Most of the 40 women honored at Friday’s celebration of “Founding Mothers: Portraits of Progress” will have opportunities to add to their records of community leadership.
Five of the distinguished women in these portraits, however, were born in the 1800s: The stories of pioneer Esther Short, Mother Joseph, Dr. Louisa Wright, teacher-legislator Ella Wintler and librarian Eva Santee have pretty much been told, including coverage in The Columbian.
Yet many of those stories have been forgotten: how Wright worked her way through medical school to become Clark County’s first woman doctor; how Santee’s single-minded focus on her library eventually meant that she refused to walk into the place.
The daughter of wagon train pioneers, Wright earned $25 a month teaching in Camas-area schools to pay for medical school. She was only 23 when she graduated from the University of Michigan Medical School in 1885.
A Columbian story written after her death in 1913 described a house call to treat an ailing woman in that horse-and-buggy era.
Wright and the woman’s husband found the road blocked by a downed tree. They were able to get her horse to the other side of the roadblock, then “together they disassembled the buggy, piece by piece, and reassembled it on the other side of the fallen tree.”
On May 30, 1013, she was on her way to decorate the family plot at Fern Prairie Cemetery when she was killed. Her husband was preparing to hitch his horse to the buggy when the animal “reared and struck the doctor’s chin, breaking her neck,” we reported.
Hilarie Couture’s portrait of Santee might be the only public salute to the librarian since her retirement in 1967. That was by design. According to our archives, Santee made it clear she didn’t want so much as a plaque in her name.
Santee, who died in 1979 at age 83, had another way of putting an exclamation point on her retirement. She would be driven past the main Vancouver library but refused to enter, her niece said. Santee didn’t want anybody to think she was meddling.
Off Beat lets members of The Columbian news team step back from our newspaper beats to write the story behind the story, fill in the story or just tell a story.
