist who advocated for things such as egalitarian marriage and advised that women keep their own names after marriage instead of taking hubby’s name. Women who did (and do) that are sometimes called Lucy Stoners.

Grace Danforth, Granger’s first suffragist female doctor

The chapter leader was Grace Danforth, Granger’s first female doctor. The newspaper noted that “as there is quite a strong equal suffrage sentiment in and around Granger, they propose to make it [the chapter] like the name it bears, a tower of strength for the cause.” Grace was also outspoken on many issues, publishing articles on the need for women to know their own bodies, wear non-constricting clothes, be financially independent, and more.

Circleville suffragist Alice McFadin McAnulty

Grace was friends and sister activist with Alice McFadin McAnulty of Circleville, which is about five miles north of Taylor. As soon as the Texas Equal Rights Association (TERA) formed in 1893, Alice, her sisters Ora and Veree, AND Alice’s husband Charles and grandfather David McFadin, became charter members. Alice promptly started a suffrage group in Taylor, pushed the Populist Party to adopt a suffrage plank, and testified for suffrage at the state legislature. Alice spoke at the TERA convention about suffrage as “Our San Jacinto,” likening suffrage to Texas’ triumphant break from Mexico.

Alice also ran for election as the state superintendent of public instruction for the Socialist Party in 1908 and received 7,631 votes. On top of this, Alice was a poultry expert and became a wealthy rancher after she and Charles split up.

As the 1900s began, suffrage calls continued to grow. More women were joining the work force and going to college and vocational schools.

And for decades women across the board had been proving themselves more than ready to handle voting decisions. In Georgetown as elsewhere, they’d been honing expert organizational skills in women’s clubs, leading initiatives in their schools and churches. And they’d been continuing to work in political arenas for many issues, including the vote, like the Women’s Progressive Club of San Antonio.

Women’s Progressive Club of San Antonio around 1910

Here and across the US, women were the backbone of supplying war relief supplies and support for the troops in WWI. Georgetown women spent endless hours, sewing hospital garments and knitting socks and gathering surgical dressing for Red Cross. They organized the schoolchildren to do Red Cross work.

Women fundraised prodigious amounts of money. Wilco women, such as the Taylor’s new women’s voter league, helped raise the $800,000 in Liberty Loans gathered by the Texas organizer of the National Suffrage Association.

Of course, men in Wilco and elsewhere helped with the home war effort, too. Just one amazing example: Granger farmer Frank Mazalek baked a 625-pound, six-foot-tall patriotically decorated cake to raffle off to raise funds for the Red Cross! Check it out.

Women even volunteered to provide support for the soldiers on the front, like this Texas woman serving food where battles raged in France.

Suffragists here and nationwide showed patriotism aplenty, like these suffragist nurses and doctors on the right ready to sail off to battlefields. They hoped that their dedicated work for the troops—and risking their lives—would be rewarded with the vote for women.

Women even (of course) volunteered during elections, assisting at polling places and serving coffee during elections. (Fun fact: These days, women are over 80% of pollworkers at elections.) Women did so much to improve the community. Yet they were denied the vote.

Across the state, Texan suffragists faced formidable opposition. Texas governor James “Pa” Ferguson was a virulent opponent of both suffrage and the robust prohibition movement. Ferguson said of the suffrage “agitation sweeping the nation”: “Women across the country should be performing functions for which God Almighty intended her!”

Ferguson fulminates against female suffrage.

Ferguson had additional reason to hate on suffrage: He loved the money flow he got from the alcohol industry—including a gift (sometimes called a bribe) of $156,000 from a secret donor, which is a lot in yesterday’s—and today’s—money. Many other politicians—here in Texas and across the nation and world—enjoyed that liquor largesse. So since suffragists and prohibitionists had considerable overlap, these lawmakers responded by opposing suffrage. Women were more likely to vote for prohibition, so to the liquor lovers, women needed to stay away from the ballot box.

Even more opposition to women’s suffrage came out of racism: If women got the vote, that would include women of color.

Colquiett warned against suffrage because of “negro equality.”

