Imagine...

... you heard the news today, oh boy... actually the news is from one-hundred years ago today, and it took another day for this news to be printed in Conway (no Twitter in those days)... and you can read about it here and now thanks to a new program at the Conway Public Library's Henney History Room!

The news is that the New Hampshire State Legislature ratified the 19th amendment to the US Constitution.

Note the article reports that "while the debate was short it was at times spicy." The news on suffrage was combined with a report about "our valiant boys" getting a soldier's bonus.

Today we have a hard time imagining what was so controversial? Or that it would take almost another year (until August 18, 1920) for enough other states to ratify it and make it law. Or that the right for women to vote was not guaranteed earlier.

Here is the wording of the amendment "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." Seems pretty simple and fair? 

For more on the history of this struggle check out one of our favorite blogs off all time - Cow Hampshire at this link.

As usual, the blog's author, Janice Brown scooped me and published her blog back in June.

The National Park Service has mapped out some of the history of the suffrage movement at this site. Here you can read about the key role this landmark building played in the story. 

And now back to the news. Thanks to a grant from Henney Historical Fund we have been digitizing our collection of the Reporter newspaper. See this link for details. Now you can catch up on all the local news and gossip from March 14, 1895 to Dec 31, 1973 from anywhere anytime. Here is the direct link to the search page.

If you want to read all the news from the issue printed Thursday, September 11, 1919 you can go directly here for that. Be sure to give it a few seconds to load properly. At first the text appears as an ancient alien hieroglyphic language but then the image clears up. From there you can zoom in, search, crop, download, send, etc. You can create a digital scrapbook, etc. and copy info about births, deaths, marriages, etc. We will do more on using this fantastic new resource in future blogs. In the mean time, if you have any questions about navigating the site contact us.

In other news, another front page article noted that runaways were becoming frequent in our village. The article is in the weekly "Busy People of Conway" column.

 Now before thinking it was teenagers, these runaways were probably only two or three years old.

They were in fact horses. This tradition continues today as someone recently tried to create a new drive through at the Conway post office. You can read about that at this link.

For yet more information on suffrage commemorations see these links here and here.

In the mean time, please let me know what you think. For more details on this or any other historical subject in the White Mountains, contact us at the Conway Public Library's Henney History Room.