Appalachian Figures
On a cold November day in 1921, women across Kentucky stepped into voting booths for the first time in a presidential election. In Boyd County, a former Pikeville schoolteacher and Ashland journalist named Mary Elliott Flanery did more than mark a ballot. She put her own name on it.
When the votes were counted, Flanery had won a seat in the Kentucky House of Representatives from the 89th District, representing Boyd County, by about 250 votes. Contemporary observers and later institutional histories agree that she was both the first woman elected to the Kentucky General Assembly and the first woman elected to a state legislature anywhere in the South.
From that point on, newspapers and political handbooks described her simply as “the Lady from Boyd.” Yet the story behind that title runs through eastern Kentucky hollers, Pikeville law offices, a Black poet’s slim book of verse, and a bill that helped create Morehead State Teachers College.
Elliott County Roots
Mary Elliott was born on April 27, 1867, in a section of Carter County that later became Elliott County, named for her uncle, judge and congressman John Milton Elliott.
Genealogical records and Find A Grave entries identify her parents as Benjamin Franklin Elliott and Nancy Kegley Elliott, part of a prominent eastern Kentucky family whose name the new county carried.
Like many ambitious young Appalachian women of her generation, Mary left home for schooling but never cut ties with the mountains. A biographical sketch prepared for a Western Kentucky University exhibit on Kentucky women in political life notes that she was educated in local public schools and attended Barboursville College in West Virginia (now the University of Charleston) and the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Kentucky, today the University of Kentucky.
By the early 1890s she was teaching in eastern Kentucky schools, part of a generation of women whose paid work in the classroom nudged them into public life.
Pikeville, Law, And A Black Poet’s Book
In 1893 Mary married attorney William Harvey “Harve” Flanery. His law practice drew the couple first to Ann Arbor, Michigan, then back south to Pikeville in 1896, where he worked for Northern Coal and Coke and later practiced law.
Pikeville was more than a courthouse town. Around the turn of the century it supported a small but vibrant literary circle that included Effie Waller Smith, a Black poet whose work reflected both Pike County life and broader currents in African American writing.
When Smith struggled to find a publisher for her manuscript Songs of the Months (1904), Mary Elliott Flanery helped organize subscriptions to pay the printing costs and wrote the book’s introduction.
In that introduction, Flanery framed the book as an answer to racial prejudice, explaining that it was issued partly to help remove “prejudice of color, and to prove that poetic genius is the heritage of their race as well as ours.”
It is a brief sentence, but it places an Appalachian white woman in an interracial literary project at a time when Black writers in the mountains often found their work ignored or buried. Later scholars of Effie Waller Smith would point to Flanery’s support as evidence of the complicated but real alliances that sometimes formed across race and class in early twentieth century eastern Kentucky.
From Schoolroom To Newsroom
By 1904 the Flanery family had relocated from Pikeville to Catlettsburg and nearby Ashland, trading a mountain county seat for an Ohio River town connected to the wider world by rail and press wire.
That year Mary began working for the Ashland Daily Independent. Over the next two decades she wrote news, feature pieces, and eventually a regular column titled “Impressions of Kentucky’s Legislature.”
Those columns mattered for more than inside baseball from Frankfort. The Kentucky Press Association has emphasized that Flanery used her column to argue for women’s suffrage, education reform, and child welfare, linking local readers directly to Progressive Era debates in the capital.
Through the surviving family papers at the University of Kentucky’s Special Collections Research Center we catch glimpses of that life. The Flanery Family Papers, 1883 to 1972, include correspondence, receipts, genealogical notes, pamphlets, scrapbooks, and political memorabilia documenting Mary, her husband, and their daughters Merle and Dawn. One scrapbook focuses largely on Mary’s public career and Dawn’s poetry, while photographs now in the Mary Elliott Flanery Photographic Collection show Elliott Hall in Catlettsburg and portraits of family, allies, and visiting dignitaries.
Among those images are pictures of suffrage leader Madeline McDowell Breckinridge and adult literacy reformer Cora Wilson Stewart, signaling the reform networks that linked mountain communities to Lexington drawing rooms and national campaigns for education and women’s rights.