Said Texas governor Oscar Branch Colquitt (governor from 1911-1915): “The question of surrendering our states’ rights is the important issue. When you give the ballot to women, you make it possible for negro equality such as you suffered in the carpetbag days after the Civil War.” The prospect of the federal government forcing female voting was a horror for Texans who’d hated the federal Reconstruction mandates.

Jessie was energized by the suffrage fight and spoke out with speeches and articles. She began writing a weekly suffrage column for the Williamson County Sun, in which she’d point out nonsensical realities such as this. By then, women were at times getting elected to school board and other offices by male voters who presumably considered those elected women quite competent. Yet the men don’t find women smart enough to vote?

Jessie delivered talks around the county to big and enthusiastic audiences. She’d race around the county and give, on some days, up to four speeches.

She packed the Taylor auditorium.

She was SRO at the Hutto Evangelican Lutheran Church. Which, by the way, looks exactly like it did over 100 years ago.

Not a seat left at the Jarrell School auditorium above left—which also still looks the same, and is currently being preserved as a school district office building.

Wilco Men Love Suffrage, Too!

Many Williamson County men were foursquare for suffrage! Georgetown men joined the Men’s Woman Suffrage League, and 29 members gathered in 1917 to formally initiate the organization. Southwestern sociology professor and minister John Granbery was the president. In a letter to the Sun, Granbery called women’s suffrage “just as essential to Democracy as kindness is to Christianity.”

And the Men’s League cosponsored events such as a suffrage gala at the Wilco Courthouse on George Washington’s birthday in 1917. Girls in red, white, and blue sang, prayers were said, and visiting dignitary George Peddy, a Texas state legislator, declared his lifelong support of women’s suffrage. The Williamson County Sun reports Peddy said that “men were getting things in such a muddle that they would have to call upon the women to help them out.”

Over in Hutto, after hearing a speech by Jessie and Minnie, Hutto men pledged 23 cars to bring over all the Hutto women who wanted to register to vote. We don’t know if these Hutto guys who owned the first car in Hutto were for suffrage, but we like to think so.

Jessie became treasurer of the Texas Equal Suffrage Association (TESA). She found a good friend and mentor in TESA president Minnie Fisher Cunningham, who was growing TESA to its height of 10,000 members.

Minnie Fisher Cunningham, Jessie’s friend and mentor

Both Jessie and Minnie had felt the sting of inequity in the workplace. Minnie was one of the first Texas women to receive a pharmacy degree, and she learned at her first job in Huntsville that untrained male colleagues were making twice her salary.

Minnie and Jessie strategized big and small on suffrage strategies. One PR campaign they devised publicized a set of photos of Jessie reading to her children in a tableau of domestic tranquility. These photos were designed to refute anti-suffragist rants that “only old maids, unhappy married women, and childless married women wanted the vote.” It worked—the photo ran in newspapers announcing that Jessie would speak or head a meeting on topics that were seen by many as controversial.

Jessie and Minnie joined with Texas suffragists towards the goal of getting suffrage just for primary voting. This first step could be achieved easier: by simple majority passage in the Texas House and Senate and the approval of the governor. In contrast, full woman suffrage necessitated amending the state constitution, which required a two-thirds majority in both houses of the legislature, as well as voter approval. Suffragists figured that once primary suffrage was achieved, it would be easier to get full suffrage.

The top priority was to get anti-suffrage Gov. Ferguson out of the way. Suffragists documented Ferguson’s impressive corruption record, and they battled his attempt to defund the University of Texas. Ferguson was outraged because the UT president wouldn’t fire professors he didn’t like. When Ferguson vowed to cut state funds to UT, an angry coalition formed of progressive Texans.

Join the battle, drums this Baylor suffragist!

In June of 1917, throngs of suffragists, students, prohibitionists, farmers, lawyers, and legislators sick of the corrupt Ferguson rallied at the capitol from dawn to dusk in a rowdy 16-hour protest.

University of Texas supporters rally against Ferguson.

It helped turn the tide: Ferguson was impeached, and Lieutenant Governor William Hobby took over.

