INEZ | News about Inez from Lewis, N.Y

Inez Milholland near the U.S. Treasury at the end of
the Suffrage March in March 1913. Long forgotten, she
 is being remembered well in 2020.

We just received an update from Sandra Weber, who helped produce a version of my 1998 play, "Forward into Light", at the Lewis Church, where Inez Milholland Boissevain is buried.

Sandra's email to a few Inez fans is posted below, with her permission. I have added some links to her references to save time for readers:

Words cannot express my gratitude to all of you for your efforts towards bringing Inez into the Light. Your years of campaigning and promoting have come together into a glorious force of recognition in the past year, and especially the past few weeks. I am filled with such joy and inspiration and hope for the future.
I would like to share with you a few planned and unplanned events I have witnessed in the recent days. Yesterday, at the Adirondack Women’s March at the grave of Inez, we celebrated the life and legacy of Inez, particularly the official naming of Mount Inez. Thank you, Nancy Duff Campbell. And, Molly from Adirondack Explorer is creating a short documentary about the naming of Mount Inez.
We unveiled the placing of an Inez challenge coin (sponsored by the Champlain Valley National Heritage Partnership) at the entrance to the Milholland gravesite. And we celebrated Alice Paul, and Virginia’s ratification of the ERA.
On Wednesday evening, January 15, I attended the creation of an Inez mosaic at the Keene Central School. This was a project of the Art Force 5 of Alfred University, which is doing an amazing job of promoting women in history. And they created an Inez T-shirt, too.
And, Martha Wheelock, they played your Forward Into Light documentary [financed by as a kickstarter project] during the creation of the mosaic. I expect you will be receiving many requests for your DVD. This is only the first month of 2020–and look at the momentum already created.
Last year I led an Inez tour for Adirondack Architectural Heritage and will repeat this year, along with an Inez lecture at the Adirondack Experience Cabin Fever Series on February 9. I am also part of a group planning a Champlain Valley Centennial Suffrage Auto Tour which includes events honoring Inez Milholland, including a celebration of her birthday (tentatively scheduled for August 2). Links and photos of the mosaic project, the coin, the Women’s March, and Mount Inez are at Adirondack Women’s March website [link is above].

Jane Barker, then Chair of the Turning Point Suffrage Memorial,
with the restored portrait of Inez Milholland, which long hung
over the fireplace of the National Woman's Party HQ in
Washington, DC. (Photo by JT Marlin, 2016.)

I could also add the Roadside Marker that was placed in 2017 to recognize this famed favorite daughter.

Also the Turning Point Suffrage Memorial planned for Lorton, Virginia, which raised  $40,000 in 2017 with another version of my play at the Vienna Country Club in Vienna, Virginia.

Also the move for women's statues in Central Park (Inez was one of ten New York Times nominees).

Also the raising of $4,000 to restore the National Woman's Party portrait of Inez Milholland Boissevain. (See photo at right of Jane Barker in 2016, at the celebration of the completion of the portrait's restoration).

Please send any other news about Inez to teppermarlin at aol dot com, or any links I have missed, and your blogger will post here as a compendium of Ineziana.

MOUNT INEZ | Town of Lewis Follows Up, A Century Later

From the Elizabethtown Post,
December 7, 1916.

October 9, 2019–Yesterday evening, the Lewis (Essex County, NY) Town Council voted to rename Mount Discovery. The new name is "Mount Inez".

The mountain is named after Inez Milholland Boissevain (1886-1916), who spent her childhood and summers here and is buried on a hill in the graveyard behind the Lewis church.

This is the fulfillment of a name change made after Inez's  death in 1916, by the then-owner of the property, John E. Milholland, her father.

The commitment was at that time apparently formalized by the then government of the Town of Lewis. It was announced in the Elizabethtown Post on December 7, 1916, and was featured on the front page of the New York Times a few days later.

However, the name change was not forwarded to and memorialized by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names (USBGN), part of the U.S. Department of the Interior, or the New York State Board on Geographic Names.

Through diligent work by Nancy Duff Campbell, a century later this error was yesterday rectified as a vote was taken by the Lewis Town Council in favor of the name change. Your blogger sent the following letter to the Lewis Town Council in advance of the meeting, and to the USBGN. That evening, the Lewis Town Board formally approved the name change. The last stop in the process will be at the USBGN.