Suffrage, Clubs, And The Road To 1921
By the 1910s Mary Elliott Flanery was active in Kentucky’s women’s club movement, the Kentucky Equal Rights Association, and the Democratic Party. Institutional biographies and Kentucky Women’s History Project materials stress her work for suffrage, marriage and divorce reform, and public education, as well as her membership in organizations such as the Daughters of the American Revolution and later the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
The Woman’s Democratic Club of Fayette County and the Democratic Woman’s Club of Kentucky, both documented in University of Kentucky collections, formed important hubs for this work. Meeting minutes, programs, and correspondence from those clubs show Kentucky women coordinating campaigns for the vote, lining up speakers, and nudging local party organizations to take their concerns seriously. Mary and her daughter Merle appear in these circles as part of a cohort of women who insisted that the Democratic Party make room for female activists.
In January 1920 Kentucky ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, and on Election Day that November, women across the state cast ballots in a presidential election for the first time.
Mary’s path to the House was direct. In 1921 she ran as the Democratic nominee for the 89th District seat representing Boyd County. Newspaper coverage and later summaries agree that she won by a narrow margin, roughly 250 votes, in a district that watched closely to see how men would respond to a woman on the ballot.
Associated Press stories on her victory traveled far beyond eastern Kentucky. A 1921 wire piece, shared today in Kentucky history circles, highlighted the symbolic weight of a woman winning office so soon after the suffrage amendment.
“Holding Her Own With The Boys”
When the General Assembly convened in January 1922, the Journal of the House began listing “Mrs. Mary Elliott Flanery” among the members for Boyd County. Legislative rosters published by the Kentucky Legislative Research Commission later marked the year as a milestone, noting her as the first woman ever to sit in the chamber and the first woman legislator in any southern state.
Those watching from the galleries and reading the papers were curious whether she would act as a quiet symbol or a working lawmaker. According to a Kentucky Historical Society podcast on her life, when asked about the atmosphere in Frankfort she replied that she could “hold [her] own with the boys in Frankfort,” puncturing doubts with a dry mountain confidence.
Her committee work and floor speeches suggest that she did exactly that. Contemporary accounts, including a 1922 issue of the Boone County Recorder, describe her speaking in favor of expanded compensation for industrial accidents during debate on a workmen’s compensation measure. The Recorder noted that “Mrs. Mary Elliott Flanery spoke for the measure,” placing her on the side of injured workers in a state where coal and factory labor were both dangerous and poorly protected.
At the same time she pressed for reforms to Kentucky’s marriage and divorce laws and advocated for implementing the federal Sheppard Towner Maternity and Infancy Act, which provided maternal and child health services at a time when Appalachian infant mortality rates were high.
In one oft quoted question from her coverage, she asked whether “women [could] be real mothers as well as good delegates,” challenging critics who insisted that public service and family life were incompatible.
The Normal School Bill And Morehead
Flanery’s most enduring legislative achievement came not in a sensational debate but in the dry language of an act to expand teacher training. In March 1922, the General Assembly passed an act establishing two new state normal schools, one in eastern Kentucky at Morehead and one in western Kentucky at Murray.
The session laws and institutional histories at Morehead State University credit Mary E. Flanery with introducing the bill that created what became Morehead State Teachers College.
In the context of early twentieth century Appalachia, that mattered tremendously. Eastern Kentucky counties had long struggled to train and retain qualified teachers. By backing a publicly funded normal school at Morehead, Flanery and her allies helped build a pipeline that would send generations of teachers into mountain classrooms.
Her ties to Morehead and to literacy reform went beyond one bill. The Flanery Family Papers and related photographic collections include images of Cora Wilson Stewart, the Rowan County educator who founded the “moonlight schools” for adult illiterates beginning in 1911.
Those programs, launched in the same hills that would soon host Morehead State Teachers College, taught thousands of adults to sign their names and read simple texts. Flanery’s support for both moonlight schools and the normal school bill tied her firmly to the Appalachian literacy crusade.
Defeat, Delegations, And A Changing South
Flanery’s legislative service lasted a single term, but her political ambitions did not end with Boyd County’s seat. In 1923 she ran in the Democratic primary for Secretary of State, a statewide office. She lost that race to another pioneer, Emma Guy Cromwell, who became the first woman elected to statewide office in Kentucky.
Rather than retreating, Flanery stayed active in party politics. She served as a delegate to the 1924 Democratic National Convention in New York, where southern women delegates like her and Cromwell pressed national leaders to take women’s issues seriously.
At home she remained a force in women’s clubs, veterans’ auxiliaries, and heritage organizations. In 1926 she organized the John Milton Elliott chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy in Catlettsburg, a reminder that some of her causes, especially around memory and the Civil War, sat uncomfortably alongside her progressive stances on education, labor, and women’s rights.
Elliott Hall, Portraits, And Papers
Mary Elliott Flanery died on July 19, 1933, at Elliott Hall, her home in Catlettsburg, and was buried in Ashland Cemetery.
