Tag: Unitarians in Palo Alto

A schoolteacher and supporter of women’s suffrage, Ann Upton Lawrence was born on Nantucket Is., Mass., on Oct., 1840, to Frederic W. Lawrence and Susan Hussey. Since her birth is recorded in the Quaker manner as “10th month” (rather than “October”), perhaps her family were Quakers; a Quaker upbringing could help explain her lifelong support of equal rights for women.

Her life can be traced through the U.S. Census. In 1850, she was living on Nantucket Is. with her father and mother, and younger siblings Amelia and Everett; her father was working as an accountant. By 1860, she was living with her father in San Francisco, and working as a school teacher; her father was working as a clerk, and they shared a house with William H. Lawrence, a mariner, and his wife and child.

Annie married Edward W. Corbert before 1866. In 1870, she and Edward were living in San Francisco, where Edward worked as “Assessor, Int. Rev.”; they had two children, Louise (b. c. 1866, Calif.), and Sadie (b. c. 1869, Calif.). In 1880, she and Edward were living in Martinez with Louise, Sadie, and Anita Lawrence (b. June, 1874, Calif.). By 1900, Annie was widowed and living with Anita in Palo Alto; Anita was working as a teacher. And in 1910, Annie was still living with Anita, as well as with her son-in-law, John Byxbee; John was the Palo Alto city engineer for whom Byxbee Park is named.

Annie supported women’s suffrage. She was president of the Santa Clara County Equal Suffrage Assoc. in 1900, and said in her presidential address of that year, “We are simply waiting and watching, and working to strengthen our forces and our cause, so that at the golden moment we may be ready to spring into place.” She continued working for equal suffrage through the successful campaign in 1911 which gained California women the right to vote: “Mrs. John F. Byxbee, Mrs. George Rosebrook and Mrs. Annie L. Corbert entertained at a suffrage tea Thursday afternoon at the Byxbee home in Alma Street.”

Her civic activities were not limited to equal suffrage. She also found time to support the schools and the public library, and she belonged to the Palo Alto Woman’s Club, the Civic League, the Peace Society, and the Historical Society.

She was active in the early days of the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto, and was one of the early members of the Women’s Alliance. She helped run the Unitarian “Post Office Mission” in Palo Alto. She sang in the church choir, and her “clear true alto” voice was “always a power in quartette singing, even to the time of her last illness.” She divided her time between San Francisco and Palo Alto, and was also an officer for the San Francisco branch of the Women’s Alliance.

Her obituary in the Pacific Unitarian gave three samples of her religious philosophy, things she said not long before she died:

“As a church we should ask ourselves, continually, What is the church for—are we doing something worthy, or are we marking time.”

“I have found that we must not judge people. Minds are different, and we must not condemn as unworthy that which does not suit our own ideas.”

“The human soul is a lonely thing. It must stand by itself at the last.”

Notes: 1850, 1860, 1870, 1880, 1900, 1910 U.S. Census; Vital Records of Nantucket, Massachusetts, to 1850, vol. II—Births (G-Z), Boston: New England Historical Genealogical Society, 1926, p. 235; Gayle Gullett, Becoming Citizens: The Emergence and Development of the California Women’s Movement, 1880-1911, Univ. of Illinois Press, p. 109; San Francisco Call, Aug. 20, 1911; Pacific Unitarian, Aug., 1916, p. 262; Pacific Unitarian, March, 1915, p. 137.
N.B.: In the printed record, her married name is often spelled “Corbett,” but when she signed her name she wrote “Corbert”; furthermore, she signed her first name “Annie,” not “Ann.”

Effie June Scott Franklin — A professor of French and German, she was born Aug. 5, 1871, in on a farm in Carlyle Township, Kansas. Her father, Dr. John W. Scott, came to Kansas in 1857, and was active in the free state fight, serving in the first state legislature; Dr. Scott served in the Civil War as surgeon of the Tenth Kansas, and after that war was president of the company that laid out the town of Iola, Kansas.