October 8, 2019 

To the Lewis Town Council, Lewis, NY 

Dear Supervisor Monty and the Lewis Town Council, 

This is to support renaming Mt. Discovery as Mt. Inez. 

I am a huge fan of Inez Milholland. She was married to the brother, Dutchman Eugen Boissevain of my grandmother (Olga Boissevain). My mother met Inez when Inez was first married in 1913 and the couple went to visit Eugen's relatives in Holland. My mother described Inez to me in great detail, how sweet-smelling she was and how she brought with her a gift of a Kewpie Doll (the doll with little wings in the back), which was the rage at the time. 

Inez proposed to Eugen on the Cunard ship Mauretania and they were married in the Kensington Town Hall in London on Bastille Day 1913. The idea was they wanted to go to Holland as a married couple, not just engaged. They were going to keep it a secret from Inez's father, John Milholland. By this time Inez was already a national figure, having led the suffrage parades in New York and Washington, DC. She was also well known in London as a disciple of the Pankhursts (she was proud to call herself a Suffragette, as the Pankhurst followers did, not just a suffragist). 

So the attempt to keep the wedding a secret was futile. It was featured on the front page of all the newspapers and that's where John E. Milholland read about it in the New York Times the next day. He wanted Inez to marry Guglielmo Marconi, the radio guy, who actually proposed to Inez on another Cunard ship when Inez was not yet in college. Inez accepted, but Marconi's Irish mother (a cousin of Eugen's Irish mother) was distressed that Inez would go to the United States and talked her son out of it. Inez later said she loved the radio but didn't want to marry it. 

In an effort to keep the memory of Inez memory alive, I wrote a play about her that was produced as a staged reading in the Lewis church where she is buried (it was also staged in six other locations). I maintain a website about her, www.inezmb.blogspot.com. I was the secretary and organizer of a national committee to pay for the restoration of the iconic painting of Inez that hangs in the Belmont-Paul building next to the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington (https://www.adirondackalmanack.com/2010/04/inez-milholland-portrait-restoration-planned.html. The Committee was headed by  members of the Boissevain (especially Al Boissevain, Eugen's nephew) and Milholland families and included Margaret Gibbs of the Essex County Historical Society. The painting was restored to the highest standards. 

A century ago, the Lewis Town Council reportedly decided to rename the mountain. It's not too late to make good on the promise. The world owns the memory of Inez Milholland, but only Lewis owns her gravesite and the mountain that your predecessors in office promised to rename in her honor. As the logline of a recent movie, "The Silent Soldier and the Portrait," puts it, "If the Universe offers you a second chance, take it."

John

John Tepper Marlin, Ph.D. (teppermarlin at aol dot com)

STATUE IN NYC | Inez One of Ten NY Times Nominees

Inez Milholland at NY City woman suffrage parade in 1913. She was an accomplished equestrian from her vacations in Lewis, N.Y. Source: Library of Congress
(from Bain News Service).

Inez Milholland's life, "though it lasted only 30 years, was cinematic." https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/26/nyregion/women-monuments-new-york-city.html

Summary of her life (with a few additions here to the NY Times bio):

• 1905-09 Campus activist at Vassar College, fighting for suffrage as the President, James Monroe Taylor, tried to silence all discussion as political.
• 1909 Rejected by Harvard and other U.S. law schools, and Oxford, because she was a woman. Harvard law school faculty accepted her but was overruled by the administration. Accepted by NYU.
• 1909 Arrested after demonstrating with striking women shirtwaist workers.
• 1909 Interrupted a campaign parade for President William Howard Taft, in New York, asking what he had done for the right of women to vote.
• 1912 Led woman suffrage parade in New York City. Received NYU Law School degree.
• 1913, March Led huge woman suffrage parade in Washington, D.C. on the eve of Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration. 
• 1913 Wrote a harsh report on prison conditions at Sing Sing for her firm, one of whose partners was Osborne.
• 1913, July Proposed marriage to a Dutch tobacco importer (later coffee importer) on board the Mauretania, and remained committed to free love; they were married secretly in London.
• 1915-16 Went on Ford Peace Ship and got off in Sweden because of patriarchy on the boat. Covered the Great War in Italy as a journalist, before getting thrown out of the country for negative reporting (she was a pacifist).
• 1916 Set out on a long whistle-stop train tour with her sister Vida, rallying support for the Federal Anthony Amendment.
• 1916, October Collapsed in Los Angeles, from exhaustion and anemia. After daily notices in the newspapers nationwide about her status, she died in November.

