Suffrage in the Adirondacks: Westport hub

Westport on Lake Champlain was making regional news in the summer of 1916 as an Adirondack hub for the woman’s suffrage movement.

“Aside from the location is the fact that Miss Alice Lee of San Diego, Cal., a suffrage leader of much prominence in that state and vice president of the Woman’s Board of the San Diego Exposition, has returned to spend the season at her summer place in the village,” The Post-Star of Glens Falls reported on July 8, 1916.

Matthew Hale of Massachusetts, a Progressive Party leader and “an enthusiastic worker on behalf of suffrage for women,” also was at Westport for the summer, and Commodore A.V. Wadhams, another suffrage advocate, was at Wadhams, near Westport.

“Mrs. George Notman of Brooklyn, the district leader who is in charge of the work in the mountains, has a summer place at Keene Valley,” The Post-Star reported.