Hobby accepts the quid-pro-quo of the suffragists.

Suffragists promptly pressed Hobby to submit a bill for suffrage in primaries. They promised Hobby that if he did, they’d then work to elect him governor. It worked: The primary suffrage bill passed and went into effect in June 1918.

But there was no time for celebration: Passage meant that Texas women had only 17 days to register women in time to vote in the primaries.

Eleanor set up training sessions for suffrage workers to do their best work—fast!

Jessie and the Williamson suffrage supporters leapt into action. She conducted workshops all over the county teaching women how to register, and she held mock elections. The same energy radiated statewide, as women took to the roads to race against the voter registration deadline. Here’s suffragist Eleanor Brackinridge and friends about to rally the suffrage troops in San Antonio.

Suffragists on a roll! That’s Eleanor Brackinridge in the near back seat.

Knowing that women would have to travel a good distance in the summer heat to register in the county seat of Georgetown, Jessie got local stores to offer restroom relief for women . . . who might then do some shopping. This ad aimed to entice the women serving their country by registering and voting into the Stromberg-Hoffman department store—you can still see its building name at 8th and Austin.

And of course, suffrage-seeking women got the royal treatment from the Woman’s Club, whose members were all for suffrage. The members opened their meeting room in the As women poured into Georgetown by carloads and wagons to register, things were getting frantic over at the county courthouse in the tax assessor office, which at that time was in charge of voter registration. Director Halsey Davis was surely getting frazzled with all the registrations by women. Three more clerks were required to accommodate all the women.

By the 17th day before primaries began, an incredible 3,800 Williamson County women had registered to vote. The statewide numbers were staggering. A tidal wave of 386,000 Texas women had registered. These happy voters are celebrating in Travis County, where 5,856 women registered in the 17 days.

Now the focus turned to getting the 19th Amendment ratified in Texas. The road was rocky, and the anti-suffragist shenanigans included trying to spirit Texas senators out of town to prevent a quorum—an effort that was headed off by suffragists at train stations looking out for legislative runaways. The measures seemed doomed several times; nevertheless, women persisted.

Finally, on June 28, 1919, full suffrage for women passed, making Texas the first southern state to pass the suffrage amendment! Here’s Hobby signing the amendment.

Sing out, suffragist sisters!

Suffragists loved to sing along to original songs about their cause, or they’d tailor the lyrics of an existing song. Sing along to this one, penned by victorious suffragists at the time, which goes to the tune of “Dixie.”

There is growth and grace in the land of cotton

Where women’s rights are not forgotten

Look away, look away, look away, Texas land.

In Texas land where man and woman

Are close akin in all things human

Look away, look away, look away, Texas land.

CHORUS

And they’re getting right in Texas

Hooray! Hooray!

In Texas land they’ll be on hand

For equal rights in Dixie.

Away! Away! Away down south in Texas!

Beyond the Vote: Women Fight for Fairness

The ink had scarcely dried on the suffrage proclamation when the TESA transformed itself into the TX League of Women Voters. State suffrage leaders got together at the St. Anthony Hotel in San Antonio on October 19, 1919, and made the magic happen. Leagues started to spring up and the leagues got on with the business of voter education for women and all people. These women from the National League got one word for you. What’s that word? VOTE! Same one that fuels our own Wilco LWV and the 700-some Leagues nationwide!

The women of the National League of Women Voters got one word for y’all: VOTE!

Jessie was elected president of the Texas League of Women Voters. Here she is in 1923 as a proud state president.

The League began doing the same important work still done today: In its early years, the League of Women Voters conducted citizenship schools all around the county and held get-out-the-vote campaigns. They published extensive voting information, interviews with candidates, and “Know Your County” booklets that are similar to the League’s current day Voter Guides.

The League of Women Voters carries on its biggest mission: Educating voters.

Jessie loved being a force in the political scene here and beyond, diving into state and national Democratic politics. She was elected a delegate to the 1920 National Democratic Convention in San Francisco. There she is in San Francisco with some other Texas lady delegates—Jessie is the third from the right on the bottom row.