Effie’s family family moved to the town of Iola, Kansas, in 1874. She graduated from high school in Iola, Kansas, in 1887. She had two older brothers: Angelo C., the eldest; and Charles F. Scott, ten years older than Effie, who represented Kansas for several years as a Republican in the U.S. Congress.

After graduating from high school, Effie taught in the Kansas City, Kansas, schools, and then taught high school in Leavenworth, Kansas. She then began studies at the University of Kansas, receiving her A.B. in 1891. Subsequently she pursued graduate study at Cornell and at the University of Berlin. She was assistant professor of French and German at the University of Kansas for two years until her marriage in 1897; William Carruth was at that time professor of German.

She married Edward Curtis Franklin on July 22, 1897, at Central Presbyterian Church in Denver, Colorado. She and Edward had three children: Anna Comstock (b. Sept., 1898), Charles Scott (b. c. 1902), and John Curtis (b. c. 1905).

Politically, she was a progressive who supported “woman suffrage.”

She was active in the Unitarian church in Lawrence, Kansas, and was a delegate from the Lawrence church to the National Conference of Unitarians in 1911 (the family lived in Washington, D.C., 1911-1913 while Edward worked for the government Hygenic Laboratory).. Prof. William Carruth was also a member of the Lawrence, Kansas, church before he moved to Palo Alto.

Effie moved to Palo Alto in 1903 when her husband accepted a position as professor at Stanford. She was an early member of the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto, and was active in the Women’s Alliance.

When Maria Protsman Scott, Effie’s mother, died in 1907, she was staying with her daughter in Palo Alto; however, it doesn’t appear that Maria was living with the Franklins.

In 1914, a classmate from the University of Kansas visited the Franklins, as well as former Kansans Jennie and Helen Sutliff, and William and Katharine Carruth. She wrote: “At Stanford I spent several days with the Sutliffs and Franklins and had a pleasant visit with Dr. and Mrs. Carruth. … Dr. Franklin was soon to leave for New Zealand where he was going at the request of the British government, in company with fourteen other American scientists of note. Dr. and Mrs. Franklin have a very handsome big daughter Anna, a high school girl, and two younger boys, Charles and Jack.”

Effie was an accomplished pianist, and she was elected an honorary member of the Stanford Music Club in 1916.

She died at her home in Palo Alto on March 31, 1931.

Notes: 1900, 1910 U.S. Census; Graduate Magazine of the University of Kansas, 1931, p. 14; William E. Connolley, History of Kansas Newspapers, Topeka: Kansas State Printing Plant, 1916, p. 47; William E. Connelley, A Standard History of Kansas and Kansans, vol. 3, Chicago: Lewis Pub. Co., 1919, p. 1360; Iola Register, May 30, 1902; Jan Onofrio, Kansas Biographical Dictionary, St. Clair Shores, Miss.: Somerset Pub., 2000, p. 142; The Arrow of Pi Beta Phi, Ann Arbor, Mich.: Michigan Chapter of Beta, October, 1893, p. 118; Iola Register, July 30, 1897, p. 8; John William Leonard, Woman’s Who’s Who of America, 1914-1915, New York: American Commonwealth Co., 1914, p. 305; Christian Register, Oct. 19, 1911, p. 1095; Graduate Magazine of the University of Kansas, March, 1907, p. 224; Graduate Magazine of the University of Kansas, Dec., 1914, p. 91; Stanford Daily, Jan. 25, 1916, p. 2.

 

Edward Curtis Franklin — A renowned chemist who grew up in Kansas while it was still part of the frontier, he was born in Geary City, Kansas, on March 1, 1862. He was raised in Doniphan, Kansas, where his father owned a saw mill and grist mill. At the time he was young, that part of Kansas still had the flavor of the frontier, to which some ascribed his later “noticeable impatience with convention.” As a boy, he enjoyed the outdoors, including hunting, fishing, swimming in the Missouri River, and collecting fossils; this love of the outdoors was to remain with him his whole life, and he was an active mountain climber who belonged to the Sierra Club, and summited a number of 14,000 foot peaks. He and his brother William, later a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, made their own batteries, a two-mile long telegraph line, and their own telephone in 1877, only a year after A. G. Bell patented his tel-phone.

