Marker Mystery solved

In my post, A Marker Mystery, July 31, I wrote about the missing historic marker commemorating Susan B. Anthony's December 26, 1854 speech in Mayville, New York. To no avail, I had asked several workers at the county facility located beside the courthouse. I asked two librarians. I talked with a man who was at the dedication of the marker. He insisted that it was still there."I'll have to come look for myself," he said. I called the Chautauqua County historian and left a message. Although, having found out that the current historian had recently retired and the new one hadn't started, I wasn't that optimistic that that contact would be useful.

In a process that unfolded over time, I did receive a call back from new county historian, Norman Carlson, whose sleuthing and my nudging led to him to discovering the marker in a storage shed, and getting the marker reinstalled! "I can see it from my office window," he assured me. (It had been removed because of "roof work.)

The photos and text below are from the William G. Pomeroy Foundations website. (The blue is Lake Erie. Jamestown is off the map at the southeastern end of Lake Chautauqua.)

In 1854, Susan B. Anthony began an organized, statewide effort to establish a suffrage committee in each county in New York State, beginning with Chautauqua County. The goal was to hold a women’s rights convention and establish committees to circulate petitions to promote women’s suffrage legislation.

The January 3, 1855 edition of the Mayville Sentinel provides details about the meeting:

"Susan B. Anthony stated the object of the meeting to be the discussion of all the reasons that impel woman to demand her right of suffrage. She then read the Appeal of Elizabeth Cady Stanton to the women of the State – after which she stated that the platform of Women’s Rights Conventions were always free, that men as well as women were permitted to speak in our meetings. She then delivered a lecture on the Industrial and Pecuniary Disabilities of women, showing that even these were the natural result of woman’s disenfranchisement. . . .Miss Anthony then addressed the Convention in her eloquent and forcible manner. She dwelt particularly upon the legal disabilities of Woman, and upon the unequal and unjust laws existing on our Statute books; laws which give to the wife a mere pittance of the estate in case of a husband’s death – robbing her of her own earnings, also giving the control of children entirely to the father, and she looked upon the enfranchisement of woman as the only redress for these wrongs physically exhibited."

Here is an excerpt from my July 31 post about our trip to Mayville: "That is where on the afternoon and evening of December 26, 1854, thirty-four-year old Susan B. Anthony gave a "Woman's Rights" speech.

She had left her home in Rochester, New York, 141 miles north, on Christmas Day, traveling in mid-winter by train to Dunkirk, New Yor, and horse-drawn sleigh to Mayville.

It was her first meeting of a four-month speaking tour in all 54 counties in New York. According to her carefully kept expense account, she paid "56 cents for four pounds of candles to light the courthouse." The afternoon session was free. The fee for the evening was a York shilling (12 1/2 cents). People traveled from eight of the surrounding villages to hear her advocate for woman's rights.

One account of Anthony's tour described her as “neither too tall nor too short, too plump nor too thin . . . the perfection of common ."

Note: In the photo of the courthouse, SBA's marker is on the left. Ellen Y. Miller's marker in on the right. Miller was the first woman elected county clerk. When the male clerks refused to work for her, a woman, she got official approval to replaced them with women.