WOMEN ON THE MARCH | 1912-2018

Inez Milholland leading the Women's March, 1913. 

There is a fine photo history of the women's parades in Washington put together by the USIA here. 

It focuses on Washington, D.C. and therefore omits the woman-suffrage parades in New York City. The reason that Inez Milholland was asked to head up the Washington parade is that she had led the 1912 New York City parade on her horse.

Both Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan were among the 50,000 women who marched down Fifth Avenue in 1970, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of women being guaranteed by the Constitution's 19th Amendment the right to vote at the Federal level.

Here are links to stories on the first day of the 2018 Women's March and the second day. In The New York Times, Michelle Goldberg argues that the agreement to end the shutdown sells out the Resistance and the women’s marches. Paul Krugman says it is a betrayal of the Dreamers. In The New Yorker, John Cassidy thinks the effects of the women’s marches are more lasting than the shutdown. Time noted in 2016 that in 1923 (it was in advance of a memorial to Inez Milholland at her family home) many people had forgotten about Inez.

INEZ | Her New Roadside Marker in Lewis, NY!

November 24, 2017 – A new marker for Inez Milholland Boissevain has been erected in her childhood home, Lewis, N.Y.

Three cheers for the Pomeroy Foundation for creating this and other physical markers for the women who persevered in campaigning for their right to vote.

The eldest of the three children of John E. Milholland and his wife Jean Torrey Milholland, Inez was born in New York City, in a neighborhood that is now called Brooklyn Heights.

The Lewis newspaper in 1916 supported
changing the name of "Mt Discovery" to
 "Mt Inez". The maps were never changed.
It's not too late to do that.

She spent her summers and other vacations in the huge property that her her father purchased in Lewis, and learned to ride a horse there – a skill that defined the iconic image by which she is best known today.

The mountain on the Milholland property, Mt Discovery, was supposed to have been changed to Mt Inez but the maps haven't reflected the change. It's harder to do that than they thought. The name change would be an even better marker than a roadside sign. Maybe the Pomeroy Foundation can help with that? There are other pointless names in the United States that could be changed to those of neglected American women.

Inez is the only woman in the American suffrage movement who is considered to have given up her life for the cause. She died like a soldier on the battlefield at the age of 30 in 1916, collapsing in October that year while on a grueling speaking tour with her sister Vida, and dying six weeks later in Los Angeles.

I have written a play about Inez. A 15-minute movie about her life was created last year. The connections are being made between the huge ceremony on Christmas Day in her honor and the anger of the  delegation of women to President Wilson the following month that he dissed. 

Buy a large-size durable poster of Inez
 for $30 from Boissevain Books LLC.

The picketing of the White House that started in January 2017 began with the memory of Inez Milholland Boissevain.

This blogsite is filled with recent efforts to recognize her contribition to the gaining of recognition of women's right to vote in New York State and the nation.

MT INEZ | Mt Discover Inez?

From The Elizabethtown Post, Dec. 7, 1916.

In late 1916 the citizens of Elizabethtown or Lewis or both decided to rename Mt Discovery after Inez Milholland Boissevain.

The Name-Change Approved

1. The Name of Mount Inez Was Announced in a Four-Column Article in The Elizabethtown Post, December 7, 1916. The newspaper says, with some finality:

The highest mountain on Meadowmount (the Milholland farm/estate) is "Old Discovery" from the summit of which is obtained a wonderful view of Lake Champlain, the Adirondacks, Green Mountains, and vast sweep towards Canada. It stands an outpost of the ranges like Mount Shasta in relation to the Sierra Nevadas. Hereafter its name will be "Mount Inez," a fitting monument of nature for her nose love for the mountains was only equalled by her love for the sea.

Not content with this fine tribute, the newspaper editorializes further:

Inez Milholland-Boissevain [sic, unique use of hyphen with Inez's name] will have a monument made by the hand of man but she has one already fashioned by God in Nature and in changing the name "Discovery" – which means little to this generation whatever significance it ever possessed – to "Mount Inez" something has been done in the right direction that we believe all our people will approve and unanimously carry out.

