Lucretia Ann Hatch came to California’s early suffrage movement through her involvement with Spiritualism. Born Lucretia Ann Newton in Massachusetts in 1816, she was married at the age of twenty-six to John O. Darrow in Boston. Of the couple’s four children, apparently only one, William, survived to adulthood. In 1851, Darrow left for the California gold rush, after which Lucretia apparently filed for divorce (a legal ambiguity that later resurfaced in her life).
In the late 1850s, Lucretia took William to California, where she joined her brother John Newton in Petaluma, where he settled in 1853 after coming west for the gold rush. One of Lucretia’s sisters, Mrs. Emma Baston, also lived in town.
In Petaluma, Lucretia met and married forty-seven year old Chester Payne Hatch (1814-1893). Born in Connecticut, Hatch, like the other men in Lucretia’s life, originally came to California to mine gold in 1853. A machinist by trade, he started a company in San Francisco manufacturing sashes, doors, and blinds. In 1857, he relocated his business to Petaluma, and two years later formed the town’s first foundry.
One interest Chester shared with Lucretia was Spiritualism, a religious movement that began in New England in 1849. Based on a premise that the living could communicate with spirits of the dead through a medium, Spiritualism became a therapeutic means of feeling connected to deceased family members, especially young children.
For a number of women, it also became a means of claiming some degree of independence outside the hierarchy of clergymen, particularly with respect to public speaking before mixed audiences, unrestrained by the principles of piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity imposed upon women during the Victorian Era.
After the Civil War, Spiritualism began to flower in California with the arrival of mediums—typically single, young, white, Protestant women—from New York or New England, looking to escape the yoke of traditional values and institutions back east.
Lucretia and Chester Hatch, like many Spiritualists, endorsed many of the progressive reforms of the mid-nineteenth century, including abolition and suffrage for women. The Hatch’s home on Liberty Street between Washington Street and Western Avenue became the site of regular Spiritualist gatherings, featuring seances with visiting mediums.
In 1866, the Spiritualists organized to hold their first California State Convention in San Jose, which the couple attended. Chester was elected to the Spiritualists’ State Central Committee as the Sonoma County representative.
On December 28, 1869, Lucretia and Chester attended the first meeting of the Sonoma County Woman Suffrage Association held at the Petaluma home of Abigail Haskell. The next month, Lucretia accompanied fellow members Haskell and Sarah Myers Latimer—both members of the Swedenborg Church, which had an affiliation with Spiritualists—to San Francisco to attend the inaugural convention of the California Woman Suffrage Association. At the convention, Haskell was elected the new association’s first president, and Latimer a vice president.
While continuing to agitate for suffrage, Chester and Lucretia also became involved in the progressive circles of the Radical Republican Party. Chester became a prominent business and political leader in Petaluma and Lucretia volunteered as a hospice nurse for the terminally ill including, in her role as a Spiritualist, performing last rites.
After Chester passed away in 1893, Lucretia was subjected to a scandalous estate battle initiated by Chester’s brother in Connecticut, who charged Lucretia with bigamy for having married Chester without divorcing her first husband, and also with forging Chester’s final will, which named Lucretia as its main beneficiary.
Lucretia won the estate battle in court, restoring her reputation. She lived another seven years, passing away in 1901, at which time she was recognized in newspaper obituaries around the country as one of California’s early Spiritualist pioneers.
SOURCES:
Petaluma Argus: “A New Enterprise,” March 5, 1870; “Died,” March 28, 1873; “Republican Mass Meeting,” April 6, 1877; “Local Brevities,” July 30, 1880; “Personal and Social,” November 25, 1881; “Petaluma Foundry,” March 13, 1884; “John U. Newton,” September 10, 1887.
Petaluma Courier: “Courierlets,” November 14, 1883; “Death of Col. C.P. Hatch,” March 19, 1893; “Notice to Creditors,” January 3, 1894; “Mrs. Lucretia Hatch,” March 4, 1901; “Landmarks Are being Torn Down,” October 18, 1918.
San Francisco Call: “Noted Spiritualist Dies at Petaluma,” March 5, 1901.
San Francisco Examiner: “A Contested Estate,” April 1, 1893; “The Hatch Will Contested,” October 4, 1893.
San Francisco Chronicle: “His Legal Wife,” April 4, 1893.
“Chester P. Hatch,” History of Sonoma County (Alley, Bowen & Company, 1880), pp. 557-558.
Julia Schlesinger, Worker in the Vineyard: A Review of the Progress of Spiritualism, Biological Sketches, Lectures, Essays and Poems (San Francisco, By the Author, 1896).
Elizabeth Schleber Lowry, Invisible Hosts: Performing the Nineteenth Century Spirit Medium’s Autobiography (State University of New York, 2017).
Elizabeth Schleber Lowry, “Women in Nineteenth Century Spiritualism,” World Religion and Spirituality, website, wrldrels.org.