Hermitage Hotel

You are now at the Hermitage Hotel—the epicenter of the fight for and against suffrage. In 1920, the hotel was still quite new, opening a decade earlier in 1910. Its Beaux Arts style with a grand staircase leading up to a spacious lobby and veranda made it Nashville’s most elegant place to stay. Ironically, women were not allowed to enter the hotel from the main entrance and had to access the building from a side door, still located on the Union Street side of the hotel. 

The suffragists, led by Carrie Chapman Catt and Nashville native Anne Dallas Dudley, set up offices with a view of the capitol building. Hotel folklore recalls that the pro-suffrage women could be a rowdy bunch, with their eighth-floor guestrooms referred to as the “Jack Daniels suite” for the volume of whiskey delivered despite the statewide prohibition of alcohol.

The “Anti’s,” led by Josephine Pearson arrived soon after and asked for the cheapest room available. She kept her accommodations simple but paid to reserve the assembly rooms on the mezzanine and first floor where she set up the Tennessee branch of the Woman’s Rejection League. Suffragist Abby Crawford Milton described a frenzied scene at the hotel. “There were fist fights and swarms of red roses in the lobby every evening,” she said. Years later, Milton also recalled, “The mezzanine of that hotel had been bought up by the Anti’s. And they served liquor there to the members—[at least] all the members they could get drunk. The [Anti’s] took our votes away from us with all the men that they could.”

Abby Crawford Milton and Catherine Talty Kenny worked to organize local suffrage societies in small towns across the state. Because of their efforts, Tennessee had a suffrage club in almost every county by the time Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment and sent it to states for ratification. When Governor Roberts agreed to call a special session of the Tennessee General Assembly to vote on the amendment, Milton and Kinney personally lobbied every member for support. 

Unlike many of the other Nashville suffragists, Catherine Kenny was not born into a prominent family. She grew up in Chattanooga and moved to Nashville after her husband secured the city’s first franchise to bottle Coca-Cola. She quickly became active in the Nashville Equal Suffrage League and in local Democratic Party politics. In 1915, Kenny co-chaired the campaign committee for the state suffrage association with Abby Milton. Milton earned a juris doctorate from the Chattanooga College of Law, and her husband George Fort Milton was the publisher of the Chattanooga Free Press. Milton was the last president of the Tennessee Equal Suffrage Association and the first president of the Tennessee League of Women Voters. She died in 1991 at the age of 110 and is also memorialized as part of the suffrage monument in Centennial Park, an optional stop after visiting the capitol.

For more on the Hermitage Hotel and its history including the Capitol Grill, the Oak Bar, magnificent lobby, and famed men’s room—see our Capitol and Church and Food for Thought Tours—to name a few. 

Turn LEFT as you exit the main entrance of the Hermitage Hotel. Turn LEFT onto Union Street. As you walk up Union Street, be sure to find the historic marker, “Votes for Women” on the corner of Union and Anne Dallas Dudley Blvd. Cross Union Street at the crosswalk and walk up onto the Legislative Plaza. Go to the middle of the plaza to see War Memorial Auditorium and the imposing statue titled “Victory” that depicts Mars, the God of War. The auditorium was built in 1925, to honor Tennessee soldiers who died in World War I. Today’s plaza memorializes those who died in all U.S. wars. Make your way toward the north end of the plaza to view the State Capitol, your final stop.