Before . . . .

Before we headed home, there was more to see and do in Jamestown, New York. (Previous posts about this women's history road trip start on July 11, 2024)

We took a mini-road trip to see five murals on the side of buildings. The first image is the 1,800 square foot mural representing, "California, Here We Come," episode 110 of the television show, "I Love Lucy." The scene of Lucy, Ricky, Fred, and Ethel zipping across the George Washington Bridge, singing "California Here We Come," was painted by the father/son team, Gary Peters and Gary Peters, Jr. (There are two hidden images in the mural—the episode number 110 and CHWC, i.e., California, Where We Come.") The other murals are: "Lucy, Desi Postage Stamp," "Lucy and Desi," "Lucy Does a Commercial," and "Job Switching."

Next was a visit to Lake View Cemetery. Lucy died April 26, 1989. Her cremated remains were buried in niche in Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Hollywood. In 2002, her children, Lucie and Desi moved her

remains to the Ball Family plot in Lake View Cemetery in Jamestown. At the entrance, I discovered hearts had been stencilled on the road to lead fans to her grave.

A new black granite headstone had been erected. On the back, her full name—Lucile Desiree Ball Morton with the inscription "You've Come Home—is the third line after her father and mother. (The bottom name is her brother Fred.)

Next I found the grave of the first historic woman's landmark that I had visited shortly after checking into our hotel—suffragist Edith Ainge

Edith Ainge was arrested and imprisoned twice. She endured harsh treatment during women's fight for the vote, including solitary confinement. In my book The Vote: Women's Fierce Fight, I wrote that Edith Ainge was "an expert in caretaking, calming, and cheering up."

Along with ten other imprisoned suffragists, she signed the "Text of

Ultimatum," arguably the first organized group demand for political prisoner status in America. The pioneering document was smuggled out and served on Washington, D. C. commissioners. The commissioners dismissed it.

Although she died twenty-eight years after ratification of the 19th Amendment, someone—perhaps Aingy— requested that the words "SUFFRAGE LEADER" be inscribed on her headstone, a tribute that profoundly heartened me.

After finding Edith Ainge, I searched of Catherine Harris. Earlier I had visited a historic marker to her at the site of her home that had been a station on the Underground Railroad. “Tradition in her family says that at one time she had seventeen fugitives concealed in her attic until she thought it was safe for them to go on,” wrote Helen McMahon in her book about Chautauqua County.

AGED CITIZEN DEAD was the headline on the obituary of Catherine Harris in a Jamestown newspaper.

"After 98 years of active life, Catherine Dickes Harris of 12 West Seventh Street passed away at midnight Tuesday, living only a few hours after the death of her daughter, Mrs. Marie Hall. . . .Her grandfather was a full-blooded negro. Quite a romance is connected with the marriage of her grandfather and grandmother.An English captain of an African slave ship brought her grandfather to England; and he later married the captain's daughter. Their son came to America where he married a woman of Dutch extraction."

Having been widowed twice, Catherine Harris and her daughter Maria move from Buffalo to Jamestown in 1831, the first "coloured people"to live in the village. In 1835, she married John Harris and they moved to a little house, just sixteen feet long. In time they greatly expanded their home. The front yard was a garden in which "she planted lemon, verbena, bluebells, hollyhocks, and other century old plants.

As other Black people moved nearby, the white people dubbed the area "Africa."

According to her lengthy obituary, Harris was "affectionately known as Aunt Catherine."

She was "tall and slender with a refined and intelligent face. . . . She was a woman of a particularly sunny and happy disposition, generous, thoughtful, and unselfish."

On April 24, 1976, members of the church she founded in her home dedicated a memorial at her grace in Lake View Cemetery. After her name and birth and death dates, the inscription reds: HERO CONDUCTOR ON THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD.

.

McMahoon, Helen. Chautauqua County: A History, 2001.

"Aged Citizen Dead," Jamestown Evening-Journal, Feb. 13. 1907.

"Chapel Founder's Grave Marked" The Post Journal Jamestown, April 24, 1976