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.8 Linear feet in 2 – 5 inch boxes
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Ellis Meredith Collection, 1870-1918 ; (bulk 1900-1916)
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Date, 1854-1918
Bulk Date, 1900-1916
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Papers of Ellis Meredith, a writer and important suffrage leader in Colorado’s 1893 suffrage campaign. Meredith later went on to become a staff member for the National American Woman Suffrage Association and the Democratic Party during the 1916 election. Collection also includes family papers and photographs from the Meredith, Sorin, and Clement families.
Highlights of the collection include letters by Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Taylor Upton, Benjamin Lindsey, Mary C. C. Bradford, Carrie Chapman Catt, and others. There is also a large group of flyers from the National Women's Party, as well as the National Democratic Party, particularly around the 1916 presidential election.
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This collection is divided into several series: Correspondence, Election Commission, Meredith and Sorin Family papers, political and suffrage related materials, tourist information from California and Colorado, and original writings by Ellis and her friends. The second box of materials is entirely photographs, mostly from 1875-1910. See box and folder list for details.
The correspondence in the collection is primarily between Ellis and several important leaders in national suffrage circles as well as Colorado history, including Susan B. Anthony, Ida Husted Harper, Anna Howard Shaw, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Harriet Taylor Upton, Alice Stone Blackwell, and Benjamin Lindsey. There are also several letters from Ellis to her mother, which she signs as “Toddy.”
The Election Commission series of 2 folders covers Ellis’ election to the commission, and contains an original charter from 1911 and blank election ballots from 1915.
The Meredith/Sorin family papers include memorials to Frederick Meredith from the Colorado Legislature and others, original manuscripts and memorabilia from Matthew Sorin (Ellis’ grandfather) that he collected or wrote when he was a Methodist minister in Minnesota. Among these is an anti-Catholic booklet entitled “Political Character and Tendencies of Romanism” from 1854, as well as a resolution from the Missouri Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church from 1863.
The political and suffrage section is one of the highlights of the collection. It includes pro- and anti-suffrage fliers, Democratic Party promotional materials about suffrage from the 1916 and 1918 campaigns, as well as National Woman’s Party materials, including a strategy guide from the 1916 election.
The tourist material is a small folder of 2 booklets of postcards, one from California, and another from Colorado. Neither item is dated, but estimates put them between 1890 and 1915.
The writings section is mostly composed of articles by or about Ellis Meredith. There are several original manuscripts, as well as receipts and pay stubs from her first book. There are also a few folders of writings by her friends, Judge Benjamin Lindsey and Mary C. C. Bradford, a suffragist from Colorado Springs.
The photographs in the collection are mostly portraits of Ellis, her family and friends. All the photos have been individually described in the box and folder list. The photos have been sorted into series, with the unidentified photographs sorted by state and photographer. Many of the portraits are unidentified, but efforts have been made through internet and other searches to propose identification of some of the subjects.
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Ellis Meredith was born Emily S. Meredith in 1865 in Bozeman, Montana to Frederick and Emily (Sorin) Meredith. Ellis’ childhood was spent near her mother’s family in Missouri, and she and her parents moved the Denver in 1885. She became a staff writer for the Rocky Mountain News in 1889, and became involved with the Colorado Non-Partisan Equal Suffrage Association. Also in 1889, Ellis married Howard Stansbury, who was a writer for the Rocky Mountain News. They divorced in 1901. Ellis was a representative from Colorado to the World’s Fair in 1893, where she and a contingent of Colorado suffragists met with Susan B. Anthony. She had correspondence with national suffrage leaders like Anthony, Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell, Harriet Taylor Upton, and Carrie Chapman Catt throughout her life. Ellis’ articles were instrumental in persuading the men of Colorado to vote for equal suffrage in 1893.
After the 1893 campaign, Ellis served as Vice-Chair of the Democratic Party’s Central Committee from 1904-1908. Between 1901 and 1910 she continued to work for the News, but also published 3 books: The Master Knot of Human Fate (1901), Heart of my Heart (1904), and Under the Harrow (1908). She was elected to the Denver Election Commission in about 1910, during which time she helped to write the Charter for the City and County of Denver.
