Virtual train tour honors 100 years of votes for women. There’s a stop in Tacoma
To mark the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, the Washington State Historical Society, in collaboration with a number of other historical societies and heritage foundations, has created a digital re-imagining of a train of suffragists that passed through Washington in 1909.
Mary Mikel Stump, director of audience engagement for the Washington State Historical Society, says the train tour was instrumental in pushing Washington to grant suffrage to women in 1910, the first state to do so in the 20th century.
Dubbed the “Suffrage Special,” the train was filled with activists supporting the efforts of women in the state who wanted the right to vote. The train’s final destination was the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, Seattle’s first world’s fair.
Eleven years later, on Aug. 26, 1920, the suffrage movement finally succeeded in securing the national right to vote, according to the Washington State Historical Society.
The eight-part video series, called the Suffrage Special Whistle Stop Tour, virtually visits cities around Washington, tracing the history of women’s suffrage and honoring the legacy of voting activism in the state.
This video series wasn’t always the plan. Stump explained that the original commemoration was an in-person day of festivities in Olympia.
A quick pivot
“COVID kind of threw a wrench in the plans,” said Elisa Law, women’s suffrage centennial coordinator at the Washington State Historical Society.
Law says the celebration — which was to include presentations, speeches, performances, food trucks, a parade and vendors — was canceled because of COVID-19.
Stump was disappointed when she realized the event couldn’t proceed as planned, but she knew she had to think of something else.
“We still have to do something,” she said she remembers thinking. “We can’t let this day, really important day, go by without commemorating it in some way.”
Just a few months ago, Stump began working with her colleagues and with historical societies in the state to develop something new.
“We didn’t just want to take the thing and put it online,” Stump said. “Instead, we wanted to design something specifically for digital delivery.”
Stump says the “Suffrage Special” train made perfect sense as a starting point for the new project. According to Stump, the train (and Washington’s subsequent passage of suffrage for women) reignited the movement and kick-started the national conversation over voting rights.
The new plan
One Suffrage Special Whistle Stop Tour video will be released daily this week, each focusing on the history of one city’s role in the suffrage movement and speaking with women about what the right to vote means to them. The videos will be available on the Washington State Historical Society’s Facebook and YouTube channel.
“We have all of the stops that the historic train visited as well as we added Vancouver, Bellingham and Olympia. We partnered with seven other historical organizations and they co-host each episode and provided a lot of the content,” Law said. “We hired a local woman-owned and operated production company to put it together.”
The remaining schedule:
Aug. 23: Bellingham, hosted by the Whatcom Museum
Aug. 24: Seattle, hosted by the Washington State Women’s Commission
Aug. 25: Tacoma, hosted by the Tacoma Historical Society
Aug. 26: Olympia, hosted by the Olympia Historical Society and Bigelow House Museum
“Probably looking back on it, we were a little crazy, because this kind of project would normally take a year,” Stump said. “But everybody seemed to really rise to the occasion.”
Law says the first half of each video includes historical images and an explanation of women’s history and suffrage history in that city, and the second half is a program put together by the hosting historical society. That program includes interviews with local women and performances from local actors and musicians.
A focus on disenfranchisement
Stump says an important part of the history of the 19th Amendment is who it left out — specifically, Black and Indigenous women, who she explains still struggled to vote after 1920.
Stump says the Washington State Historical Society developed a show called “Votes For Women: 100 Years and Counting” addressing this issue. It will debut when the museum reopens during Phase 3.
‘Steeped in suffrage history’
According to Law and Stump, Tacoma was home to multiple well-known suffragists. Law named Nettie Craig Asbery, an African American suffragist, as well as Emma Smith DeVoe and Virginia Mason, as influential voting rights activists living and working in Tacoma in the early 20th century.
“Tacoma is steeped in suffrage history,” Stump said.
The upcoming video from the Tacoma Historical Society will cover the suffrage history of the city and feature interviews with local women.
Michael Lafreniere, managing director of the Tacoma Historical Society, says the content of Tacoma’s video was written by Bill Baarsma, former Tacoma mayor and current board president of the Tacoma Historical Society.
Baarsma explained that the suffragists arrived in Tacoma on June 29, 1909 and enjoyed dinner in Point Defiance Park. They also toured Stadium High School (then called Tacoma High School) and observed the Stadium Bowl during its construction, Baarsma says.
He points to a quote from Harriet Chamber Upton, a suffragist from Ohio and a rider on the “Suffrage Special,” who said the most important stop of the trip was in Tacoma.
“A lot of activity in terms of the suffrage movement was taking place right here in the City of Destiny,” Baarsma said. The video includes interviews with a diverse group of present-day Tacoma women, according to Baarsma.
‘The more you know, the more you care’
Stump says the pandemic and upcoming presidential election make these videos particularly special and relevant.
“It just is an exciting thing to see in the face of this pandemic in a time that we can’t be together, something like this that really makes us feel a part of a larger thing,” Stump said.
Stump said the main question guiding the videos is: What does voting mean to you?
“That’s would be a question that we would have regardless of the pandemic, regardless of some of the issues about mail-in voting that you hear in the news today,” Stump said. “But it resonates even more given some of the questions we’re having today.”
She said she hopes the videos continue to educate people about the history of voting.
“The more you know, the more you care and the more you care, the more you get involved,” she said. “So this is really an exercise in building knowledge.”
This story was originally published August 22, 2020 at 7:15 AM.