After he graduated from high school, he worked for a pharmacy in Severance, Kansas, from 1880-1884, then at age 22 entered the University of Kansas. He received his S.B. from the University of Kansas in 1888, studied at the University of Berlin 1890-1891, and received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1894. He was a professor of chemistry at the University of Kansas from 1891 to 1903, and worked for a gold mining company in Costa Rica for a time in 1897. He was professor of chemistry at Stanford from 1903 to his retirement in 1929. As a chemist, he was best known for his work on ammonia and other nitrogen compounds. He was considered an excellent teacher who delivered exceptionally clear lectures.

He married Effie Scott on July 22, 1897, in Denver, Colorado, and they had three children: Anna Comstock (b. Sept., 1898), Charles Scott (b. c. 1902), and John Curtis (b. c. 1905).

He was an early member of the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto. He hosted the monthly social gathering of the Unitarian Church, entertaining “the company with some experiments with liquid air.” Theologically, Unitarianism was a good fit for Franklin: “Even as a youth…Franklin was inclined to be a ‘free thinker’ and agnostic.”

After his wife Effie died in 1931, he lived with his daughter, Anna Franklin Barnett, in Palo Alto. In the last three years of his life, he took long auto-mobile tours of the U.S. and Canada, and died just two months after returning from the last such trip. He died Feb. 13, 1937.

Notes: Alexander Findlay, Journal of the Chemical Society, 1938, p. 583; Howard Elsey, Biographical Memoirs, Nat. Academy of Sciences, 1991, pp. 67-75; Stanford Daily, Feb. 15, 1937, p. 1; Jan Onofrio, Kansas Biographical Dictionary, St. Clair Shores, Miss.: Somerset Pub., 2000, pp. 139 ff.; obituary, Stanford Daily, Feb. 15, 1937; John William Leonard, ed., Men of America: A Biographical Dictionary, New York: L. R. Hamersly & Co., 1908; Pacific Unitarian, April, 1909, p. 186. Photo of Edward from a U.S. Government Web site, ihm.nlm.nih.gov/images/B06647, accessed May 23, 2017.

 

Anna Comstock Franklin Barnett — A physician and graduate of the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto Sunday school, she was born Sept. 12, 1898, in Lawrence, Kansas, daughter of Effie Scott (q.v.) and Edward Curtis Franklin (q.v.).

Her family moved to Palo Alto in 1903. In 1905, Anna was “one of the first pupils of the Sunday-school” of the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto.

She received her A.B. from Stanford University in 1920, and her M.D. from Stanford in 1924. On July 12, 1924, she married Dr. George de Forest Barnett; he was a physician and professor of medicine at Stanford. They had two children, Margaret A. and Edward F. After the death of her mother in 1931, Anna’s father came to live with her.

Anna joined the faculty of Stanford School of Medicine. Her husband, who had also taught at Stanford School of Medicine, died in 1955. Anna continued to live on campus after her own retirement.

On Oct. 1, 1968, the Stanford Daily reported: “The badly decomposed body of Dr. Anna Barnett, a retired Medical School professor, was discovered in the hills behind Stanford Friday morning. The body was found near Stanford’s antenna farm at 7 a.m. by Eleanore Norris, a resident of Palo Alto, who was strolling in the area near Stanford’s antenna farm. Dr. Barnett, despondent over eye trouble and a scheduled eye operation, disappeared September 13. She left a note indicating she was contemplating suicide. A morphine overdose was determined as the cause of death.” The date of death on the death certificate was Sept. 27, 1968.

Notes: 1900 U.S. Census; Christian Register, Dec. 17, 1925, p. 1236; Stanford University Alumni Directory, 1921, 1931; Stanford Daily, April 30, 1924, p. 1; Stanford Daily, Oct. 1, 1968, p. 4; Carl T. Cox, “Anna Com-stock Franklin,” The Orville, Sutherland, Cox Web site: Ancestors, descendants, and Family Information, oscox.org/cgi-bin/igmget.cgi/n=jucox? I17378, accessed May 25, 2017. (N.B.: Anna’s biography was added an hour or so after Effie’s and Edward’s biographies were posted.)

