Christopher Philippo uses a local lens to look at large historical issues

History is all around us although few of us delve in, as Christopher Philippo does, to find it.Take women’s suffrage for instance.In 2017, as New York was celebrating its centennial for women’s suffrage, the William G. Pomeroy Foundation notified historical societies across the state about a grant program for markers.At a Lansingburgh Historical Society meeting, Philippo recalled, the secretary mentioned the Pomeroy letter and said, “We didn’t have any suffragists here, so we’ll just move on to the next item on the agenda.“And I said, ‘Wait a minute … Let me just look first.’”Philippo discovered Lansingburgh, which is now part of Troy, had a significant suffragist, Caroline Gilkey Rogers.She spoke at local and national women’s rights conventions and her home was nicknamed the Equal Rights Hotel because, whenever there were out-of-town suffragists visiting for conventions in the area, they would stay with Rogers, Philippo learned.Rogers attempted to vote in Lansingburgh in 1885 and recounted the experience in remarks before a State Assembly Committee on Grievances. Philippo unearthed this account of her comments in an 1885 report in the Daily Saratogian:“A short time ago a call was issued for all taxpaying inhabitants to come out and vote upon the question of introducing the water works into the village. Being very anxious for this measure to be carried I went with a lady friend to the polls, but our ballots were refused, and when I pointed out to the inspector that ‘all taxpaying inhabitants’ were urged to come, he said: ‘oh that does not mean women.’”Philippo applied to the grant program and got a marker for Rogers.Now a trustee of the Bethlehem Historical Association, Philippo had a similar experience when in 2020 he urged a museum exhibit to commemorate the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote nationwide.The association president “didn’t think we really had much in the way of items that we could put together for an exhibit,” he recalled.Philippo did the same thing he had for Lansingburgh, checking databases to look for suffrage activity in Bethlehem and its hamlets.“I quickly found that, here again, there certainly was suffrage activity in Bethlehem,” he says in this week’s Enterprise podcast.Read the full story at altamontenterprise.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.