Now, VERY unfortunately, what the LWV and other white women’s organizations sidestepped was the fact that women of color were NOT part of this new voting right for women. Texas women of color were cut out of the voting privilege in large part because of the whites-only primary voting rules of the Democratic party. This measure kept black people from an electoral voice because Texas was then overwhelmingly one party: The Democrats.

But the Democrats and their party planks of this era in the South were not the same as they are now. The Democrats were the party that typically represented the interests of white male elites, and most Dems were firmly in favor of segregation and disempowering people of color. So Black women and men were reduced to voting in the general election for white-picked Democrats OR for Republicans . . . who were virtually guaranteed to lose.

Minority voters also faced paying a poll tax—a fee to be paid when voting that not many could afford. And the poll tax was intended to keep out anyone but white people of means. In a special session, the Texas legislature had already passed a bill that said that in the event of women’s suffrage becoming law, a poll tax was a “protection to the state against possible influx of all kinds of voters.”

So when Black and Latina women—who had also worked hard for women’s suffrage—came to register and vote, they were turned away. Christia Adair and Lulu B. White worked all their lives for racial justice in Houston and elsewhere, and they encountered these roadblocks for years.

Christia remembers trying to vote in the 1918 primary. “The white women were going to vote,” she recalls. “And we dressed up and went to vote, and when we got down there, well, we couldn’t vote. They gave us all different kinds of excuses why. So finally one woman, a Mrs. Simmons, said, ‘Are you saying that we can’t vote because we’re Negroes?’ And he said, ‘Yes, Negroes don’t vote in primary in Texas.’ So that just hurt our hearts real bad.”

Christia, who died in 1989, is standing by a mural in a Houston community center and park named after her.

The NAACP—the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People—and other organizations battled to stop the all-white primary laws. In Texas, the all-white primaries were not overturned until a Supreme Court decision in 1944. Here’s Lulu B. White at center to the left of Thurgood Marshall, who argued the case for the NAACP and went on to be a Supreme Court justice. The poll tax in Texas didn’t end until after the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965.

Black and Latina women had been just as important in their communities as white women were, doing critical social welfare work in their women’s clubs, working and owning businesses, and advocating for female suffrage. Latinas were angry that the poll tax and all-white primary rules also kept Latinos from voting, and they organized for change.

One Latina club, La Liga Femenil Mexicanista or League of Mexican Women, was started in Laredo by fearless journalist and suffragist Jovita Idar. Jovita fought for women’s suffrage and defended her family’s newspaper press when it was threatened.

The group worked for suffrage, as well as better health and education for Hispanics. By the way, Jovita recently merited a park renamed for her, a nice big historical marker, and awesome mural in Laredo. Great ideas, aren’t they?

Most white suffragists were happy that women of color were working for suffrage—in their own groups. They did not invite them to join their white organizations, for fear that minority women’s presence would amp up fears of increased non-white voter power and endanger the passage of suffrage.

Some suffragists WERE overtly racist, such as Kate Gordon of Louisiana, who didn’t want Black women OR Black men to vote. These suffragists called for “states rights” to decide who voted, and they fanned the flames by pointing out that allowing white women to vote could help overpower any minority voting power. Gordon started the Southern States Woman Suffrage Association because she thought it unfair that uneducated Black male voters got the vote before educated white women. Gordon wrote that Southern women “have felt a special resentment in witnessing their government make their ignorant slaves the political superiors of the white women of the nation."

James and Pauline Wells opposed women’s influence in lawmaking.

In Texas and other Southern states, anti-suffragists were frequently married to rich, powerful men who didn’t want to see suffragist goals such as equitable pay for women and children and other possible regulation that would lower profits. Pauline Kleiber Wells, head of the Texas Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, was married to James B. Wells, the iron-fisted boss of the south Texas Democratic machine who owned vast parts of south Texas. James predicted that if women got the vote, "No one on earth can tell how they are going to vote, or can control them." Pauline used the family money and influence to delay suffrage passage.

However, some white suffragists DID work hand-in-hand with black and brown suffragists. In El Paso, for example, Maude Sampson Williams founded the El Paso Negro Woman's Civic and Enfranchisement League in 1918.

Suffragist Maude Sampson Williams on left

Maude’s group worked closely together with the city’s white suffrage club, the El Paso Equal Franchise League. Belle Christie Critchett of the white women’s Equal Franchise League urged Maude to seek admission for her group to the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA).

But when Maude requested that her chapter become a NAWSA affiliate, NAWSA’s national president, Carrie Chapman Catt, directed Minnie Fisher Cunningham of the Texas Equal Suffrage Association to decline Williams’s admission.

President Carrie said that Maude should be told that white suffrage groups "will be able to get the vote for women more easily if they do not embarrass you by asking for membership." When Minnie said that in this letter to Maude, she emphasized that when suffrage was won, it would benefit all women, including women of color.

Jessie and Texas women head for the Lege

When suffrage was won, Jessie and Minnie began marshalling women to join forces in their new poll power. The Joint Legislative Council was formed in 1922, uniting big women’s groups including the League of Women Voters, the Congress of Mothers and Parent-Teacher Associations, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, the Texas Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs, and the powerful Texas Federation of Women’s Clubs. Here are Federation leaders in front of the Federation building that’s still looking good on San Gabriel and 24th in Austin.

Texas Federation of Women’s Clubs HQ in Austin

The Council hammered out legislative goals, and when the 1923 session opened, lawmakers found on their desks a program including state monies for maternal and infant health; improvements for public education; prison reform measures; and more. In short, these women wanted to make good on the promise of Lady Justice in Texas!

Lady Justice about to go up; she can’t rest until women’s voices are heard!

Condescending lawmakers dubbed these activists “the petticoat lobby,” but these women meant business. EVERY one of their proposals in that first year eventually passed! They passed, because women all over the state were on their legislators’ butts constantly, writing letters and submitting petitions and calling out hypocrisy. For example, when lawmakers said that accepting federal money for maternal and infant health would upend the hallowed “states rights” and foster “Communism, Anarchism, birth control…and free love,” the suffragists pointed out those lawmakers were delighted to score federal handouts for highways and agriculture.

Nearly one in three babies would die before age five.

Health for mothers and babies, even for more privileged women, was far from guaranteed back then. In the early 1900s, childbirth killed many mothers. Nearly one in three babies would die before age five. Bacteria in milk cans left out too long was often a culprit, along with polluted water and poor sewage and garbage disposal systems.

Many children died from milk that had gone bad.

Mary Brown Work wanted more children to live.

This grated on activist Mary Brown Work of Denton. She noted that when the boll weevil destroyed one-tenth of the cotton crop, the legislature quickly threw lots of money at remedies—all while they ignored the high infant death rate.

For Jessie, prison reform was a priority. Appointed to the Texas Committee on Prisons and Prison Labor, she saw the awful treatment of prisoners on the state’s many penal farms, as well as the pork-barrel operating mode of the state prison administration. She’d seen prison labor close up since she was a girl, when convicts were forced to build railroads near her girlhood home.

Convict laborers working on the railroad near Palestine, Texas

Jessie was asked by the Texas Association of Colored Women's Clubs to help them get state funding for a home and training school for delinquent black girls. The LWV and Joint Legislative Council lobbied, and in 1926, Jessie toured Texas getting donations from white women’s clubs for the school and lobbying the legislature. The following year, the state approved the school . . . but didn’t provide funding. It wasn’t until 1945 that the state finally appropriated $60,000 to establish the Brady State School for Negro Girls west of Waco. Hundreds of girls got vocational training.

Within the LWV, Jessie fought for women—and children—who were working. While the law forbade employment for children under 15, it exempted farm kids, who were 7 of 8 child workers. The state listened to the Joint Legislative Council and added oversight of these children.

Jessie and the women of the Joint Legislative Council got protection for child farmworkers.