2. The Decision is Noted in an Inez Biography. The plan to change the name of the mountain from "Discovery" to "Inez" is noted at the end of the long entry (pp. 188-190) by Paul S. Boyer in Notable American Women, 1607-1951.

3. The Republican Party Announced It. According to Andrea Anesi, Archivist for the Adirondack History Museum, which is operated by the Essex County Historical Society, an article from the Essex County Republican of August 1, 1924 reported on the pageant to be held in Inez’s honor “at Meadowmount on Mount Inez.” 

4. The Plan Was Noted in 1984. In the editorial below from the Valley News, September 12, 1984, the news should have gone forth to the people who keep track of names. 

The Name Change Was Not Implemented

Before: An 1897 Map Showing Mt Discovery

Alas, the approval process seems to have happened, but the "carry out" part has not. 

1. The Maps Don't Show It. Now, 100 years later, and while most of Inez's 20th-century contemporary biographies indicate the name change took place the maps don't show it.

After (100 Years Later): Google Map, 2017
shows it now called... Mt Discovery.

The Milholland farm included Mt Discovery. The name may have come from the discovery of iron in the Adirondacks in 1826, but that story is about David Henderson on a higher mountain in the Adirondacks. The relevance of the story is that when Henderson died the name of the place where he died was changed to Calamity Pond...

2. In 1916, I reminded the people of Lewis, Elizabethtown and Essex County that it was time to "carry out" the name change. 

3. The Granddaughter of Harriot Stanton Blatch, Speaking in East Hampton This Week, Noted the Omission. Coline Jenkins was with her daughter Elizabeth Jenkins. Coline went on from her talk in East Hampton to Lewis, New York.

Next Steps

1. Keeping Both Names? "Mt Discovery Inez"? I suggested "Mt Discover Inez." It ought to be easier to amend a name if the old name is incorporated.

2. Ultimately, the decision-maker is the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) in the U.S. Geological Service of the U.S. Department of the Interior. Click on the link – GNIS still shows the name as Mount Discovery and nothing about Inez.

Either way, I ask you: HOW LONG, ESSEX COUNTY, MUST AMERICANS WAIT FOR THE NAME CHANGE?

INEZ | Get This Durable Enlarged Poster

The "Forward into Light" Poster.

The original Inez Milholland Boissevain poster was made for the 1923 pageant in Lewis, N.Y., where Inez was born. 

It celebrated the 10th anniversary of the 1913 march on Washington.

This march will again be celebrated on June 11, 2017 with a play, "Take Up the Song," at the Westwood Country Club in Vienna, Va.

To recognize the event, Boissevain Books has prepared a more durable version of the original poster, in a larger size.

This poster travels well and looks terrific. It is shipped rolled up in a strong cardboard tube.
-----------
The Brennan Center at NYU ordered two of them and said: "Thank you for the terrific posters. They are really well done, and we look forward to hanging one of them in a place of honor at the Brennan Center."
----------
For more information contact info@boissevainbooks.com.

Related Posts on Inez Milholland. Her Engagement to Guglielmo Marconi . Short Biopic on Inez .  June 11 Play Featuring Inez Milholland . Edna St Vincent Millay  Centennial of Christmas Day Memorial to Inez . Seneca Falls Convention .  The 1913 and 2013 Marches on Washington .  Inez Led the 1913 Parade . Eugen Boissevain, Tough and Tender

INEZ | Sister March, Jan. 21, in Lewis, N.Y.

The following is from a press release sent out by Sandra Weber.

Sister March Planned to Honor Inez Milholland 

Adirondack-Champlain Valley community will rally at suffragist’s grave

Elizabethtown, NY, January 9, 2017—Women, men, families and youths from across the Adirondack region plan to rally on Saturday, January 21 to show solidarity with those at the Women’s March on Washington. Local marches have been gathering momentum and the national organization says 300 Sister Marches are planned, each with its own program, “from music and speeches to a rally at a suffragist’s grave in upstate New York, to a verbal ‘human mosaic’ of people in Napa Valley sharing their vision for the future.” [See prnewswire on Sister Marches, 1/9/17]

“The day after the Presidential inauguration, people from around the country will unite in Washington, DC in the spirit of democracy, dignity and justice,” said Sandra Weber, co-organizer of the Adirondack march. “Some people are travelling to DC, but many of us will not be able to make the trip. When I heard that Seneca Falls was holding a Sister March, I thought it was a great idea for our North Country community to join the movement.”

