THE TURNING POINT SUFFRAGIST MEMORIAL - LAST ONE

This is where we were heading today, the Occoquan Regional Park. We have been here before as I had another post which you can see at this link if you would like a refresher - or haven't seen it yet. It tells a little bit about Lorton Prison, so I may be repeating myself a little bit here. I also mention Dartmoor Prison which we visited often. Now that sounds a little strange. It was my dad who visited because of his work, we just 'saw' Dartmoor Prison when he dropped us off at a tearoom in the nearby town while waiting for him. At Lorton Prison I mentioned that Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Count Basie once performed in one of the fields. It was also where many years earlier, suffragettes were imprisoned and treated horribly.  

One of the birdhouses situated in this area of the garden, with a relatively young magnolia bush in the foreground.

There were several information boards, what the website called information stations. A website sharing more information and excellent photos you can see at this link. Just scroll down that page until you come to them.

I made a collage of various photos taken from these information boards.

The following came from their website here. It says it includes the three statues of prominent leaders I have shared. 

"The memorial includes three statues of prominent suffrage leaders, a Rotunda featuring the six pillars of democracy, and an Arroyo Bridge perfect for Girl Scout bridging ceremonies. Another major feature is the 24' section of the actual hand-forced, White House Fence (circa. late 1800's) in front of which suffragists picketed in 1917 that was provided to the memorial by the National Park Service. A Donor Wall lists the memorial's major donors.” 

There is a beautifully designed Memorial Garden where you can sit for a spell afterwards. Native flowers and trees have been planted, all with the suffrage colors in mind - purple, gold and white. My second photo above shows part of it. I would like to go back in the summer to see its full potential.

This is Alice Paul, who was portrayed in the first statue we saw just outside the entrance of the memorial. Her photo came from this page. 

For a reference I am repeating all the statues that were in previous posts.

This is Mary Church Terrell, and you can click on her name to go to more information. She is the second statue as you enter the memorial.  I borrowed her photo from this page.

This lady's statue is the second statue encountered at the Memorial.

The third lady is Carrie Chapman Catt, and she was an American Suffrage Leader. Her statue is the third one found in the Rotunda. More information can be read on this website.

This is her statue.

There was a railing showing plaques of various names from different states.  Gregg is standing in front of it.

These were those suffragettes who took part in the movement. I am sharing the one on its own because it is of two women from Virginia, Pauline Adams and Maud P. Jamison. You can click on both their names to go to more information. Reading about these ladies gives one a whole different perspective, makes them more real somehow. Both were from Norfolk, Virginia, where my husband was born and grew up.

The following is a collage of other names on this railing. There were ladies from several other states involved, but I didn't get them all. 

Also on the wall...

as was the following. The National Woman's Party awarded silver pins shaped like a jail cell door with a heart-shaped padlock to each of the women who had been jailed. The story of the Freedom Pin can be found here. This pin, called The National Woman's Party "Jailed for Freedom" pin was based on the Holloway Prison in England, that the English suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst gave to the suffragettes who had been imprisoned there.

If you want to learn more about where they were imprisoned, you can go to this page.

The stories of the pins and several other objects that were important symbols of the Women’s Suffrage movement can be found here.

I also found impressive photos taken on this subject by a Scottish photographer Christina Broom (1862-1239). At the website she is described as Britain's first woman press photographer. Those photos can be found here and were taken of the British Suffragette Movement. You can also read her biography at this website. 

The graphic below I didn’t find on any of the suffrage links, and I am not sure where I found them originally. They have been in my fashion folder for a long time. I have always enjoyed collecting pictures of clothing down through the ages. These seemed to be from the same time frame, give or take a few years.

"...the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified on August 18th, 1920.  The amendment removed bans on the American woman's right to suffrage."  You can read more here.

One last photo of the Beehive Kiln which you can see here. 

