By Lisa Robinson
In 1874, the National Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was founded in Cleveland, Ohio and in the fall of 1892 a local chapter was formed in Boulder Creek. The members of the WCTU were staunch supporters of the suffrage movement. In an 1892 letter to the Santa Cruz Sentinel the WCTU chides the male voters of Santa Cruz for not voting for Alfred J. Hinds, the temperance candidate for Mayor. “I doubt not but that every women [sic] if allowed to vote, untrammeled, as she believed to be right, would vote for temperance.”
The temperance and suffrage movement were tightly linked. In the late 1800s, there were few states in which women could control property, they could not vote, or have custody of their children if they divorced. Rape was rarely prosecuted and the age of consent in California in 1880 was just ten.
The temperance movement was in part women’s protest against their lack of civil rights, at a time when most local political meetings were held in saloons, and as such inaccessible to women. According to the WCTU at the end of the 1800s Americans spent over a billion dollars on alcoholic beverages each year, compared with $900 million on meat and less than $200 million on public education.
The perceived need for a local chapter in Boulder Creek was a result of the extensive lumber interests and a railroad terminus and hence “scores of young men on the streets with little but evil before them.” The WCTU resolved to build a free reading room and public library to entice these young men away from the saloons.
The building, which still stands today on the east side of Highway 9 just south of East Lomond, was constructed in 1893 and dedicated on January 1, 1894. The first floor housed the library and the WCTU parlor; the second floor housed the librarian and their family. In order to raise funds to support the reading room, events such as a “Martha Washington Supper” (Martha Washington being the first first lady) and a “Festival of Days” were held in local halls. The arrival of new books was announced in the local newspaper, the Mountain Echo. Books such as Trail of Sandhill Stag by Ernest Thompson Seton – a beautifully illustrated book that you can now read in its entirety on Google Books, and Rebecca of Sunny Brook Farm by Kate Douglas Wiggin – a classic favorite. In addition, the reading room received books from the State Library. These books were noted as containing “valuable information and to the deep thinker, intensely interesting,” such as Forestry by Filbert Roth.
To learn more about the suffrage movement and to celebrate the 100-year anniversary of a woman’s right to vote visit She Can Do Both, a new exhibition opening in April at the San Lorenzo Valley Museum Grace Episcopal Gallery in Boulder Creek, opening reception April 19, 2-4pm, refreshments served..