On the evening of August 26, on the anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, a small crowd will gather in rural Geauga County and walk to the base of an oak that has stood for a hundred and fifty years. They will not come to mark the tree's age but its meaning. The trustees of South Newbury Union Chapel, the League of Women Voters of Geauga, and the Geauga Park District will dedicate a new state historical marker at the base of the so-called Centennial Oak, a living monument to the earliest stirrings of women's suffrage in Ohio. The ceremony, planned to coincide with Women's Equality Day, calls for visitors to arrive at 5:30 p.m., with the program beginning at six; overflow parking and a shuttle will be available less than a mile south at Faith Baptist Church.
The tree itself was not old when the country was young. It was planted on July 4, 1876, in celebration of the nation's centennial, and the people who put it in the ground were members of the Newbury Woman Suffrage Political Club, founded two years earlier. According to the chapel's own history, that club was possibly the second such organization in Ohio and among the earliest in the United States, meeting in a building long known locally as the cradle of equal suffrage. The planting was meant to commemorate both the country's hundredth birthday and the achievements of local women in the long battle for the vote, symbolizing what the chapel's trustees describe as the roots of change and the growth of equality.
The chapel that hosted that club has a genesis as remarkable as the movement itself. In December of 1857, James A. Garfield, then the young principal of the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute (now Hiram College) and later the twentieth president of the United States, was scheduled to lecture for several nights at the Congregational Brick Church across the road. The invitation was abruptly rescinded, however, because his planned remarks were deemed too controversial; they touched on abolition and baptism by immersion. Garfield recorded the scene in his diary, describing a community in a fever of excitement, and an audience of more than a hundred who gathered to hear him in a local dancing hall when the church doors were shut against him. In response, families of the community erected the chapel around 1858 on land donated by the Anson Mathews family, with a lease providing that the building be open and free for lectures on all useful subjects, open to all denominations, and monopolized by no one. The place earned the title Free Speech Chapel.
That open platform drew the reform movements of the era. The Northern Ohio Health and Dress Reform Association was founded in 1870, headquartered at the chapel, and its president was the formidable Ruth Fisher Munn, an early proponent of dress reform in Geauga County. The association celebrated dress reform and suffrage every Fourth of July by holding a picnic and sporting bloomers. The questions debated at those gatherings led in 1874 to the formation of the Newbury Woman Suffrage Political Club, with Munn as its first president and Dr. Julia Porter Green as its corresponding secretary.
The club's most defiant moment came in 1871, even before its formal founding, when nine local women marched to the chapel and cast their ballots in a local election, an act that was then illegal. Their votes were rejected, and according to chapel history the ballots were lost on the way to the board of elections. The women were undeterred; they returned to vote, with their ballots disregarded, in the elections of 1872 and 1873. Those nine women became some of the first women to vote in Ohio, and their story is why the chapel is regarded regionally as the cradle of equal suffrage.
It was in that same spirit of defiant hope that the club planted the oak on July 4, 1876. The tree has survived the century and a half since, standing proudly near the chapel. The oak is now generously maintained by the Independent Tree Company of Newbury, Ohio.
Long before the marker, the tree was already the site of a pilgrimage. In the late summer of 1919, as the Nineteenth Amendment still awaited its final ratification, members of the newly formed Newbury Memorial Association marched from the chapel to the Centennial Oak. Dr. Julia Porter Green, the only surviving charter member of the suffrage club, walked at the head of the procession and hung a wreath of evergreen and golden glow on the tree. Green had helped plant the oak in 1876 as the club's corresponding secretary; she had left for Michigan to study medicine, earned her medical degree, practiced for decades, and returned to northeast Ohio to preside over that commemoration.
The August 26 dedication will follow in that long line of memory. It comes at a time when the chapel is undergoing preservation assessments to guide a plan for saving the structure. The building is owned by the public and managed by a three-member board of trustees, and it stands on property owned and stewarded by the Geauga Park District.
The ceremony on August 26 will bring the story full circle. It will take place in the open field where, one hundred and fifty years ago, a handful of women from a tiny Ohio village planted an oak to remind the country of what the women of Geauga County were still fighting for. The marker will sit at the base of the tree that has stood in that time, a witness to the arrival of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 and to the century of change that followed. It will stand for a long time to come, a leaf in the story of American democracy, and a reminder that the cause of equal suffrage in Ohio grew, quite literally, from the soil of a free speech chapel.