Oakland Speaks – Anna Norris
The Enduring Legacy of Anna Norris Kendall: Suffragist, Philanthropist, “The Grandmother of Good Roads”
By Jessica Gray, Curator
Anna Norris was born in Belmont County, OH., October 11, 1844, the daughter of Isaac and Elizabeth Norris. The family moved to LaMoille in 1846. Life on the frontier prairie exacted a brutal toll. Out of five children, only Anna and her brother Clark would live to adulthood.
It must have been clear from the outset that she was an unusual child, especially when she gave a temperance lecture to a crowd on a street corner at the age of 8.
Their farm was a station on the Underground Railroad and her father transported runaway slaves north, often at the request of Owen Lovejoy.
On June 16, 1867, Anna married lawyer James Lyman Kendall. Their son, Isaac Norris Kendall, was born in 1868. Unfortunately, her husband died in 1869 from typhoid.
In 1871 Anna attended Boston University School of Oratory where she took courses from professor and inventor Alexander Graham Bell. She participated in one of the early tests of the telephone in Bell’s laboratory.
Through the years, Anna hosted famous individuals, including William Jennings Bryan, a future Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson, Elijah Parish Lovejoy, the son of Owen Lovejoy, and Lilian Steichen, a teacher at Princeton High School who visited just prior to her marriage to poet Carl Sandburg. In 1902 Anna supplied 200 pieces of artwork for a weeklong art Chautauqua at Princeton High School and hired author Mary Elizabeth Wilson Sherwood to lecture on the value of art in schools. She supported pay raises for teachers and advocated deep breathing exercises for students. Adamant about early childhood education, she paid the salaries for three kindergarten teachers in LaMoille for three years, in exchange for allowing a woman to serve on the school board. In 1906 she also funded a kindergarten at Lincoln School in Princeton.
After attending a suffragist lecture at the 1910 Socialist Convention in Chicago, Anna wrote, “I have joined the Socialist Party. A great political organization that systematically schemes, as do (the Democrats) in New York and the G.O.P. of Chicago, to rob, demoralize, dehumanize, and ruin men, women, and children, must be met by a political organization that will prevent its dominance. Hellish work so I am a socialist until the old parties are battered to death…”She later lost a bid with the Socialist Party to become county superintendent of schools. In 1913 she was photographed at the head of the Illinois Delegation of the National Women’s Party parade in Washington, D.C., and on March 4, 1917, when she was 72 years old, she picketed the White House with the NWP alongside 1,000 other suffragists.
Around this time, Anna wintered near Mobile, Ala., and was shocked at the muddy state of the roads. She soon instructed the road commissioners on the split-log drag system, as well as subsurface ditches to take care of seepage and groundwater, on crossdrain construction, and the type of pavement best suited to a particular roadbed, all things she’d learned farming. Due to her efforts, she was elected the first female road commissioner anywhere in the south and served with the Mississippi Highway Association. The governor of Alabama even bestowed upon her the title “the grandmother of good roads.”
She later purchased a home in Chicago at 5046 Greenwood Avenue, the future home of President Barack Obama and his family. She would celebrate her 90th birthday there in 1934.
Anna Norris Kendall died at the age of 94 and was buried near her family farm in LaMoille Township. Her obituary in the Bureau County Tribune on January 29, 1939 stated, “When death took from this life a frail little woman … one of the most militant and prophetic spirits of the century was taken from the roster of the few surviving pioneers of Bureau County.”
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