Jessie Daniel Ames: The Early Years

Unless you happened on it, you may not know about the Hidden History at 1004 Church Street. Go there! Here’s the place where Jessie Daniel Ames made sure Georgetown got better for women AND men AND children. It’s here where Jessie brainstormed and carried out campaigns that improved conditions for Texans statewide, even as she and other women were belittled as ‘the petticoat lobby” by lawmakers at the Texas Capitol.

Here was the homebase where Jessie led the local and state Texas League of Women Voters, and helped it grow into its current powerhouse of voter advocacy chapters across the US—including Wilco’s currently thriving chapter. And it’s here where Jessie’s influence spread nationally as her passion for racial justice led to founding the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching.

**Imagine how Jessie and her crew connected folks in Georgetown and surrounding areas.**

And it’s here that she left every workday morning with her mother Laura to walk a few blocks to 824 Austin Avenue to their jobs running the Georgetown Telephone Exchange. Their business kept 600 telephones in Georgetown and over 2,000 more in rural Wilco ring-a-ding-dinging.

It is Jessie and Laura’s contribution to Georgetown’s economy and position as businesswomen that jolted Jessie’s motivation to work for women’s suffrage. She wrote: “All I wanted was the vote . . . for I was . . . the owner of property which voters could tax without the consent of the owners.”

Jessie already had a sharpened sense of social justice honed during her girlhood years. Let’s find out about Jessie’s girlhood—we’ll go over to Palestine and Overton in east Texas, where Jessie spent the first nine years of her life.

**Palestine, Texas, around the time Jessie's family arrived**

Jessie’s father James Daniel left Indiana to work for the International & Great Northern railroad in Palestine, a town bustling after the I & GN Railroad came to town. Railroads were a lifeblood for small towns, moving people and virtually all resources and products across Texas.

**Railroads were critical to daily life in Texas.**

Georgetown depended on the rails as well to transport people and all manner of necessities—see us there on the list of railroad destination cities on the left near the bottom of this I & GN advertising?

Jessie’s mother Laura was a schoolteacher in Indiana, where she met her husband. James left for Texas 10 days after the birth of their son Charley, leaving Laura with toddler Lulu and newborn Charley. Laura and the children soon joined James, who had a first brief assignment at the I & GN depot right up the road in Round Rock.

Soon after, James got assigned to Palestine, and the family boarded the train again for East Texas. The family lived in a warehouse by the Palestine train depot.

Jessie was born on Nov. 2, 1883. Just few months later, James took a job as train dispatcher in tiny Overton, about 60 miles northeast of Palestine. Laura found 1880’s Overton a somewhat desolate backwater. Baby brother James Junior was born the next year.

Early on, Jessie grasped the realities of class and race divisions that flavored life in Overton—and in locales all over Texas, and really, the US. See how the Overton city map shows the north-south rail tracks dividing the town? Stores, houses, and churches on the east side where wealthier whites lived; industry and the boarding house and shacks on the other. That was the town’s dividing line of class and race segregation.

Jessie described her Overton life in an unpublished autobiography. She recalls that every morning when it wasn’t a school day, she would head over across the tracks to meet up with her best friend Minnie, a Jewish girl whose mother, Mrs. Levi, ran a boarding house. Jessie didn’t fit in well with the more privileged white crowd on the “good” side of tracks where her family lived. Warning: Jessie uses a hateful term for the “bad side,” it was a term routinely used at the time.

**Jessie’s unpublished autobiography pages from her Overton girlhood**

As Jessie recalls, Minnie would arrive at Jessie’s house in the morning on her gray donkey. The two would then ride across the tracks on the donkey to play rough-and-tumble games with the “socially outcast” kids there, as Jessie described them.

Jessie could identify with a feeling of “not good enough,” especially in her father’s eyes. Jessie believed her father’s clear favorite was her big sister Lulu. Jessie wrote that her father saw her as “the fat, freckle-face child who made a splendid foil for the dainty beauty of his daughter Lulu.”

Jessie was largely left on her own by her mother. Laura and the other women in Overton were often called on to nurse the victims of epidemics that regularly ripped through the community—diphtheria, smallpox, and typhoid fever. Laura was also occupied with church work and keeping the family together while James was at the train station. Given freedom to roam, Jessie was a keen observer of the community, including the Reconstruction-era violence seething in the area.