 The Occoquan Workhouse/Lorton Reformatory was closed several years ago. This link says that the last prisoners were transferred in 2001. We always passed it on our way to take a walk around Occoquan, which wasn't too far away. I knew on one side of the road we drove down, was for the men and the other was for the women. The guard towers are still there, although it has been turned into a very nice art center. It includes The Lucy Burns Museum which I would like to visit sometime. Lucy was one of the suffragettes imprisoned at the facility where she spent more time than any other suffragette.

I never knew any of the history back then. It's been eye-opening and mind boggling, and we owe them our own right to vote, a debt that will never be repaid. I may have taken that for granted. No more!

In all my links today there is a wealth of information. What I have given are mere snippets of a more powerful story.

Thanks for visiting and I hope you have found these posts interesting. This is the last one from our visit.

Have a great day!

THE TURNING POINT SUFFRAGIST MEMORIAL, LORTON, MEMORIAL CONTINUED...

You can read about the Memorial at this link.

I am publishing snippets of information from various places, and you can click on their title to get to that particular website. 

  Pieces of History, a blog from The National Archives.

What is Suffrage? 

This was written on May 14th, 2019, by Jesse Kratz

"This year we mark the 100th anniversary of the woman suffrage amendment, and as it turns out, a lot of people don't really know what "suffrage" means because it's mostly fallen out of common usage.  The term has nothing to do with suffering but instead derives from the Latin word "suffragium," meaning the right or privilege to vote. In the United States, it is commonly associated with the l9th and early 20th century voting rights movements."

Did You Know? Suffragist v Suffragette?

An Article from the National Park Service.

"Did you know there is a difference between a suffragist and a suffragette?

Although we often see suffragist and suffragette used as though they mean the same thing, their historical meanings are quite different.

The terms suffrage and enfranchisement mean having the right to vote. Suffragists are people who advocate for enfranchisement. After African American men got the vote in 1870 with the passage of the 15th Amendment to the United States Constitution, "suffrage" referred primarily to women's suffrage (though there were many other groups who did not have access to the ballot).

The battle for woman's suffrage was in full force in both Britain and the United States in the early 1900s. Reporters took sides and in 1908 a British reporter used the word "suffragette" to mock those fighting for women's right to vote.  The suffix "-ette" is used to refer to something small or diminutive, and the reporter used it to minimize the work of the British suffragists.

Some women in Britain embraced the term suffragette, a way of reclaiming it from its original derogatory use. In the United States, however, the term suffragette was seen as an offensive term and not embraced by the suffrage movement. Instead, it was wielded by anti-suffragists in their fight to deny women in America the right to vote."

and from 

Time Magazine

"The 'ette' suffix is a string of letters that came across the Channel - where the French still use it to denote something that is diminutive - and got absorbed into British English, before being shipped off to Americans in the New World. Over the centuries 'ett' has become a marker of things that are short or smaller-than-usual (cigarette = small cigar; roulette = small wheel), feminine and female "jockette = a female jockey; hackette = a female journalist), as well as imitative and inferior (leatherette = imitation leather; poetette = a young or minor poet).”

Getting back to the Memorial, the iron railings have an interesting story. The photo below, along with the information, came from the sign in front of the railings.

Here's the sign as a whole.

I cropped the part under 'Silent for Suffrage' so that it can be read more easily. You might want to enlarge for even more detail.

A close-up of the top part of the fence that Gregg took.

I will end my post here and will share the third and final part next week. My computer time will be a bit limited and as I mentioned before, I don't want to rush such an important part of our history. I have had my Friday to Monday posts already set up.

I hope you found this interesting. There is a wealth of information out on the internet, and I feel like I went down another rabbit hole, so to speak.

HAPPY EASTER!

 

This pretty card was sent to me from our dear friend Ann from Ann's Snap Edit Scrap. The little yellow Easter Egg came with it too, a sweet bonus to find when opening the card itself.

A perfect way to start this post.  

I love it, thank you Ann, and such a sweet sentiment!

I didn't realize when I got my post ready last week, and said I was going to let you know where we went to, that today would be Easter. I was going to share Ann's Easter card on its own, to give it pride of place. However, and not to go back on my word, here are a few photos taken. I will go into more detail next week.