Participants in the Adirondack-Champlain Valley Women’s March will meet at the grave of Inez Milholland in Lewis Cemetery behind the Congregational Church. The program will include a tribute to Inez, presentation of flowers, and a reading of the sonnet "To Inez Milholland" by Edna St. Vincent Millay. The cemetery setting also echoes the famous “graveyard rally” organized by Inez when Vassar College officials refused to allow a suffrage meeting on campus. 

“In the Adirondack region, the most notable site of the woman’s movement is Inez’s grave. She rode a white horse at the front of the 1913 Suffrage Parade in Washington and became the national symbol of the suffrage movement,” explained Weber, a local author and historian. “Three years later, Inez Milholland died, at age 30, while campaigning for Votes for Women. Her father, John Milholland (one of the founders of the NAACP), insisted that the body be buried in the Adirondack foothills, near the family’s estate, Meadowmount.”

“Inez was not only a suffrage martyr, she was an advocate of human rights,” said David Hodges, co-organizer of the local event. “Her message---Forward out of darkness, Forward into light---resonates as much today as 100 years ago.”

In recognition of her sacrifice and commitment to women’s equality, Inez Milholland was nominated for the Presidential Citizens Medal in 2015. The Inez Milholland Centennial project believes that now is the perfect time to award the medal to Inez, as women march in Washington following in her footsteps and others rally at her grave.

After the short graveside ceremony, the Adirondack marchers will reconvene indoors at the Whallonsburg Grange where Hodges, along with other musicians and singers, will lead participants in songs of hope and unity. The purpose is to stand together and send a message of support for values of human decency, equal rights and freedom from discrimination. 

During the first ten days of the grass-roots effort using Facebook and e-mail, fifty people committed to attending the Adirondack-Champlain Valley Women’s March. Participants are coming from all over the region: Keene Valley, Essex, Westport, Elizabethtown, Saranac Lake, Lake Placid, Plattsburgh, Glens Falls, and Vergennes, Vermont, and other places.

The event is free and non-partisan. For more information, see the Facebook Event page for Adirondack – Champlain Valley Women’s March or email Sandra Weber at weber@sandraweber.com.

For more information on the Sister March Press Release: https://www.womensmarch.com/sisters-press

For more information on the Women’s March on Washington and Sister Marches, visit womensmarch.com or womensmarch.com/sisters

Additional photos available from Sandra Weber, 518-873-1137 . weber@sandraweber.com.

EUGEN | Guglielmo Marconi, Friend and Relative

Marconi

Dr. Marc Raboy's new book on Guglielmo Marconi published by the Oxford University Press has just appeared. It was reviewed yesterday by Greg Milner (author of Pinpoint: How GPS is Changing Technology, Culture and Our Minds).

Prof. Raboy holds the Beaverbrook Chair in Ethics, in the Media and Communications Department of Art History and Communications at McGill University in Montreal.

Raboy credits me with providing some details in his book about Marconi's mother's family that I sent to him in an email on July 26, 2012. I am posting here information I sent, in the hope that it will be useful to other researchers on the Milhollands, the Boissevains or the Marconis.

My link to Raboy was Linda Lumsden, who wrote a fine biography of Inez Milholland–book that made it unnecessary for me to rush out my own book into the void I saw about her life story.  Instead, I worked on a play about her that was first produced in New York City Hall, then migrated to Rochester, and was then produced as a staged reading in Inez Milholland's birthplace, Lewis, N.Y.  (Linda was kind enough to attend this event.) This year is the centennial of Inez Milholland's death and I am rewriting my play for a group in the Washington, D.C. area that is interested in producing it.

