A charismatic poet and journalist, Anna Morrison Reed captivated the nation as a young woman with her electrifying lectures on temperance and a woman’s place in the home. By the time she reached middle age however, Reed had become one of California’s leading suffragists as well as a spokesperson for beer and wine industry.
Anna Moreda Morrison was born in Dubuque, Iowa, in 1849. Shortly after her birth, her father departed with a wagon train bound for the California and the gold rush, leaving behind his wife and child. In 1854, four-year-old Anna and her mother boarded a ship in New York for California, where they reunited with her father, who was working the mines in remote Butte County.
Homeschooled by her mother, Anna demonstrated an early talent for poetry, publishing her first poems in local newspapers when she was fifteen. At seventeen, she began teaching in a rural school and writing articles for the local press. At nineteen, she gained entry to Mrs. Perry’s Seminary in Sacramento, but had to withdraw after two months and return home to take care of her parents and three younger siblings, who were all afflicted with malaria.
To support her family, Anna joined the temperance lecture circuit as the opening act for her mother’s cousin, Col. E.Z.C. Judson, a recovering alcoholic and the originator of the western “dime novel,” who later started Buffalo Bill Cody on the path to fame. Anna learned from Judson the formula for an entertaining presentation, combining speaking, poetry recitations, music, and dancing.
After learning the ropes, Anna went on the road as a solo act, speaking to small-town residents in every Northern California county except Modoc, traveling either on horseback or by stagecoach, accompanied by only her younger brother Eddie. Espousing traditional roles for women in the home, she quickly gained notoriety for her opposition to the women suffragists working the temperance circuit, many of whom were Spiritualists originally from the east coast. She drew large crowds and the attention of prominent politicians as well as the national press, who dubbed her the “California Girl.”
One newspaper described her as “an unusually attractive personality with sparkling brown eyes, finely molded features, and luxuriant dark hair … a striking illustration of what pluck and native talent can do in spite of adverse circumstances in early life.”
Anna’s speaking tour, which continued non-stop for two-and-a-half years, generated enough money for her to purchase a house for her family. Her events usually ended with a community dance that she happily participated in, garnering her several suitors and marriage proposals. In 1872, after a whirlwind romance that began at a dance, she married John Smith Reed, a successful miner twenty years her senior.
The Reeds made their home in Ukiah, where John became involved in ranching as one of the largest landholders in Mendocino County, as well as politics and founding the Bank of Ukiah, where he served as president for many years. Anna, following the message of her lectures, became a stay-at-home mother, giving birth to five children in her first eight years of marriage.
She remained active in the local and state temperance movement, using her political connections in Sacramento to draft California’s first local option law in 1874, which proposed allowing communities to determine whether they would be wet or dry when it came to selling alcohol. After passing the legislature, the law was quickly struck down by the state high court.
Anna also continued to write. Deemed the “Poetess of the North” by the San Francisco press, she published her first book of poetry in 1880, followed by two more well-received volumes in the 1890s. She also became a founding member of the Pacific Coast Women’s Press Association, which provided support to women writers and journalists.
After a large fire destroyed their Ukiah home in 1889, the Reeds bought a sheep ranch near Laytonville in Mendocino County. Anna returned to the public eye as a rancher, becoming the first woman to deliver the annual address before the State Agricultural Society of California, as well as at Cloverdale’s Citrus Fair and Petaluma’s Sonoma-Marin Agricultural Fair. In 1892, the California legislature appointed her to the Board of Lady Managers for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. To raise money for the exposition’s California exhibits, Anna returned to the speaking circuit of Northern California, sometimes with a child in tow.
In the 1890s, a financial downturn in the sheep business led to repossession of the family’s ranch by John’s former colleagues at the Bank of Ukiah. The action, which Anna complained was part of a property swindle by the bank, broke John, and in 1900 he died of a heart aneurism, leaving his family penniless. To make money, she began selling ads and subscriptions to a Ukiah newspaper, as well as writing a weekly column. She also remained active in the California Women’s Press Association.
By 1904, she had made enough money to purchase a house for her extended family, and to fund a magazine, The Northern Crown, which covered the people, politics, arts, and travel of Northern California. In the first issue she made it clear that life had made her a staunch supporter of suffrage and social justice reform for women. In the years that followed, she became a prominent advocate for the California suffragist movement.