And women’s wages then were abysmal: Many women worked for less than $5 a week in industrial jobs. Mexican-American women earned much less in the same position, and African-American women were often totally excluded from these jobs. A minimum-wage law for women passed in 1919 . . . and then was repealed two years later.

Women of color earned much less than white women.

Jessie worked hard to expand women’s legal rights, such as equal guardianship of children and married women’s property rights. Often her efforts met a stone wall. She recalls a legislator who assured her that current laws giving men control of women’s pay and assets were chivalrous measures to protect women. Retorted Jessie, “Since an unmarried woman or a widow could own her own property, while the wages of a working woman were ‘community property,’ then as long as a woman is married . . . she’s feeble-minded, but just let the husband die and she gets her sense back, doesn’t she!”

Jessie knew how critical equal education was to the expansion of women’s lives, so in 1923 she helped found the Georgetown branch of the American Association of University Women (AAUW) and became the first president. At the first state AAUW convention in 1926, she was elected president of the state AAUW. She resigned shortly after, but stayed heavily involved.

The AAUW women urged schools to offer the same classes and opportunities to women as those given to men. The Georgetown AAUW chapter continues on, and they named their chapter and scholarship program after—who else?—Jessie Daniel Ames. Here’s the AAUW women gathered a few years ago celebrating having the Georgetown mayor proclaim an Equal Pay Day!

Jessie enjoyed a new sense of purpose and pride in her widely praised organizing skills. But she also began to see the limits to her work for women. So many reforms she and other women proposed were denied for racist reasons. Legislators too often refused to approve anything intended for women and children because it would then include women and children of color.

She wrote that equal wage proposals and job training for women would be nixed because “[n-word] wenches,” as one (and certainly many more lawmakers who used the term freely) legislator put it, would be getting the same wages as “pure white girls.” Or that any programs to help mothers and babies would be blocked unless there were a guarantee that Negro mothers and babies would be excluded. Jessie decided racial problems must be a top focus.

Jessie’s political involvement also gave her a front-row seat to conditions for people of color in her own community and state. Jessie helped a friend and sister suffragist Mary Shipp Sanders win the seat for county school superintendent, an office never before won by a woman.

Mary, an English instructor at Southwestern University, teamed with Jessie to inspect the county’s schools for Black children. They found the conditions appalling. In some schools, a single teacher taught as many as 90 students, in part because the state education funds for black children were being diverted to white students.

The Black community had been working toward a county vocational training school, and they gathered seed money toward starting the Hopewell School in Round Rock. Jessie and Mary were instrumental in securing a grant to build the school from the Rosenwald Fund, a program started by Sears & Roebuck founder Julius Rosenwald that funded more than one in five schools for minority students in the South.

Rosenwald funds also aided Black schools in Circleville, Granger, and Coupland. You can see the former segregated Hopewell—the Round Rock school district preserved it and uses it as a meeting space.

Hopewell School lives on as a Round Rock school district building.

Jessie was also troubled by the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, which in the 1920s controlled the majority of the state’s counties and the machinery of the state Democratic Party. Klan parades mushroomed—here’s one in Austin on Congress Avenue. By 1922, Williamson County Klavern No. 178 had large open-air rallies and “barbekues,” appeared at local churches in full regalia, and routinely placed notices of events in the Williamson County Sun.

Jessie came every day to the county courthouse for the now-famous Wilco trial of the Klan, which resulted in a rare successful prosecution of the Klan by county attorney Dan Moody.

Several Wilco Klanners decided a white man was consorting with a widow woman, and as punishment beat him, chained him to a tree and whipped him, and covered him in tar.

A friend of Moody, Jessie offered him advice as the trial went on. Jessie would soon be a force in getting Moody elected Texas governor. In later years, she would be angered as Moody backed away when she urged him to pursue justice against other KKK crimes.

This room in the Wilco Courthouse where the Klan was convicted looks much the same today.

Jessie got appointed as an anti-Klan representative to the state Democratic convention as well as the national Democratic convention in Madison Square Gardens. Jessie fought for an anti-Klan plank in the Democratic platform. But the pro-Klan contingent won out—and had to be stopped from burning a fiery cross outside Madison Square Gardens.