After her father’s death in 1911, Ellis married Rev. Henry Harmon Clement, in 1913. He was a teacher at East High School. Ellis’ mother died about a month after her marriage to Clement in August 1913. Ellis wrote a set of fiction articles published as Sharp Arrows in 1913, and another called the Waters of Strife in 1914. In about 1915 she was approached by her friends in the National Woman Suffrage Association to come work at their headquarters in Washington, DC. She and Henry moved there permanently around that time, but she continued to write articles in the Denver newspapers. By 1917, she was mentioned in the Denver Post as “second in command of the Woman’s National Democratic Committee.” She worked on behalf of Woodrow Wilson’s campaign in 1918, but was still very much involved in the suffrage movement, getting an endorsement of a woman’s suffrage amendment from Wilson on September 17, 1918. Rival National Woman’s Party protesters burned the announcement outside the White House in protest.
The 19th Amendment, granting women throughout the United States the vote, was ratified on August 18, 1920. Ellis shifted to other writing and clerk work. In 1920 the census states that she was an “Editorial Writer // Political Organization.” In the 1930 census, Ellis listed her occupation as an artist. On the 1940 census, she is listed on the census as a writer. She died in 1955 in Washington, DC. Her husband Henry Harmon Clement passed away in 1965.
Ellis’ father, Frederick Meredith, was born in 1835 in Dublin, Ireland and came to the United States with his family at the age of 12. Frederick became a printer and newspaper editor, working in Kansas, Illinois, Minnesota, Montana, and finally moving the family to Denver in about 1885. He became a staff printer and eventually the Managing Editor of the Rocky Mountain News, from which he retired in about 1894. Frederick moved to Fort Lupton and served in the Colorado Legislature in 1900. He passed away in Denver in 1911.
Ellis’ mother, Emily Sorin was born in 1836 in Pennsylvania to a family of ministers. Emily’s father Matthew Sorin moved Emily and her 5 siblings to Red Wing, Minnesota around 1857, where she met and married Frederick Meredith. Emily and Frederick had a total of 3 children, but Ellis was the only one to live into adulthood. Evan Meredith died at age 14 in Cass County, Missouri, and Allison Meredith died sometime before 1880, when she would have been about 10 years old. Emily was also involved in the suffrage movement in Colorado before her death in 1913.
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Ellis Meredith compiled the papers in this collection. Some of the early materials in the collection came from her mother’s (Emily Sorin Meredith) family, but Ellis or her husband Henry Harmon Clement gathered the bulk of the collection.
Ellis Meredith donated another manuscript collection to History Colorado in around 1925, and this was an important set of papers documenting the 1893 campaign for suffrage in the state.
This collection: purchase, 2019.
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The following materials in the History Colorado Collection may help researchers with the context of MSS.3119, the Ellis Meredith Papers, 1853-1918:
MSS. 427: Ellis Meredith Collection, 1881-1917. This donation was made by the same author in 1925.
MSS.564: John Franklin Shafroth Collection, 1880-1922.
MSS.730: Woman’s Suffrage Collection, 1906-1930. Set of scrapbooks of newspaper clippings by Margaret Long.
MSS.965: The Twenty-second Avenue Study Club Collection, 1893-1965
MSS.1059: Liska Stillman Churchill Collection, 1884-1950
MSS.1241: Lillian Hartman Johnson Collection, 1881-1920
MSS.1247: Colorado Woman’s Suffrage Association, 1876-1881
MSS.1296: Grace Espy Patten Cowles Collection, 1863-1935. Patten-Cowles is mentioned in the Ellis Meredith correspondence, and this collection includes a letter from Susan B. Anthony to Patten-Cowles in 1903.
MSS.2158: Non-Partisan Equal Suffrage Association of Colorado Collection, 1900
MSS.3066: Women’s Suffrage Collection
MSS.3040: Denver Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs
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Ellis Meredith Collection, MSS.3119, History Colorado, Denver, Colorado.
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