March is Women’s Month, and Historic Takoma is pleased to offer insight into some of the black and white distinctive women who helped create the Takoma Park we know today. Part 1 of Notable Takoma Women honors those who played significant roles in Takoma’s early decades. Part 2 will focus on more recent decades.
Creating Takoma Park out of the wilderness meant cutting down trees to lay out streets and build houses. For the first women it meant setting up households and raising children in relatively isolated conditions. Together they established churches, schools, and cultural amenities to make Takoma their home. Historic Takoma’s archives contain images and newspaper clippings that reclaim the names of many of these women.
Pamela Favorite
Pamela Favorite was one of the most prominent early residents. She took over the town’s first general store, opened by Isaac Thomas, and renamed it “Favorite’s.” She also became the town’s first Postmistress. But her place in Takoma history was assured when she began publication of The Favorite in 1892. This monthly news sheet covered Takoma politics and local gossip, leaving us a glimpse of those early days.
Ida Summy is credited with suggesting the name “Takoma” (from Tacoma, Washington) to her friend Benjamin Franklin Gilbert. In 1884 she and her husband moved into their home at 7101 Cedar Avenue, which sits on the Maryland side of the boundary line with the District of Columbia. Read More
Amanda Thomas
The same day Gilbert made his first land purchase, Amanda Thomas bought several lots along Tulip and Maple Avenues in her own name. Deeds show that several other local women did the same. Amanda’s husband Isaac opened the first general store, while she joined in planning Takoma’s first social events. A group photo in Historic Takoma’s archives shows Ida as part of the cast for a theatrical event.
Alcena Lamond
Alcena Lamond and her husband were already living in the area when Gilbert arrived, operating the terra cotta quarry in the District near Van Buren and Underwood Street NW. As matriarch of the extended Lamond family, Alcena played a key role in building the Takoma DC library and organizing the Order of the Eastern Star (Masons). She was an early member of the Citizens Association of Takoma Park and its first female president. In fact, records indicate she was the first female president of any citizens’ association in the area. Her daughter, Mary Lamond White, later took up her role.
Betsey Cora Dudley
One of the first arrivals was Elizabeth “Betsey” Cora Wentworth Dudley. While her husband oversaw construction of many Takoma homes, she raised their four children at 204 Carroll Street NW, currently the CVS parking lot. Her son William Wentworth was the first child born in the new suburb. Two other sons opened long-lived local pharmacies, one in Takoma Park and the other in Silver Spring. For 60 years she witnessed Takoma’s expansion and was much honored by her neighbors as a keeper of early Takoma history.
Maggie Gilbert, the wife of Takoma founder B.F. Gilbert, welcomed newcomers into what was becoming a close-knit community. In an era when entertainment was do-it-yourself, her daughter Margaret and Helen Calhoun, who lived across the street, organized and performed in many recitals and musicales for the pleasure of all.
Elizabeth Cady and her husband spearheaded the formation of Trinity Episcopal Church, hosting the first meetings in their living room at 7064 Eastern Avenue NW, now known as the Cady Lee Mansion, and served as president of the church’s Ladies Guild for 17 years. Her children remained in the house until 1973. The renovated house, now owned by the Forum for Youth Investment, stands as a reminder of the grandeur of early Takoma.
Records show that a young woman named Miss Prentiss, no first name recorded, taught the first elementary school classes in a house on Maple Avenue in 1887. She and the students moved to a four-room wooden schoolhouse on Tulip Avenue (the current site of the Presbyterian Church community center) in 1889.
The arrival of the Seventh-day Adventists in 1904 brought two important women to Takoma Park. The first, Ellen White, the spiritual leader of the church, single-handedly orchestrated the Adventists’ move to Takoma. Over the next five years, she occasionally took up residence in General Carroll’s Manor House while overseeing construction of the Adventist hospital and the college.
Dr. Kress
The second Adventist was Dr. Lauretta Kress, who was called in to ready the San for its 1906 opening. She oversaw staff and trained nurses while running her own practice for expectant mothers and newborns. In 1915 she became the first woman licensed as a doctor in Montgomery County. Along with her daughter, she opened the Kress Maternity Ward adjacent to the hospital. Meanwhile she found time to be President of Takoma’s Women’s Temperance Union. When Lauretta retired in 1939, the Washington Post calculated she had delivered 4,371 babies since arriving here.
The names of Black women from Takoma’s early years mostly elude us. These women raised their own families while taking jobs as nannies, housekeepers, laundresses and cooks in white households. The evidence of their lives remains in only scattered references from employers praising their assistance and a few photographs captured by Morris Bien’s camera.
Thelma Wheeler at the Takoma Park “colored” school, 1932
By 1915, more Black women began to arrive as part of the Great Migration. One of the first was Olive Mae Warren, whose daughter Helen would marry Lee Jordan in 1935. Another was Alberta Dawes, whose son Roland currently presides over five generations of the Dawes family. Thanks to Roland we know the name of the teacher who appears in a fuzzy photo taken at the Blacks-only school on Geneva Avenue. Thelma Wheeler left an indelible impression on him that remains vivid nearly 80 years later. Historic Takoma’s African-American Oral History Project is working to recover more of these names.
Coming Next: Part 2 – Librarian Ruth Pratt, author Katherine Paterson, organizers like Belle Ziegler and Opal Daniels, Roland’s gymnast granddaughter Dominique, along with activists and politicians.
