Harriet Canfield, better known as “Miss Hattie” to the parents of her students at Jennings School, was a nationally known writer whose work appeared in the New York Times and the Ladies’ Home Journal.
Canfield came naturally to writing. She was the daughter and granddaughter of pioneer Akron newspaper publishers. Grandfather Horace Canfield had started the first Cuyahoga Falls newspaper, Ohio Review, in 1833. He later moved to Akron and started the American Democrat. Her father, also named Horace Canfield, was also a newspaper editor/publisher.
Canfield started her journalism career on the Summit County Beacon, the family newspaper. She then started submitting stories elsewhere. The Beacon Journalcharacterized some of them as “burning love stories.” She sold these and other stories through the McClure Syndicate, a well-regarded editorial service that provided features to newspapers across the East. In addition, she sold stories to the New York Times and the Ladies’ Home Journal.
Her journalism, however, probably never paid the bills. For that, she relied on her teaching career. She taught at both the old Crosby School and Jennings School.
Margaretha Gerhardt Burkhardt was not yet 35 when she took over the family brewery. Over her 40 years with the brewery business, she expanded it and made it more productive and profitable than ever before.
Margaretha Gerhardt was born in Germany and emigrated to America in 1870. Wilhelm Burkhardt, who would become her husband, had been born in Germany also. He was trained in brewing before he emigrated to America in 1868. Initially, he settled in Cleveland, working as a brew master. When he settled in Akron, he became part owner of the Wolf Ledge Brewery, located in the city’s German community. In 1874 Wilhelm Burkhardt and Margaretha Gerhardt married. They had two children, William and Gustav.
Five years later, the Burkhardts faced a business disaster. The successful Wolf Ledge Brewery, a wooden brew house, burned to the ground. Burkhardt’s partner wanted no more of the brewery business. Burkhardt bought his partner out and rebuilt the brewery.
Two years later, Wilhelm Burkhardt died of blood poisoning. He was only 32 years old and his wife Margaretha had to make a decision. Should she sell the business or keep it and run it? She had two young sons and there were few – if any women in the Akron area – running a brewery.
Burkhardt opted to keep the business. In fact, she proved to be a woman of tremendous business acumen. For more than 40 years, Burkhardt was the driving force behind Burkhardt’s Brewery in Akron. She faced many challenges, one of which was the disastrous 1890 tornado that damaged the brewery. (She refused charity and instead donated money to help others rebuild their homes.)
By 1899, Burkhardt had brought both her sons into the family business. With the turn of the century, she started an expansion policy that increased production 100 fold, modernized the plant, improved and enlarged the bottling works and diversified the business into real estate and coal.
Margaretha retired as president of Burkhardt’s in 1911 but she retained her controlling stock and remained a director of – and a key force in — the business until her death in 1925.
Burkhardt lived to see prohibition introduced into the state in 1918. In 1919, Burkhardt had to shift to soft drink production and for a time produced Hires Root Beer. Its soft drink business was never successful but the company was sufficiently diversified that it survived prohibition.
Emily Bronson Conger, a revolutionary 19th century woman, was a role model for women who wished to pursue nontraditional paths.
The granddaughter of Herman Bronson, founder of Peninsula, Ohio, Conger came from strong patriotic stock. Little is known about her early years and education. She married Union Civil War Col. Arthur Latham Conger around 1865, and they had three sons-Kenyon B., Arthur W, and Latham H. Conger.
Conger’s husband was a successful farmer and Akron industrialist. When he was elected treasurer of Summit County, she joined his administration as deputy county treasurer. This was unusual, because women had not been granted the right to vote at that time.
In addition to her official role in county government, Conger was talented in music and volunteered at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. She was a natural hostess and was often giving grand social parties.
Being the patriot that she was, it was natural for Conger to take interest in organizations like the Dames of the Loyal Legion, the Order of the Eastern Star and the Women’s Relief Corps. She started the Cuyahoga Portage Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution.
Shortly before her husband’s death in 1899, Conger embarked on a new journey. The study of osteopathy fascinated her because she had seen the miraculous recovery by her husband after a serious stroke. She studied at a school in Missouri and was one of the first women in the United States to be given a degree in the field. She firmly believed in the practice and resisted efforts to prohibit it and became vice president of the American Association of Osteopathy.
After her husband’s death, Conger traveled with one of her sons to the Philippines to work with American soldiers. She also helped care for mothers and their babies. Known as Senora Blanca by the natives, she wrote a book called An Ohio Woman in the Philippines, based on her experiences.
Photo courtesy of the Women’s History Project of the Akron Area.
Mrs. Sarah M. Edgerly Battels, a pioneer among women and catalyst for social action, was active in serving her local community, Ohio and the nation.
Born in Hudson, Ohio, Battels used her wealth and social status to influence people. She worked tirelessly to organize the Buckley Post of the Women’s Relief Corps (W. R. C.) and served as its first president. The W. R. C. offered aid to Civil War veterans. She also served as a trustee for the Xenia Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Orphans’ Home until her death in 1906.
Battels resigned her local position with the W. R. C. and became the president of the state chapter. While with that organization, Battels represented Ohio at national conventions and was well received on every level.
On Jan. 16, 1858, she was married to Benjamin F. Battels, a well-known photographer in the Akron area. A member of the First Congregational Church in Akron, Battels also belonged to the Order of the Eastern Star in Cleveland.
Women from all over the state were saddened at her death. The May 4, 1906 issue of the Akron Beacon Journal said of her “…no one ever went to her in misfortune but what some help was given.”
Mrs. Margaret Chapman Barnhart, tirelessly devoted to the welfare of children, was a moving force behind curbing juvenile delinquency in Summit County.
Born in Holmes County, Ohio, Barnhart began teaching at age 16 after completing her education at Millersburg High School.
After her marriage to Board of Education Secretary John F. Barnhart on April 1, 1893, Barnhart became very interested in the welfare of children. After the Civil War, many children were left without a father. She became very active in raising funds for the first Children’s Home in the county. She was so successful in her persuasion that she was appointed to the building committee and helped design the plans for the new home.
Barnhart also lead efforts to provide public playgrounds in Akron. She believed that having a safe place to play would lessen crimes committed by young people. She served on the Akron Civic League’s Playground Committee. As a result of her efforts, many playgrounds were built throughout the city.
Barnhart was also appalled that young people who committed crimes were sent to the same facility as adults. She had worked as a juvenile probation officer and felt that a separate court system for juveniles was needed. She worked with the Akron Woman’s Council to involve city leaders in establishing the Detention Home in Summit County.
Assistant superintendent of the Sunday school at First Methodist Episcopal Church in Akron, Barnhart was also a charter member of the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) and once again used her ability to raise funds for the support of that organization.
Not only was Barnhart concerned for the welfare of children, she wanted to provide educational opportunities for immigrants in Summit County. She opened her home and taught English classes to foreign girls who came to work in Akron.
Over the years, Barnhart was involved in numerous community organizations. She was secretary of the Summit County Health Protective Association and was in charge of the first sale of Christmas seals for the Red Cross. She helped organized the Visiting Nurses Association, which provided health care services for children in schools.
Upon her death on March 18, 1913, the Akron Beacon Journal quoted a lifelong friend of Barnhart’s as saying, “she was a character seldom met…and never set out to do a thing that was not accomplished.”
Frances C. Allen, first woman elected to the Akron Board of Education, is credited with helping her husband develop the oats cooking process used in the development of breakfast cereal.
Born in Barghill, Ohio, on April 14, 1849, Allen attended Hiram College (Ohio) and taught school in New Castle, Pa., before moving to Akron. She also taught at the old Perkins School in Akron.
She married Miner Jesse Allen in Akron in 1876. He was a partner in Cummings and Allen Flour which, through mergers, became part of Quaker Oats. The Allens developed in their family kitchen the oats cooking process used in the development of breakfast cereals.
Frances Allen was also in the missionary activities of her church, High Street Church of Christ. She was one of the founders and first secretary of the missionary society. In addition, she was a member of the Ohio Christian Women’s Missionary Association.
Allen made local history when she and Mrs. O.L. Sadler, a local suffragist, ran successfully for the Akron Board of Education in 1896. In 1894, the Ohio legislature gave women the right to vote in school board elections. At the same time, women became eligible to hold a seat on the school board. Both Allen and Sadler won in 1896. Both women served their full two-year term. Sadler refused to run again; Allen was nominated but failed to win reelection. Twenty years would pass before the next woman would take a seat on Akron’s school board.
After her husband died in 1915, Allen moved to Cleveland. She helped to establish the Cleveland Heights Christian Church and helped to financially underwrite both its building and maintenance. She also provided funds for educational work in India and the Philippines.
On that day in October 1894 when Lucy A. Morse Tibbals was buried, all of Akron society – male and female – seemed to be crowded into the First Methodist Church to say goodbye to a friend and community leader.
Lucy A. Morse was born in Randolph, a small town in Portage County, Ohio, on July 9, 1835. She came to Akron in 1852 with her parents Huron and Althea. On Oct. 26, 1856, she married Newell D. Tibbals, an ambitious attorney who had just come to Akron the year before. Her husband had an eye on a political career. A Republican, he was elected the city’s prosecuting attorney in 1860, the city’s first city solicitor in 1865 and state senator in 1866. In 1875, he was elected judge of the Common Pleas Court. During the Civil War, he was a sergeant in the Ohio voluntary infantry.
Back in Akron, his wife performing her own war duty. She was an active member of the Akron Soldiers Aid Society. Affiliated with Cleveland’s Sanitary Commission, the Akron society contributed literally thousands of dollars worth of food and clothing to the hospitalized wounded and sick soldiers. These women spent evenings knitting mittens and socks for soldiers. They also packed food and other goods for the Army in a small room above a store on South Howard Street. The food and goods were shipped to Cleveland’s Sanitary Commission and then onto the hospitals that cared for the wounded and sick soldiers. In addition, the organization raised much money by holding “dime parties,” socials and dinners. Virtually every month, the Summit Beacon reported the contributions that Tibbals and the other Akron women made to the war effort through the Soldiers Aid Society. According to the Portrait and Biographical Record of Portage and Summit Counties, Ohio(1898), Tibbals “made a host of friends during the war.”
After the war, she gave up neither her friends nor her community activities. She was one of the organizers of the Dorcas society, out of which the Akron board of charities grew. She even served as superintendent of the industrial branch of that board.
Both she and her husband were active in the Buckley Post of the Grand Army of the Republic: she as a trustee of the Woman’s Relief Corps and he as commander of the Post. The Woman’s Relief Corps provided support for the Civil War veterans and their families.
Tibbals also got involved in the Ladies’ Cemetery Association, serving as president for one term. She also helped establish the Summit County Children’s Home. A member of the First Methodist Church, she remained active in its Woman’s Missionary Society.
When her death was announced at the Akron court house, Judge A.C. Voris called a meeting of the bar and its members unanimously approved a resolution to attend her funeral. The funeral must have been crowded. Not only did the attorneys in the city attend, so did the Buckley Post of the GAR and the Woman’s Relief Corps.
Pamphila Stanton Wilcott was a woman who had always been defined in terms of her male relatives. She was the daughter of a prominent Steubenville, Ohio, physician. She was the sister of Edwin Stanton, secretary of War during the Civil War. She was the wife of a brilliant Akron attorney, who became assistant secretary of War. But Pamphila Stanton Wolcott deserves some credit of her own. She has been generally credited with organizing the Akron Soldiers Aid Society during the Civil War.
Pamphila Stanton was born in Steubenville, Ohio, in 1827; she was the daughter of David Stanton, a physician, and Lucy Norman. She was bright young woman but always stood in the shadow of her older brother Edwin. It was through her brother, then a successful attorney, that she met her future husband Christopher Parsons Wolcott. Young Wolcott was studying law with Edwin Stanton and his partner. In 1844, Pamphila Stanton and Christopher Wolcott married and moved to Akron.
Christopher Wolcott was a man on the make. He was a brilliant attorney and soon became the senior partner in the prosperous Akron law firm of Wolcott & Upson. But he would soon make his mark in politics. Governor Chase appointed Wolcott as the state’s Attorney General. In 1861, he was appointed Judge Advocate General. By 1862, he was working in Washington, D.C. with his brother in law and mentor Edwin Stanton at the War Department. Wolcott was assistant secretary of War. Wolcott was also a workaholic. His long days — the Summit Beacon reported that he worked from 6 a.m. until 2 a.m. every day — led to his early death in 1863.
While Christopher Wolcott was off traveling the state as Attorney General or working in Washington, his wife cared for the couple’s three sons and carried on her own life in Akron. She came into her own during the Civil War.
Pamphila Stanton Wolcott is generally credited with starting Akron’s Soldier’s Aid Society. She also served as its first president. Affiliated with Cleveland’s Sanitary Commission, the Akron society contributed literally thousands of dollars worth of food and clothing to the hospitalized wounded and sick soldiers. The Soldiers Aid Society members spent evenings knitting mittens and socks for soldiers. They also packed food and other goods for the Army in a small room above a store on South Howard Street. The food and goods were shipped to Cleveland’s Sanitary Commission and then onto the hospitals that cared for the wounded. In addition, the organization raised much money by holding “dime parties,” socials and dinners.
By 1862, she had retired from the leadership of the Soldiers Aid Society. Her husband’s ill health demanded her full attention.
Politically well connected, Pamphila Wolcott went on to hold a government position in Washington in the pension department from 1878 to 1882, during the administration of Rutherford B. Hayes, a president from Ohio.
At the time of her death, the Beacon Journal observed that Wolcott was extremely bright, very well connected politically and “happiest when working for the cause of charity.”
Martha Walters of New York probably never could have predicted what a trip to Akron in 1941 would bring – a marriage, a breaking of a color barrier in the city’s hospitals and a lifetime of contributions to her adopted hometown.
Walters had been born in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Washington, D.C., just a few blocks from the White House. She went to college there, Howard University; after graduation, she headed for New York and the Lakeland School for Nursing. There were hard times in New York during the Great Depression; but Walters, by then a registered nurse, found work with the New York Health Department. And there she might have stayed, if it had not been for that trip to Akron.
She met A.L. Averett, married and settled down in wartime Akron. Finding work was no problem; she worked at a doctor’s office. Then, in 1946, she decided to apply as a nurse at Akron City Hospital. No Black nurse had ever worked in any of the city’s hospitals before. Nonetheless, Akron City Hospital hired her and one more color barrier in medicine was broken.
Estelle Rogers, her daughter, told the Beacon Journal that there was segregation in the hospital, “whether it was by floors, wings or sections on a floor.” Averett cared for white patients, some of whom didn’t appreciate it. Nonetheless, Averett worked hard and impressed her supervisors. She was eventually promoted to supervising nurse.
Just as things were looking up professionally, Averett suffered a heart attack and had to retire. But that just opened a new phase to her life. She shifted her attention to the Akron Community Service Center and Urban League; she became the first president of the Northside Citizens Council. But, again, poor health struck her; in 1959 a debilitating stroke left her bedridden.
This, in turn, began yet another career. She began counseling troubled teens in 1961. She treasured the time she spent with these youngsters. “The stories differ: illegitimate young men with high intelligence and low grades; desperate daughters sometimes seeking shameful solutions to their troubles; fear; tension; hidden disease; despair,” she told the Beacon Journal. “These are my children and I thank their parents for sharing them with me.”
Her mixture of questions “sugar-coated with warmth and compassion” brought positive results with the teens, the Beacon Journal reported. Fifteen of her first 17 teens were in college in 1966.
Honors and awards followed. In 1967, Zeta Phi Beta sorority named her Woman of the Year; in 1970 she received the Akron Touchdown Club service award; in 1974 she won the Governor’s Community Action Award.
Martha Averett died Aug. 13, 1982 in Akron. She was 76 years old. Urban League Director Vernon Odom remembered her as “one of Akron’s great ladies.”
Daisy L. Alford-Smith, champion for the underprivileged, uses her background in health care and public policy-making to help the citizens of Summit County.
Although little is known about her early life, Alford-Smith holds the following degrees: a Nursing Diploma from Montefiore Hospital School of Nursing in Pittsburgh; a B.S. in Nursing from the University of New York; an M.S. in Technical Education from The University of Akron, and a Ph. D. in Urban Education from Cleveland State University.
In addition to teaching at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and the Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing, Alford-Smith has lectured extensively around the world, including Zimbabwe, Africa, and Bangkok, Thailand.
Alford-Smith has spoken before many groups about issues regarding health care and minorities. Some of these groups include the International Nursing Conference in Korea and the Democratic National Convention’s Black Caucus Delegation here in the United States.
The mother of three children of her own and a blended family of two more, Alford-Smith has dealt with health care issues personally in her own family. Her daughter, Kym Sellers, a well-known radio personality, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Alford-Smith and her daughter work to raise awareness and financial support for African-Americans who suffer from the disease.
Akron, Ohio, is where Alford-Smith currently serves as the director of the Summit County Department of Job & Family Services, although she is involved in many programs that deal with health care. She has worked with the Olivet Institutional Baptist Church Health and Education Institute, the Center for Urban & Minority Health at Case Western Reserve University. Besides being the director of the Cleveland Department of Public Health and the deputy director of the Ohio Department of Human Services, Alford-Smith has also been the branch manager and administrator for Staff Builders Health Care Services in Akron, a company that delivers health care products and services in a tri-county area.
Because faith is an important part of her life, Alford-Smith works in support of faith-based health care and Charitable Choice programs in Ohio. Her testimony in Washington, D.C., has given credibility to one of the first pilot programs for faith-based health care in the country.
Alford-Smith is a member of the following professional organizations: the Cleveland Council of Black Nurses, the Akron Black Nurses Association, the National Forum of Black Public Administrators, the Coalition of 100 Black Women, the Black Women’s Political Action Committee, Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, LINKS, Inc., County Commissioners Association of Ohio and the United States Conference of Local Health Officers. She is currently the first vice president of the National Black Nurses Association and is a past graduate of Leadership Cleveland.
Past board memberships and committee seats include the American Red Cross-North Central Ohio, the Ohio United Way, United Negro College Fund, Womenspace, Buckeye Health Center and the Minority Organ Tissue Transplant Education Program.
Because of her tireless efforts to improve health care, Alford-Smith has received numerous awards such as Joan L. Andrews Professional Service Award, Crain’s Cleveland Business Leaders of Today Award and Woman of Influence Award, the 24th Annual YWCA Greater Cleveland Woman of Achievement Award, the Plain Dealer’s Outstanding Accomplishments in Welfare Reform Award, and the Distinguished Achievement Award from Arlington Church of God, Akron, to name just a few.
In photo, Alford-Smith poses with daughter Kym Sellers. Photo courtesy of the Kym Sellers Foundation.
