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)

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?