In 1908, Anna moved her family from Ukiah to Petaluma, where she continued to publish The Northern Crown, while launching her own daily newspaper, The Sonoma County Independent, which she declared to be the “paper of the people.” In 1911, she was chosen to serve as one of the official speakers of California’s Equal Suffrage Association’s campaign for passage of the state suffrage amendment, Proposition 4, which passed that year by a narrow margin of 50.7%.
After selling The Sonoma County Independent in 1912, she returned to the California lecture circuit to spearheaded fundraising for the erection of the Pioneer Mother monument, a testament to early women settlers at the 1915 Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco (it can be seen today in Golden Gate Park).
Anna also became a paid spokesperson for both the United Brewery Workers and the Grape Growers of Northern California, arguing that while she remained a supporter of temperance in terms of drinking in moderation—she herself enjoyed an evening glass of port—she opposed the “warped and Puritanical minds” intent upon suppressing individual liberty and stealing the livelihoods of the thousands who labored in California vineyards, hopyards, wineries, and breweries through prohibition, noting that “the professional good” have the habit of believing evil of all who differ with them.
In 1916, due to the health of her son Jack, who contracted TB from the carbon-based inks he used operating his mother’s printing presses, Anna and her family left foggy Petaluma to return to Ukiah, where she took a job editing the Ukiah Times Journal while continuing to publish The Northern Crown.
In 1918, she ran on an anti-prohibition platform as a Democratic nominee for a seat in the California State Assembly, losing by only a few hundred votes. Having witnessed passage of the 19th Amendment extending to women the right to vote in 1920, she died at her daughter’s home in San Francisco on May 23, 1921, and was buried in Laytonville.
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SOURCES:
Thanks to Simone Kremkau of the Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library for her research assistance on this article.
Books
John E. Keller, Anna Morrison Reed 1849-1921 (California Historical Society, 1978)
Richard Mendelson, From Demon to Darling: A Legal History of Wine in America (University of California, 2010), p. 32
Richard B. Rice, William A. Bullough, Richard J. Orsi, Mary Ann Irwin, “The California Girl,” The Elusive Eden: A New History of California, Fourth Edition (Long Grove, IL: Waveland press, 2017). p. 317-318.
Pauline C. Thompson (1993). A ‘California Girl’: The Life and Times of Anna Morrison Reed, 1849-1921 (Unpublished master’s thesis). California State University, Hayward.
Nan Towle Yamane, Women’s Press Organizations, 1881-1999, edited by Elizabeth V. Burt, (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2000).
Newspapers & Blogs
“For the Ladies,” syndicated in: Chicago Tribune, August 17, 1870; Vermont Journal, August 13, 1870; Daily Commonwealth (Topeka, KS), August 14, 1870; Brooklyn Eagle, August 11, 1870; Hartford Courant, August 23, 1870.
The Golden Coast,” Akron Daily Democrat, December 29, 1892.
“’Prohibition is Piracy’ says Mrs. Reed,” Cloverdale Reveille, February 19, 1916.
Petaluma Argus: “Jack Reed is Home Again,” June 4, 1914; “Will Soon Move the Plant up to Ukiah,” June 14, 1916.
Petaluma Argus-Courier: Mrs. Anna M. Reed Gave Address,” February 15, 1916; “Rear-View Mirror Column,” August 20, 1960; “Anna Medora Morrison Reed,” March 4, 1987.
Petaluma Courier: “Peggy’s Penciling” column, August 25, 1891; “Installed New Press,” May 14, 1909; “Mrs. Anna Reed Will Speak on Monument,” June 19, 1914.
“Wet Speaker Shows Endorsement of Prohibition Woman,” Sacramento Bee, September 10, 1914.
“Suffragette Appeals to Workers,” San Francisco Examiner, August 31, 1911.
“Mrs. Reed to Take Platform,” Santa Rosa Republican, July 25, 1911.
Joanna Kolosov, “A Northern California ‘Pioneer’ in Her Own Right,” Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library, March 28, 2018. https://sonomalibrary.org/blogs/history/a-northern-california-pioneer-in-her-own-right
Ad for Anna and Col. E.Z.C. Judson, Stockton Independent, December 9, 1868.
Ukiah Daily Journal: “The Petaluma Fair,” September 4, 1891; “World’s Fair Lecture,” March 31, 1893.
“A Wise Appointment,” Ukiah Republican Press, February 12, 1892.
“Inter Poenia,” Weekly Butte Record, June 9, 1866.