In my email to Prof. Raboy, I cited several connections between Eugen Boissevain and Guglielmo Marconi. Here is a slightly edited version of what I told him in 2012: 

1. Both were engaged to Inez, Guglielmo for a few months and Eugen for the rest  of her short life. Guglielmo expected Inez and Eugen to hit it off. (He had a hunch she would go for a hunk.) My mother Hilda van Stockum was Eugen's niece and told me used to tell me things that Eugen passed on to her. Apparently Guglielmo told Eugen that he was passing his old flame onto him because she needed someone like Eugen–someone more masculine (or "stronger" may have been the way he put it) than he, Guglielmo, was. Eugene's bother Robert had been in New York already for some time and already knew Inez through his second wife (who had been personal secretary to Alma Smith Vanderbilt Belmont, a big funder of the woman suffrage movement), so Eugen was well-informed about the woman he was to meet for the first time at the Holland House in June 1913.

2. Both liked going to Irish pubs. They engaged in an Irish-pub crawl in New York and from the context it was not the first such evening out that they spent together.

3. Eugen worked for Guglielmo's company, Marconi Wireless, for a while in London–probably working with investors, which I think of as Guglielmo's obsession, although I may be projecting onto the Marconi company the worries of Inez's father about the Batcheller company. The Bankers' Panic of 1907-08 was similar to that of 2008-09 so they would still be facing risk-averse investors.

4. Both were intellectually curious. But Guglielmo was more a nerdy scientist and Eugen was more a wide-ranging free-thinker, which is the biggest thing that John E. Milholland held against him.

5. Both had Irish mothers who were first cousins from the Jameson family in Ireland, still famed for their whiskey. The Jamesons were distinguished in Ireland because of the brand was well-known and well-loved and  because they were enriched by sales of their product. They were also Protestant Irish. In New York City Protestant circles the Jameson product might have been less highly regarded because a Protestant Irishman like John E. Milholland might well have been a Prohibitionist. (It was Prohibition that united Catholics and Jews against the Protestants.)  My nephew Chris Oakley in London wrote up an explanation of the relationship between the two Jameson mothers. The Jameson family came together during the summers at Glen Lodge on the edge of Lake Sligo in Northwest Ireland. My mother has visited there many summers. Sligo (which means "abundant in sea shells") is the largest urban area in northwest Ireland. Sligo is three-quarters Catholic, but the sympathies of the Jamesons during the 1910s and 1920s would have gravitated to the British. (It is a county in the Province of Connacht, one of the four provinces of the Éire Republic. The nine Ulster counties, six of which constituted the Northern Ireland Province of the United Kingdom, are immediately to the east.)

See also related posts: Let's Get that Mountain Renamed . Recognizing Stanton and Anthony . Aug. 6–Milholland's 130th Birthday . How Did Eugen Meet Inez?

INEZ (Superseded Post)

This post has been superseded by this one. It is kept up solely to avoid broken links.

INEZ | Let's Get that Mountain Renamed

The portrait of Inez made
in 1924 for the Pageant in
Meadowmount.

Alice Paul has had the Sewall-Belmont House named after her. It is now a National Park Service Monument and is renamed the Belmont-Paul house, recognizing Alma Vanderbilt Belmont's great contributions to the National Woman's Party and Alice Paul's leadership.

But the great inspiration for the final push for suffrage was Inez Milholland. 

Her portrait hung in splendor over the mantelpiece of the Belmont-Paul House until 2011, when the mantelpiece was removed.

A committee headed by Allegra Milholland and Alfred Boissevain (nephew of Inez's husband Eugen; my late mother was Eugen's niece) raised the funds to restore the portrait. I helped put together the committee.

Mt. Discovery is in the back of Meadowmount, where
Inez Milholland grew up and learned to ride, in
 Lewis, N.Y., the site of a suffrage pageant in 1924.
The Milholland home is now a music school.

August 6, 2016 will be the 130th birthday of Inez Milholland Boissevain. November 25 will be the 100th anniversary of her death.  

She collapsed in the middle of campaigning for women suffrage and died a few weeks later. In this centennial year, how can we best create a memorial for her?

The newspapers in 1916 said that Mt. Discovery (its peak 1,552 feet above sea level) would be renamed. It is part of the Meadowmount property in Lewis, Essex County, N.Y. that John E. Milholland purchased. It is supposed to be renamed Mt. Inez. But it hasn't happened. 

What would it take to make this happen? Governor Cuomo, can you do something to remember this great woman who fought for human rights? (Matilda Cuomo, wouldn't this be a good idea?)