Jessie remembered overhearing horrific details of a lynching in Paris, Texas, about 100 miles north. A black man, Henry Smith, was accused of raping and murdering a three-year-old white girl. Smith was captured, and without charges or trial, he was paraded through Paris, where 15,000 Texans from near and far had gathered by the scaffold in what would be called “spectacle lynchings.” As the crowd watched and cheered, the executioners rolled red-hot branding irons on Smith and gouged out his eyes with them. They cut off his tongue and genitals and slowly burned him alive. Spectators scrambled to get bits of flesh and bones for souvenirs. Photographers took photos to make into postcards and sell.

JESSIE AND FAMILY HEAD TO GEORGETOWN

In the summer of 1893, the family moved to Georgetown. Lulu had graduated from high school in Overton, and James wanted her to continue her education and not marry a local boy. He took a train dispatcher job in Georgetown so that Lulu could attend Southwestern University.

Here’s the Georgetown train, headed out of Round Rock and crossing Brushy Creek, steaming toward the Georgetown I & GN depot. Back then, the I & GN depot was located at the intersection of Martin Luther King Street and 7th Street.

Like most other American towns, the railroads were critical to Georgetown back then, with spurs heading all the way into downtown and over by Southwestern. The railroads brought in just about everything Georgetown residents needed, from building material to food for the table.

Lulu started college at Southwestern’s Ladies Annex, which was then located a chaste four blocks from the male students and classrooms. (You can learn more about women’s progress at Southwestern in the Southwestern University Hidden History tab.)

Jessie enrolled at Southwestern University’s preparatory school. This “Fitting School” was intended to “fit” young students for entering Southwestern University.

Young Jessie found that Georgetown was much different from Overton—in a good way. She recalls that she marveled at all the variety in the stores, getting water from a faucet and not a well; getting milk delivered and keeping it in the ice chest; and the gala social events and parades. “There were more two-story houses than a child could count,” she remembers.

**Georgetown's marvelous two-story houses**

But while the Daniels had been the more affluent citizens in Overton, here in Georgetown, James’ salary was quickly drained by higher living costs and school tuition.

Jessie went to school with families of college professors and professional wage-earners. Her “unworthiness” increased. She remembers that “I tried humbly and painfully to be like them. But I never learned to feel at home.”

**Georgetown girls all ready for SU’s May Fete**

The family foundered under James’ iron rule. Lulu graduated from Southwestern, but she didn’t do as well as James wanted. She married a Southwestern man and moved to her new home in Georgetown. Brother James Jr. tired of his father’s frequent tongue-lashings and thrashings and ran away at 15 to California.

After Jessie finished the Finishing School, she was excited to enroll at Southwestern’s Ladies Annex. But her father told her he doubted she’d succeed there. She recalls that he said coldly: “I’m sending you to college because there is nothing else to do with you. But I want you to understand that the first time that you fail in your classes, you come out of school and go to the kitchen. I don’t expect you to graduate.”

**A graduating class of the Ladies Annex**

Nevertheless, Jessie persisted, and she graduated in 1902. Her senior presentation was titled, “Aeschylus and Shakespeare: A Parallel,” clearly the work of a failure and dimwit.

Sadly, after graduation, Jessie considered herself a failed spinster who was forced to live in her father’s house. Her father, despondent that Lulu was out of his house and control, decided to transfer to the I & GN railroad in Laredo. Jessie moved with them.

**Jessie’s father worked here at the Laredo I & GN depot.**

Jessie enjoyed the switch from “quiet, conservative, religious” Georgetown. The palm trees, steamy temperatures, and the colorful Mexican-flavored culture and music “appealed to my senses in a most un-Methodist manner,” she wrote later.

Through her father, Jessie met Roger Post Ames, an Army surgeon from New Orleans 13 years her senior. She saw Roger as an exotic man of the world. Marrying him seemed like a triumph over spinsterhood and her perpetual feelings of not being feminine enough.

From the outset, the marriage was difficult. Roger’s family considered Jessie socially inferior, as she discovered on their honeymoon to the family summer house in Pascagoula, Mississippi. The family WAS once wealthy. But Roger’s father was injured in the Civil War, his brother was disabled, and the two sisters were unmarried and dependent. So now the family relied on Roger for support, and they didn’t want to share his income with Jessie. Also, the couple soon discovered their match was rocky and that they were sexually incompatible.

Yellow fever broke out in New Orleans, and Roger was ordered to barracks. He pressured Jessie to return to her family, and thus began a familiar pattern in which Jessie felt banished. Roger was a tropical medicine specialist, and the Army regularly sent him off to Honduras or Guatemala or New Orleans. Jessie would travel to meet him at times and hope that their marriage would improve. She’d return to stay with her sister Lulu, now with her husband and family in Tennessee.

Jessie got pregnant with baby Frederick in 1907 and baby Mary in 1912. In 1914, she felt optimistic that Roger was finally ready to settle down and be happy with her. She returned to Texas pregnant again and excited to find a home for the family.

But three months later, Roger died of blackwater fever in Guatemala. Roger’s resentful family gave her only $1,000 from his estate.

Luckily for Jessie, she had a good place to land in Georgetown. Her father had invested in the Georgetown telephone exchange a few years before. He had wanted to leave Laredo, disconsolate after their youngest son, Jamie, had been killed with a blow to the head during a fight between baseball teams that broke out after a contested game. Her father never recovered from this and the other ways he felt angry and dissatisfied with his life. He died in Georgetown in 1911.

Here are some key spots focal to Jessie’s early Georgetown years. If you walk or bike-ride this tour, you’ll see some lovely Old Town—and you’ll clock about nearly two miles!

Begin at Jessie Daniel Ames’ home at 1004 Church Street where she lived her adult life. Take a look as well at the Hidden Histories for Jessie’s Suffrage years and Anti-Lynching Advocate years. Imagine all the work and strategizing that went on in this house over the years, while Jessie and her mom also raised the three children.

Jessie and Laura’s house is in red; check out the neighborhood in the 1930s. The Baptist church is to the right, so this view shows the northern side of the house.

Walk from Jessie’s home to 824 Austin Avenue, the former office of the Georgetown Telephone Exchange, just as Jessie and her mom Laura did every work day. Picture the women operators at work, connecting folks all around Georgetown and the rural Williamson County areas.

These telephone operators worked in Lockhart in this 1920s photo. Things likely looked similar right here!

Walk up Austin to 7th Street and take a left, continuing to Martin Luther King Jr. Street. Look to your right—here’s the site of the former I & GN train depot. That’s where Jessie’s father James went every day for work. Trains brought passengers and freight. Look at the 1916 city map below; the train depot is at center top on the street then called Timber, north of where 7th (then also called San Gabriel) crossed today’s MLK. Look at all the businesses and community anchors that once bustled in this part of town: The City Ice and Bottling Words, lots of lumber commerce, and the St. Paul M.E. Church that was the Black community’s first church.

Wooo-wooo! Here comes this I & GN train, shown where it headed north from Round Rock. This photo shows the train crossing Brushy Creek on a bridge still there near Chisholm Trail and Round Rock Avenue in Round Rock. James Daniel would be there to meet the train. Surely Jessie and the other Daniel kids came to the depot at times as well.

**This train headed to Georgetown was sometimes called the Jimmytown Special.**

Walk north on MLK to 6th Street and turn right. Look at the historical marker at 401 W. 6th, for this building that used to be a produce warehouse where the produce was kept cool via the building’s thick stone walls and the spring water channeled through the basement.

Turn right on Rock St. and left on 7th Street. As you near the square, look at the Bank of America on your left. Imagine walking in to this scene when it was the National Bank, one of the town’s leading banks. Perhaps Jessie’s family banked here, or maybe she did later as a business owner and single parent.

Cross the street and sit a spell on a bench on the west side of the Courthouse. Look across Austin to the west side of the square. Here it is as Jessie would have seen it as a young woman. See the Farmer’s Bank where the Williamson Museum is?

Then walk around to look at the east side of the square. This is what girl-aged Jessie would have seen.

Make your way through any number of scenic Old Town streets to 705 E. Third Street. This is where the family first lived when they moved from Overton. As you enjoy your saunter (or bike ride or car drive), visualize the young Jessie frequenting these streets to get to school and do errands for the family and play with friends. Notice the two-story houses that so impressed young Jessie—many of them she saw remain. And, of course, she got to live in one!

**Picture Jessie and her siblings and parents enjoying their new Georgetown home.**

Make your way over to 507 East University Street. Here’s the original site of SU’s Ladies Annex, where Jessie and her sister Lulu attended college. Jessie also attended the SU Finishing School nearby. Read the historical markers in front of the building. This entire block fronting University has long hosted educational institutions, from the first Southwestern buildings to Georgetown High School (built as the present structure) to Williams Elementary to the current Hammerlun Center for adult learning and staff and teacher development.

Head back to Jessie’s home on Church Street or explore more of Georgetown!