Carrie Shumway is elected to Kirkland City Council, first woman so elected, in 1911.
In 1911, Carrie Shumway (1858-1956) is elected to the Kirkland, Washington, city council.
She is the first woman in the state to be elected to a city council. Women had been
granted the franchise the year before.
Carrie Shumway was born on September 7, 1858, in Belchertown, Hampshire, Massachusetts,
and graduated from Mount Holyoke College, a rare achievement for a woman of
her generation. She came to Washington state with her family in 1883 at the age
of 25. They first homesteaded in the Skagit Valley, then moved to Seattle in 1888.
Carrie Shumway was a school teacher, one of the original staff of the T. T. Minor
Grade School in Seattle. She also taught in Seattle High School when the faculty
consisted of only three teachers, and eventually was appointed vice principal
at that school. She helped establish Tacoma’s first high school. In 1908, after
retiring from the Seattle teaching staff she taught English in Tokyo. Upon her
return in 1910, she joined her sisters and brothers to live in the recently completed
family home on Lake Washington Boulevard in Kirkland.
Carrie Shumway was a state historian for the Daughters of the American Revolution.
She was also a founding members of the Seattle Bicycle Club and the Seattle Camera
Club. She was a charter member of the Kirkland Woman’s Club and was active in both
the Community Congregational Church in Kirkland and the Plymouth Congregational
Church in Seattle.
Carrie Shumway died at the age of 97, on January 1, 1956, in Tacoma at the home of her
niece, Ruth Shumway. She was laid to rest in the family plot in the Kirkland Cemetery.
SOURCE: http://www.historylink.org/output.cfm?file_ID=2875
DAR ID # 65006
For more information on Carrie Shumway: http://www.shumwaymansion.com/shumway/history.htm
BURIED: Kirkland Cemetery, Kirkland, King, Washington
SOURCE: http://www.findagrave.com
Steve Shumway -shumways@@petershumway.org
Who is this family member?