Emily Elliott was born March 3, 1853 in Kane County, Ill., daughter of Wilson and Maria J. Elliot Edmund and Sarah (Smith) Elliott [corrected per comment below], both born in New Hampshire. Her family left Illinois and moved to a farm in California’s Central Valley when Emily was six; it seems likely that the family traveled overland on the Oregon Trail or the California Trail. In 1860 she and her parents were living in Elkhorn Township, San Joaquin County; her father was working as a farmer, and the Elliot family shared their home with another farmer and three farm laborers.

Though not listed as a graduate, she studied at the California State Normal School c. 1870. In 1870, she was living in San Francisco and “attending school”; the State Normal School was then in San Francisco. Emily taught school in Oakland for seven years.

She married Dr. Enoch H. Pardee on July 19, 1879, when she was 26 and he was 52; Enoch’s 22 year old son George was not pleased when his father remarried. Enoch was mayor of Oakland and a co-founder of the Unitarian church in Oakland. Enoch and Emily had one child, a daughter Eleanor (“Nellie”), born in 1880. Enoch died in 1896, and four months Nellie, then age 15, also died. After a legal battle with Enoch’s son, Emily received a third of Enoch’s substantial estate. Enoch’s estate was valued at approx. $275,000, or roughly $8 million in 2016 dollars; so Emily received the equivalent of $2.6 million.

For the next few years, she traveled extensively. She married William A. Karns, a lawyer, in Baltimore on March 21, 1898. The couple moved to San Jose where William practiced law.

Emily settled in Palo Alto in 1903. In August, 1906, William filed suit for divorce on the grounds of desertion. A bitter legal battle ensued, during which Emily revealed that she had indeed left her husband, but had done so on advice of a physician. William was denied a decree of divorce. Then in 1913, Emily filed for divorce on the grounds of desertion and failure to provide. This time, William did not appear at the trial because he was a fugitive from justice, and Emily received a divorce decree under which she retained control of extensive property interests.

Emily supported woman suffrage, and in 1911 was the president of the Palo Alto Suffrage League. She was one of the early members of the Woman’s Club of Palo Alto. and served as president. She was active with the Daughters of the American Revolution, and the local chapter was organized at her house in 1924.

In 1916, she married a third time, to James Leroy Dixon, who was some twenty years younger than she (b. c. 1874). Leroy was a Stanford graduate, and in 1916 was principal of the high school in Lakeport, Calif.; by 1919 he was teaching at San Francisco Polytechnic High School. Their marriage lasted only three years.

She was an early member and later president of the Women’s Alliance of the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto, and was active in the national Unitarian Women’s Alliance. In 1908, she hosted the Sunday school picnic on the ten-acre grounds of her Palo Alto house. She later gave the house grounds to the City of Palo Alto as a park to memorialize her daughter Nellie. In 1909, Emily was a delegate to the Pacific Unitarian Conference in Seattle.

She died on Feb. 5, 1940, in Palo Alto.

Notes: 1860, 1870, 1880, 1920 U.S. Census; John W. Leonard, Woman’s Who’s Who of America, New York: American Commonwealth Co., 1914; Historical Sketch of the State Normal School at San José, Sacramento: State Office, 1889; “How Palo Alto’s Pardee Park Came To Be,” Pardee Home Museum Newsletter, Nov., 1999, pp. 2-3; “The Pardee Home Histo-ry,” Pardee Home Museum, www.pardeehome.org/history.htm, accessed May 23, 2017; Emily Karns Dixon, Daughters of the American Revolution Magazine, 1948, p. 758; San Francisco Call, July 9, 1913, p. 2; Stanford University Alumni Directory, 1921; Calif. State Board of Education, Directory of Secondary and Normal Schools, Sacramento: Calif. State Printing Office, 1916, p. 33; Calif. State Board of Education, Directory of Secondary and Normal Schools, Sacramento: Calif. State Printing Office, 1919, p. 117; Pacific Unitarian, Aug., 1909 p. 294. N.B.: In early records of the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto, she appears as Emily S. Karns, later as Emily Karns Dixon.