See what happened next in Jessie’s life in her next Herstory! But first, consider this tour taking us past places where Jessie did her changemaking work.

Here are some key spots focal to Jessie’s years as a business owner and activist in her Georgetown years. If you walk or bike-ride this tour, you’ll see some neighborhoods away from our oft-visited and lovely town square—and you’ll clock about nearly TK miles!

☛ Start at 1004 Church Street, where Jessie lived with her three small children and her mother, Laura Daniel, widowed as Jessie was. Read the historical marker and picture the scene as Jessie launched the Georgetown Equal Suffrage League here. She and Laura hosted countless organizing meetings over the years for suffrage and other civic improvements.

Here is where the League of Women Voters often met, and made plans to educate voters and encourage voters, just as the local Leagues (including Wilco) do today. And then picture the Wilco suffragists celebrating after nearly 4,000 Wilco women got to the courthouse in 1918 to register to vote—all within a 17-day primary deadline!

Here’s how the house looked in 1954. That was a year that held a victory for Jessie and other equality advocates: Women could finally serve on juries—a goal long fought for by Jessie and women of the Joint Legislative Council. Black and Latino people didn’t win this right until the late 1950s.

☛ Go left on 9th Street to head toward 824 Austin Avenue, where Jessie and her mom Laura owned and operated the Georgetown Telephone Exchange. Think about how frustrating it was for the two: As women unable to vote, they had no say in so many matters affecting their business and community.

Look at the Georgetown businesses the two women passed on a daily basis. Can you imagine the outrage if the male business owners of the auto sales, meat market, barber shop, hotel, grocery, farm implements store and more were denied a voting voice in the community? And of course, women who didn’t work outside the home were affected as well, with their voices unheeded as they nonetheless worked to improve Georgetown.

☛ Walk north on Austin to 718 S. Austin and note the building name near the top. Jessie persuaded local merchants to offer their restroom for all the women coming by buggy, car, or on foot to the Wilco Courthouse to register to vote. Stromberg-Hoffman Company put ads in the newspaper urging women to register and stop by the store to freshen up.

Suffrage-supporting Stromberg-Hoffman around the time of suffrage success

☛ Cross the street to gaze at the main entrance to the County Courthouse on the south side. Jessie barnstormed the county giving suffrage speeches, sometimes as many as four a day. She gave a speech here at the Courthouse on George Washington’s birthday in February 1917 to a big crowd. Jessie was joined by Dr. John C. Granbery, president of Georgetown’s Men’s Woman Suffrage League, and Minnie Fisher Cunningham, president of the Texas Equal Suffrage League.

☛ Walk to the southeast corner of the Courthouse and see the Dan Moody statue there. Jessie advised then County Attorney Dan Moody on strategy as he prosecuted four Wilco KKK members in 1923 during a heyday for Klan activity. Moody was successful in his prosecution of Klanners who badly beat a white man, a bachelor they accused of an illicit sexual relationship with a widow. Jessie was frustrated in later years when Moody did not continue acting against KKK violence and lynching.

If it’s a weekday, walk in the Courthouse and ask at the desk if you can peek at the beautiful courtroom on the second floor where county attorney Dan Moody and his team argued the case. When you see the courtroom, imagine as well that you’re watching when Georgetown amateur (mostly) thespians put on a play in the 1990s about the Klan trials. Many of the performances of “You Can’t Do That, Dan Moody!” were performed in the courtroom where the trial actually happened.

Full disclosure: This website author for several performances played Helen Hampton, Dan Moody’s secretary. Hampton advised Moody to back off his Klan prosecution, since many important and powerful people in the community were Klan members. A trial could ruin Dan’s future political career, Hampton warned. Moody pressed on, but Hampton’s sentiment was shared by many in many places, which allowed the Klan to flourish.

☛ Turn around from the Dan Moody statue and look at the intersection of 8th St. and Main Street. Take in this 1920s view that Jessie and other women would have seen as they came to the Court House to register. As Jessie noted, women came in buggies, on foot, and in cars, determined to claim their voting rights.

