New Curated Trail Commemorates Sixteen Key Suffrage Conventions

A seventeenth Curated Trail has been added to the Freethought Trail. The Woman Suffrage Convention Trail identifies and interprets all the venues at which sixteen influential woman suffrage conventions were held.

The Woman Suffrage Convention Trail encompasses thirty-one sites. It extends some 446 miles from Churchville, east of Rochester, to Utica and back to Hornell (formerly known as Hornellsville).

Between 1890 and 1914, the New York State Woman Suffrage Association (NYSWSA) held sixteen of its twenty-four annual conventions in west-central New York. Activation of this Curated Trail caps the Freethought Trail's celebration of the centenary of U. S. woman suffrage (the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified on August 26, 1920.)

Conventions held in west-central New York State (the Freethought Trail's catchment area) included:

• Auburn in 1891 and 1904;
• Binghamton in 1913;
• Geneva in 1897 and 1907;
• Hornell in 1903;
• Ithaca in 1894 and 1911;
• Oswego in 1901;
• Rochester in 1890, 1896, 1905, and 1914;
• Syracuse in 1892 and 1906, and
• Utica in 1912.
• In addition, a 1905 meeting of the Monroe County Political Equality Club (a county-level NYSWSA affiliate) is included because it featured a speaker lineup comparable to some NYSWSA conventions.

Premier suffrage leader Susan B. Anthony keynoted the majority of these conventions, at least until her death on March 13, 1906.

To follow this Trail -- the lengthiest of the Curated Trails -- is to recapture the energy of the nation's most active state-level suffrage organization as it campaigned toward the goal it would achieve in the year 1920 with the Nineteenth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution.