Bios Exhibit

Ann Frances Greely

by Dr. Wayne Smith

Ann Frances Greely was born on Oct. 15, 1831 in Ellsworth, the fifth child of Col. Charles Jarvis and Mary Ann Black. As such, she was the product of the two most prominent families in Ellsworth in the early 1800s. Her father, Col. Charles Jarvis, had served in the Maine State Legislature, and had built a military road between Mattawamkeag and Houlton during the Aroostook War and a military training academy on the Bangor Road in Ellsworth. He became a lumber baron, and when he fell in love with the daughter of his arch rival in business, Col. John Black, it was only by means of an impassioned letter from his fiancée to her father that permission was unwillingly granted for the marriage to take place. 

Ann grew up living mostly in Ellsworth, yet briefly in Surry where her father's family had considerable land holdings. Ann was from a relatively privileged background and had access to education received at both Rev. Peter Nourse's local school and private schools.

Ann Jarvis benefitted from Nourse's supervision in that she received a better education than most girls in Maine would have received. She probably attended Rev. Nourse's school until he died in 1840. After that, she probably would have attended Ellsworth's first high school where her father, Charles Jarvis, had served on the board of trustees in 1833. That school was just down the street from the Jarvis home.

At a young age, Ann taught in a private school, one of the few occupations that women of the day could hold. But even at the young age of 16, Ann was already expressing an interest in social reforms. She was very much aware of the women's rights convention held in Seneca Falls, New York in July of 1848 and gradually became an ardent abolitionist, and the first suffragist in Ellsworth.

In 1851, at the age of 20, Ann bought the store and the dry-goods business of Thomas J. Whiting, a former employee of her father back in the 1820s. She became Ellsworth's pioneer businesswoman, one of first women in Maine to engage in business. Ann gradually developed her shop into a millinery shop, called the "Old Stand" (Risk, 2009), on Main Street and she worked in the millinery business most of her life, doing so for 38 years and continuing to lease the building thereafter.

On July 22, 1853, the Ellsworth American carried the following marriage announcement:

In Ellsworth, July 16, by A. F. Drinkwater, Esq., Mr. Everard H. GREELY of the firm of Brown & Greely, to Miss Ann F. JARVIS of the firm of E. D. Shaw & Company. Success to the new co-partnership, and may the surviving partners of each of the old firms soon follow the excellent example of their younger and more enterprising associates!!

The first place in Maine to take up a dialog on woman suffrage after Seneca Falls was Ellsworth, and women in Ellsworth were not isolated. They lived on the coast, a center of commerce and social reform, and were also near Bangor. They enjoyed a decent standard of living, and had access to education, middle-class values, and print culture. Women like Ann Frances Greely, who came to age in the 1850s, tended to be less afraid to challenge social conventions. 

Three women in particular, Ann Frances Greely, her sister Sarah Jarvis, and their friend Charlotte Hill from Gouldsboro, were the first women to organize events related to suffrage in Maine. They established dialogue with American national suffragists and referred to their nation's founding documents to argue their cause. The Ellsworth suffragists provided a template for other communities, their overt social actions demonstrating courage and resolve.

Ann worked actively on suffrage issues into the 1870s. She and three of her sisters Sarah, Caroline, and Elisabeth Jarvis, were among the eight signers of a protest letter sent to the Ellsworth assessors in which they protested paying taxes when they had no say in how the money was spent. 

They wrote:

“We the undersigned residents of the city of Ellsworth, believing in the declaration of our forefathers that “governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed”, and that “taxation without representation is tyranny,” beg leave to protest against being taxed for support of laws that we have no voice in making.  By taxing us you class us with aliens and minors, the only males who are taxed and not allowed to vote; you make us the political inferiors of the most ignorant foreigners, negroes, and men who have not intellect enough to learn to write their names, or to read the vote given them.  Our property is at the disposal of men who have not the ability to accumulate a dollar’s worth and who pay only a poll tax.  We therefore protest against being taxed until we are allowed the rights of citizens.”

On New Year's Day of 1873, an article published in Woman's Journal called for a Jan. 29 meeting at Granite Hall in Augusta to organize a State Woman Suffrage Association. That same year, as an officer and member of the Advisory Committee to the National Woman Suffrage Association, Ann signed a letter to Congress that requested they enact in the session of that year protections for women citizens granting the right to vote.

All her life Ann worked for equal rights. In 1891, the Maine Woman Suffrage Association, formed back at that meeting in Augusta in 1873, included Ann Frances Greely as one of its twelve vice-presidents. Ann collected 200 signatures on a 1874 petition to extend voting rights to women at the municipal level, and continued to collect signatures in subsequent petition drives in 1889, 1891, 1893, 1895, and 1897. In 1895, she got the signature of every businessman in Ellsworth willingly and they expressed sympathy for her cause. The municipal suffrage bill finally passed in the Maine House 79 to 54, after a speech by Ellsworth representative Hannibal E. Hamlin.

Throughout her life, Ann had an interest in medicine, and probably learned a lot from her friend and fellow-parishioner Dr. Abby M. Fulton. When the Physicians and Surgeons Registration Act was passed in 1895, she took the required examination and became certified under a license given by the State Board of Registration of Medicine. However, she most likely didn't engage in general practice, but served probably as a midwife.

On Oct. 22, 1914, Ann Frances Greely passed away at the age of 83. In her obituary, the Ellsworth American said that her death "marks the passing of one of Ellsworth's best-known and best-loved women, and during many years of her active life, the city's most prominent woman."

Ann was well-loved and respected, active in the Unitarian church, the WCTU (Woman's Christian Temperance Union), temperance societies, and philanthropic, literary, and reform movements. She loved reading, gardening, and taking care of animals, and was a strong advocate of woman suffrage and abolition.

She had a strong face, a firm voice, and a vigorous mind. She had clear and well-seasoned opinions, a strong mind, a vigorous vocabulary, and a quick wit. She took the side of right with a man's courage and a woman's flow of language. She had a clear, tenacious, and fearless loyalty to truth and justice, and a strong moral sense. Her daughter Mary Ann described her as "strong and vigorous, overcoming every difficulty with a ringing laugh." In the words of the Ellsworth American, "What she gave her heart to, she gave her hand to."

Assunta Luchini