We are at the Turning Point Suffragist Memorial in Lorton, Virgina, not too far from Occoquan.

The birds were being taken care of here. I saw more birdhouses nearby, and here is one of them.

Gregg took two lovely photos, of this Mockingbird...

and an American Robin. The robins are everywhere right now.

I will end my post for now and give you more on another day next week, with more information. This is just a little preview.

Happy Easter to you all, and thanks again Ann.

Have a wonderful day everyone!

A RIDE INTO OCCOQUAN, VIRGINIA

We were looking for a place that I had read about recently. More on that in another post. I am putting the cart before the horse as we visited that and went to the town afterwards. (I have provided links all the way through giving more information.) Today's post is from the town. By the time we got there we were hungry, and we had a late lunch.

We were actually looking for a favorite sandwich shop, but sadly it was out of business. Not too far away was the restaurant we had enjoyed several years ago, now under new management. A yellow easter bunny greeted us.

The Maitre d' asked if we would like to sit on their open patio but it was a bit too chilly for us, even with the overhead heaters provided. There are also tables at the riverside. In the warmer weather that would be lovely. We fully intend to go back and do just that.

We opted for meals on the regular menu.  Our appetizer was corn fritters.

I ordered the grilled flounder stuffed with crabmeat and shrimp, with onion rings and French fries. Gregg had fish tacos which I forgot to take a photo of. No dessert today. Gregg had a coca cola and I had a glass of water, but the waiter mentioned Bailey's Irish Creme Coffee and I was sold. Dessert! It was a very good meal, and we certainly didn't need any more to eat that day!

I found these interesting to look at.

We had a very nice time as it has been a while between restaurant visits. 

Of course, there has to be some kind of plant that I took a photo of. This is Cherry laurel, also known as English laurel, Common laurel, Laurel Cherry and Versailles Laurel. Its botanical name is Prunus laurocerasus. These were in front of one of the private homes we passed by.

We both agreed that we could very happily live in one of these homes.

There are two rows one behind the other. In the above collage, in the photo on the left, the second row can be seen on either side at the end of the narrow road. Those are the homes on the river.

We continued walking. 

There are a lot of reflections but I think you can see what is on display, for the most part.

The word Occoquan is from an Algonquian Doeg word meaning "at the end of the water". The area that is Occoquan today was long occupied by the Indigenous People. Even though the Doeg Tribe split up into several sections across Virginia, they were still one Village of people.

The historic town of Occoquan, Virginia, stands by the river that bears its name in Prince William County, Virginia, 25 minutes south of Washington D.C.

In July 1608, John Smith of Jamestown sailed into the Occoquan River and was welcomed by the Doeg Indians at their settlement, Tauxenent. Just a little bit of history. The links will give you a whole lot more.

We are on the other side of the street now.

The red building used to be an all-year-round Christmas shop called The Christmas Goose. One of the places I would go to when visiting the town. I always enjoyed buying a couple of ornaments, either for gifts or for our tree. Another business was in there, but I couldn’t quite make out what was in the windows.  I will take a closure look next time. At this point we were making a bee-line for our car.

We had walked all the way on one side of the street and down the other. There are many side streets with other shops we didn't explore. It was time to cross over again as we had parked our car in a lot next to the bridge. The building in the following photo has shops on two levels, though we only browsed by the ones on the ground level. We were ready to go home. 

I used to sell my ornaments to one of the shops in my craft show days. That's a story for another day.

I wanted to make a point of saying that there are some parts of the town that have uneven sidewalks. From someone (me) who has a klutzy, oh-look-at-that-while-not-looking-at-where-I-am-going personality, do take care!

One last photo as you probably know by now how I like to take photos on our drive back. This time it is one of the local school buses.

That's all for today. The next one I will share about the place that interested me so much, and discovered it was only a short drive away from Occoquan. I don't want to talk about it until the day of its post. It was something different, nothing too exciting as I want to manage expectations, but interesting. Tomorrow I will be getting my birdfeeder chatter post out, and hopefully on Sunday I will have the next one ready.

Thanks for looking and have a great weekend!