Julia Green with Centennial Oak

Photograph identified as Julia P. Green hanging a wreath on the Centennial Oak in South Newbury, Ohio, August 23, 1919. The oak was planted July 4, 1876, by the Women's Suffrage and Political Club in Newbury in honor of the United States Centennial. Its location was chosen to be across from the South Newbury Union Chapel, a noted site in suffrage history where a small group of women illegally cast ballots in a local election in 1871, becoming the first female voters in Ohio's history. The chapel was originally constructed in 1858 after future president James A. Garfield, then a teacher at Western Reserve Eclectic Institute, was denied permission to speak at a nearby Congregational Church due to potentially controversial subject matter. The Women’s Suffrage and Political Club would be organized at the chapel in 1874--the second such organization in Ohio and one of the earliest in the country--and it was also used as a speaking venue for suffrage activists including Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, Ellen Munn and Harriet Taylor Upton. Dr. Julia Green, M.D., was involved in suffrage work and other progressive movements in town, and served as an officer in the Women's Suffrage and Political Club. This item comes from the Frances Jennings Casement Papers, a manuscript collection comprised of letters and association records related to the founding and leadership of the Ohio Woman Suffrage Association. Casement (1840-1928) was born in Painesville, Ohio, and graduated from Painesville Academy and Willoughby Female Seminary. Her father, Charles Casement, supported abolition and women's suffrage and encouraged Frances to be active in social causes. Frances Casement established the Painesville Equal Rights Association in 1883, and shortly after became involved in the Ohio Woman Suffrage Association, serving as its president from 1885 to 1888