By Ande Finley
Former LIHS President
When it came to making a living, women on Lopez were a busy group.
In 1873, Irene Weeks moved to Lopez with her husband, Lyman, and son, Oscar, to run the fledgling Lopez store for her brother, Hiram Hutchinson. When the store doubled as a post office in 1880, Irene also became the island’s first postmistress. Out at Richardson in 1887, Mary Mann followed her example to run the soon-to-be-busy postal operation and Elisa Sperry had a brief tenure as the first Edwards (later changed to Otis) postmistress in 1894.
Port Stanley’s Tumble Inn was operated by Frank Kilpatrick’s daughters, Dorothy and Patricia, in the 1920s and ‘30s. Earning the nickname, “The Stagger Out,” it was an inn and a restaurant as well as the main office for the Kelp Plant.
Female settlers in the early years worked as equal partners with their husbands to build up their farms and sell produce. Amelia Davis and her husband, James Leonard Davis arrived with livestock, planks and 40 cents in 1869. Amelia carded, spun, knitted and dyed wool, made clothes for the family and produced butter of such fine quality that it earned a 10 cents premium per pound.
Mary Lundy became proprietor of the Hodgson-Graham Store along with her husband, Ira, when William Graham sold them the store, cannery and other Richardson enterprises in 1916. Later, the store rebuilt on this site became the beloved Richardson Store that lasted until its final fire in 1990. In the late 1930s, Edna Mueller gillnetted with her husband, Carl, on their boat based in MacKaye Harbor.
In 1922, the Pickering family moved to Lopez, bought the phone system and people remember that Mrs. Pickering ran a “telephone office” out on Fisherman Bay Road. Islanders shared party lines, and each family had a distinctive number of rings.
In the early decades of the 20th century, Lydia Richey, a college graduate and a talented musician, taught piano, mandolin, guitar, violin and banjo to her many students. Amelia Davis and her husband also loved music and reading, spending half of their farm income on books and magazines. Their home became the first (unofficial) lending library as well as a post office, Sunday school, hotel and dispensary.
Unmarried women looking to support themselves had few options. The more traditional route, of course, was teaching. Ella Cousins taught on Lopez from 1883 to 1891, Florence Johnson at Port Stanley School in 1897, Florence Allen and Louise Wakefield at Center School around 1905 and Miss Leonard became the first to teach at the new Lopez little red schoolhouse (now our library) when it opened in 1901.
Here on Lopez, at the two canneries built at Richardson in 1913, women hand-packed the salmon and lived dormitory-style at the Wander Inn.
Two retired teachers, Dort Horne and Helen “Louie” Lewis, bought 63 acres following a dream in 1945 and developed the legendary Sea Ranch Resort on a shoe string.
And Mary Jane Brown (Eaton), as an unmarried woman, homesteaded 40 acres at the corner of Mud Bay and Aleck Bay Roads and built her own house, before consenting to bring on a husband in 1893.
