Mrs. Newell Sanders
Entrepreneur/U.S. Sen. Newell Sanders
Lookout Mountain Town Hall used in early-to-mid 20th century
The year 2020 celebrates the 100th anniversary of women across America getting the right to vote, correct?
Not exactly. While the ratification of the 19th Amendment prohibiting the states and the federal government from denying citizens in the United States the right to vote on the basis of sex or gender took place on Aug. 18, 1920, women did vote earlier.
Lookout Mountain was one rare place where this occurred.
On March 15, 1918 — two years before the amendment was ratified with the help of Tennessee and more than a year before Congress passed the federal law — Mrs.
James H. Anderson was named to the town of Lookout Mountain, Tenn., school commission in a race in which both men and women could vote.
As a detailed look at the 19th Amendment is made through several stories over the next few months on the occasion of the centennial anniversary, what took place on the mountain seems to be a somewhat forgotten prequel event.
The opportunity occurred as a result of the Tennessee legislature granting a special act allowing women to vote in this election and giving them representation on the mountain town’s board of education. It was said to be the first time in the state that women had ever voted in an election.
Jim Stovall, a retired University of Tennessee journalism professor who has written about the women’s suffrage movement, said the 19th Amendment did not change everything, as people might believe today, and the Lookout Mountain situation is an example.
“It changed a lot, but women had the right to vote at certain times and places before the amendment came along,” he said. “Some states had passed full suffrage laws. Others, such as Tennessee, had partial suffrage -- often in school board elections.”
He also pointed to an article that talks about such states as Wyoming, New Jersey and Utah granting women the right to vote before the passage of the amendment. Other special situations arose elsewhere, the story said.
Regarding the pioneering local election, the Chattanooga Times article the day after said the voting had taken place in an overflow room of the Lookout Mountain town hall.
Votes in what was a primary contest were cast by some 155 people — a number of whom owned property on the mountain but actually lived in Chattanooga except during the summers.
Of those votes tallied, male J.H. Keller led with 110 votes, while Mrs. James H. Anderson had 78 and finished second. Mrs. John A. Chambliss had 63 votes and finished fifth and out of the running, as did sixth-place finisher Miss Ernestine Noa with 6.
A rumor had swirled around town that a black woman, Josephine Speight, would be a candidate for school commission as well, and that would have definitely made the evening even more monumental historically. But that was evidently just a rumor passed along by someone knowing it was not true, the article said.
A number of blacks did turn out to attend the meeting, although many or apparently all of them could not vote due to whatever local restrictions were in place at the time in those days of segregation.
In the general election in April in which fewer people voted, Mrs. Anderson was officially elected to the Lookout Mountain school board along with men J.H. Keller and W.S. Stone. Mrs. Chambliss had withdrawn her campaign to have only one woman candidate and not split any votes for those desiring that a woman be elected.
While the March primary vote had been in a meeting format, the general election was done in a traditional ballot box manner, with the polling site open from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. The first person to get to vote was Mrs. Newell Sanders, wife of the former U.S. senator. She also happened to be the mother of campaign victor Mrs. Anderson.
The Chattanooga paper described the excitement over the historic event. “The election for commissioners and members of the board of education of Lookout Mountain Tuesday marks an epoch (event) in the political history of the state of Tennessee, in that this was the first election in which women were given the legal right of the elective franchise.”
Mrs. Anderson had been born in 1876 in Bloomington, Ind., home of Indiana University and where her father ran a bookstore. When she was one year old, the family moved to Chattanooga. By that time, Mr. Sanders had become more interested in manufacturing and learned about making farm implements. And after reading a story about Chattanooga during the Civil War in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine and at the advice of a business counselor, he moved to the Scenic City. Here he started the first factory in the South for manufacturing advanced plows.
Although several of his small staff of employees died in the yellow fever epidemic of 1878, he, like the mule-driven products he made, trudged on ahead with his plow manufacturing company. It eventually became the Chattanooga Plow Co.
His plows were sold all over the world and he even displayed them at some of the well-known world’s fairs and expositions of the time. He also later started the Newell Sanders Plow Co. as the sole owner. The Chattanooga Plow Co. was sold in 1919 to International Harvester, and his other company was also eventually sold.
He also became interested in education and served on the school board in 1881 and later the Chattanooga Board of Alderman, the forerunner of the City Council. He was an avid Republican at a time when many in the Chattanooga area were Democrats.
His party loyalty led to his appointment in 1912 to fill out the term of Robert L. Taylor after that senator’s death following a gallstone attack. Sen. Sanders had pushed for women’s suffrage and was in support of the prohibition of alcoholic beverages.
After his daughter’s election to the school board with the help fo the first female vote in Tennessee from his wife and fellow IU graduate Corinne Dodds Sanders, he remained active in Republican politics. He later ran unsuccessfully for U.S. senator after the general citizenry instead of the state legislature began selecting it.
He died in 1939 at the then-familiar Sanders family home at 911 E. Brow Road, which is now the site of the expansive and regularly mowed vacant lot between the top of the Incline Railway and Point Park.
Some writing shared after he died pointed out some of his views on life, including that he was afraid of public speaking and regretted as an older man the missed opportunities to share his life and advice.
His wife, who was a descendant of Davy Crockett, had died in June 1929 after a bout with pneumonia and a subsequent heart attack. She had been active in work with the Lookout Mountain Garden Club, the local Daughters of the American Revolution, and First Baptist Church, where all the family attended.
Her obituary mentions that she was the first woman in Tennessee — and the Deep South — to cast a vote in an election.
Her elected daughter, Mrs. Norrine Anderson, went on to lead as well as serve, holding the position of chairman of the Lookout Mountain School Board for six years in the 1920s. The current Lookout Mountain Elementary School opened in 1929 shortly after the Hamilton County board of education took over the Lookout Mountain district, and it is not known if Mrs. Anderson and the board had helped plan the school.
She was also active in the League of Women Voters of Tennessee, the Chickamauga Chapter of the DAR, and the Kosmos-Woman’s Club.
Her husband, James H. Anderson, had enjoyed a multi-faceted career as a Chattanooga Times reporter, as a businessman with the Coca-Cola bottling company in Houston, and as a lawyer, federal bankruptcy judge/referee, and U.S. commissioner. He lived until 1966.
Mrs. Anderson had died at the East Brow home on July 3, 1939, at the age of 62 after becoming ill after her father died a few months earlier. She was survived by a daughter, who became Mrs. Rush (Norinne Anderson) Hickman of Lookout Mountain; a son, Newell S. Anderson of Knoxville; and two sisters, Mrs. Ben Allison of Chattanooga and Mrs. Walter Wight of New York City.
Mrs. Anderson’s name is no longer a familiar one in Chattanooga outside her family members, who include nieces and nephews Lolly Allison Jones, Dottie Allison Sutter, Ben Allison and Sandy Allison.
But her contributions helped pave the way for people like Mai Bell Hurley, the first woman on the Chattanooga City Council nearly 70 years later, and for all the women who have served or will serve in elective office throughout the country.