WOMEN'S SUFFRAGE LEADER LUCIA EAMES BLOUNT (1841-1925)
A Women’s Suffrage Trail Marker honoring Lucia E. Blount will be installed on May 10 at EVPL Central Library, downtown Evansville. The unveiling event at1:00 pm that day is sponsored by LWVSWIN and the Evansville Vanderburgh Public Library (EVPL). Following this public event, there will be a reception in the library lobby for all attendees.
The new Central Library is believed to have been the approximate location of the Blount home (no longer in existence) in the late 1800s. It was in that home in May 1886, that Lucia Blount hosted Indiana women’s suffrage leader May Wright Sewell, who spoke to a group of women at a parlor meeting to encourage the local suffrage movement. A few days later, the Equal Suffrage Society of the first Congressional District of Indiana was formed with over 150 members.
Evansville suffragists took the lead as district organizers, helping form suffrage groups in the district’s smaller communities. On November 4 and 5, 1887, Evansville hosted a district convention of the Indiana National Woman’s Suffrage Association, at which the keynote speaker was Susan B. Anthony. Though Blount had left Evansville before 1887, she had raised awareness of women’s suffrage and had drawn to southwestern Indiana the attention of national and state organizers, including Anthony, Helen M. Gougar, and Ida Husted Harper, who co-edited The History of Woman Suffrage with Susan B. Anthony.
LWVSWIN members Roberta Heiman and Lezlie Simmons did the research and writing to obtain the marker grant on behalf of LWVSWIN. The marker honoring Blount is one stop along theWomen’s Suffrage Trail sponsored by the National Collaboration for Women’s History Sites. For a list and map of locations of other markers, see the NCWHS website at https://ncwhs.org/.
This marker was provided through a grant from the William G. Pomeroy Foundation. Get a preview of the Blount marker – still in its shipping box – in the photo above.
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