☛ Cross the street and go up Main Street to the Williamson County Sun newspaper office at 707 Main St., where Jessie would deliver her columns for the paper. Say hey to the newspaper office—the Sun has been publishing at this site since 1936, keeping Georgetown informed and connected. (You can read all the Sun back issues online with a Georgetown library account.) And the Sun has been publishing from other offices located around the Square since 1877, making it the oldest business in the county!

☛ Now, settle in the bench in front of the Sun office and gaze at the Courthouse. Imagine women from Georgetown and all over the county coming to the Red Cross work rooms at the Courthouse to make huge amounts of items to support soldiers and medics during WWI. Women also met at most every church in Georgetown and worked in their own homes. Students at every school and Southwestern University pitched in to make items for war support. The volunteers cut and rolled bandages, sewed all kinds of hospital clothes, and knitted hundreds of sweaters, socks, and hats.

And everyone fundraised for Red Cross. Check out how much money—over $11,000—Wilco patriots raised! Including fun fundraisers such as the cake sale. And note that the Sun credited women for making sure this gargantuan effort happened.

☛ Walk north on Main to the onion-domed Masonic building on the corner at 701 Main St. Look upstairs to imagine the Club room where the Georgetown Woman’s Club hosted Wilco women to refresh after registering to vote.

☛ Walk north on Main Street to 4th Street and look left to see the old jail at 312 Main Street. Jessie pressed for prison reform after she got appointed to the Texas Committee of Prisons and Prison Labor. This prison, like others statewide, was under her oversight as committee member. At the request of Black women club members, Jessie went on a state fundraising drive to get a state training school for young Black women at risk.

Jessie also fought against the lawless behavior of the Ku Klux Klan, which as in many places across the country, was active in Georgetown and Williamson County.

Take a moment to listen to the oral history given by Lillian Magill Gholson, who lived with her family in this jail because her father, Wayne Magill, was the jailer and deputy sheriff. In this recording, done in 2012 by the Williamson County Historical Commission, Lillian, then 96, recalls how the Klan came to this prison to abduct a prisoner to be tarred and feathered. She recalls how Klanners in robes would sometimes come to churches as well.

Find Lillian’s full oral history and more Historical Commission oral histories here.

☛ Walk north to 3rd Street, and turn left. Cross Austin Avenue (it’s safer to go down to the light on 2nd Street and Austin, and then walk back to 3rd). Walk down 3rd to Martin Luther King Street. Turn right, and see the Macedonia Baptist Church on your left. Here’s what Macedonia Baptist originally looked like. You can learn more about the churches and businesses and homes in this historically Black neighborhood here.

The original building of the Macedonia Baptist Church

☛ Continue north on MLK until it ends and turn left. Look across the street to see the historical marker for the Marshall-Carver High School. The building pictured below was here, and it replaced a three-room wooden “Colored School” for elementary students. Jessie and her friend, Williamson County School Superintendent Mary Shipp Sanders, worked to improve schools for students of color. They both participated in teacher training institutes held at Marshall-Carver in the mid-1920s. This school was beloved by its many students—learn more here.

☛ Walk east on Scenic Drive as it curves around “The Ridge.” This neighborhood is called Ridge, and is often clumped with the Track and Grasshopper neighborhood south of it as TRG. After many years of lobbying, the city is implementing an improvement plan for TRG and the San Jose neighborhood south of Southwestern University. Learn more: 2030.georgetown.org/neighborhood-plans

☛ Continue south on Forest Street. As you cross 4th Street, you’ll see the Williamson County Jail, where some 600 inmates are housed. Jessie sought her appointment to the Texas Committee on Prisons and Prison Labor and worked for many changes in the criminal justice system—a worthy topic for us all as our prison population grows.

☛ Turn left on 7th street and continue to the Square and courthouse. Head back down Austin to Jessie’s former business, the Georgetown Telephone Exchange. Take out your cell phone to see if you have texts—phone service has changed a lot since the old “Hello, operator” days!