Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 6.djvu/595

 

For a number of years there had been a suffrage association in South Carolina with Mrs. Virginia Durant Young, editor of the Fairfax Enterprise, president. Evidence of advance in public sentiment was shown when in April, 1900, by invitation, Mrs. Young addressed 5,000 people at Rivers Bridges Memorial Association; in June when Mrs. Malvina A. Waring made the commencement address at Limestone College and again when Mrs. Young responded to a toast at the banquet of the State Press Association. That same year there was lively effort to decide which one of twenty women candidates should be elected State librarian. Miss Lucy Barron was elected and a large number of women engrossing clerks were appointed to share her work.

In 1902 during the Exposition a woman suffrage convention was held in Charleston through the courtesy of the chairman of Promotion and Publicity, Major J. C. Hemphill. Although opposed to woman suffrage he induced the officials in charge to grant the use of the German Artillery Hall for two nights and one meeting was held in the exposition grounds, where Henry B. and Miss Alice Stone Blackwell, Mrs. Mamie Folsom Wynn, Miss Koch, Miss Helen Morris Lewis, Miss Claudia G. Tharin, Mrs. T. M. Prentiss and Mrs. Young made addresses. A reception was given in the Woman's Building. In May, 1903, Mrs. Young made a suffrage speech at the meeting of the State Press Association at Georgetown. With her death in 1906 the organization lapsed but there was a small group of suffragists in Columbia with Dr. Jane Bruce Guignard president.

It was not until May 15, 1914, when Miss Lavinia Engle, one of the organizers sent by the National American Woman Suffrage