Within a generation, Kentuckians began formally commemorating her work. In 1963 the legislature placed a bronze plaque on her old desk in the House chamber.
At Catlettsburg, a Kentucky Historical Society roadside marker outside Elliott Hall identifies her as a journalist, suffragist, and politician born in Carter County (now Elliott County), notes her long service to the Ashland Daily Independent, and describes her focus on marriage and divorce law and educational reform.
In Frankfort, a tinted photographic portrait of “Mrs. Mary Elliott Flanery” by E. Miller hangs in the Kentucky Historical Society’s collections, one of the images used to represent Kentucky women’s political history.
In 2005 the Kentucky Commission on Women added her to the “Kentucky Women Remembered” exhibit in the state capitol, describing her as a Progressive Era social reformer and the first woman elected to a state legislature south of the Mason Dixon line.
For researchers and students, however, the richest memorial lies in the archives. The Flanery Family Papers at the University of Kentucky contain three point two cubic feet of correspondence, scrapbooks, and genealogical material, plus microfilm of Dawn Flanery Parker’s poetry. The associated photographic collection holds about forty black and white images, including portraits of suffrage leaders like Madeline McDowell Breckinridge and scenes from Mary’s journalism and legislative life.
Together with government records such as the Journal of the House of Representatives, the Acts of the General Assemblyfor 1922 and 1924, and local newspapers from Ashland, Pikeville, Louisville, and Lexington, those papers let us move beyond myth to see the daily labor that went into making a woman from Elliott County a lawmaker in Frankfort.
Why She Matters For Appalachian History
It is easy to remember Mary Elliott Flanery only as a “first” on a list. That shorthand is not wrong, but it risks flattening an Appalachian life that crisscrossed teaching, journalism, interracial literary patronage, and state level politics.
In her own time she used a newspaper column to translate Frankfort debates for river and mountain readers, backed a Black poet’s work in Pikeville, spoke for injured workers and maternal health in the House, and pushed through legislation that helped build an eastern Kentucky teachers college.
The web of documents left behind in her family papers, in Effie Waller Smith’s Songs of the Months, in Morehead’s founding legislation, and in old newspaper columns shows Appalachia not as a political backwater but as a place where women like Flanery were already debating labor rights, education, race, and gender roles on their own terms.
For Appalachian historians, her story is a reminder that the road from an Elliott County schoolhouse to a seat in the Kentucky House ran through coal country, courthouse towns, and women’s club halls, and that the region’s political history cannot be told without the women who wrote, organized, and legislated in its name.
Sources And Further Reading
Flanery Family Papers, 1883 to 1972, University of Kentucky Special Collections Research Center, Lexington. Finding aid via ArchiveGrid. OCLC+1
Mary Elliott Flanery Photographic Collection, University of Kentucky Special Collections and Kentucky Digital Library. Includes images of Elliott Hall, family members, Cora Wilson Stewart, and Madeline McDowell Breckinridge. kyhistory.pastperfectonline.com+1
Journal of the House of Representatives of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, 1922 and 1923 sessions, and Acts of the General Assembly, 1922 and 1924, including the act establishing state normal schools at Morehead and Murray. ScholarWorks+2ScholarWorks+2
Effie Waller Smith, Songs of the Months (Neenah, Wisconsin: 1904), with introduction by Mary W. H. Flanery. Amazon Web Services, Inc.+1
Ashland Daily Independent (Ashland, Kentucky), especially Flanery’s column “Impressions of Kentucky’s Legislature,” 1904 to 1926. Wikipedia+2Kypress+2
Boone County Recorder, 1922 issue reporting that “Mrs. Mary Elliott Flanery spoke for the measure” on industrial accident compensation. Internet Archive
Kentucky Historical Society roadside marker 2136, “Mary Elliott Flanery,” Elliott Hall, Catlettsburg, and KHS portrait “Mrs. Mary Elliott Flanery” by E. Miller. HMDB+2Kentucky Women’s History Project+2
Rebecca S. Hanly, “Emma Guy Cromwell and Mary Elliott Flanery: Pioneers for Women in Kentucky Politics,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 99, no. 3 (Summer 2001): 287 to 301. JSTOR+2networks.h-net.org+2
James C. Powers, “Flannery, Mary (Elliott),” in The Kentucky Encyclopedia (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992). Wikipedia+2Wikipedia+2
Kentucky Commission on Women and Kentucky Women’s History Project, “Kentucky Women Remembered: Mary Elliott Flanery” and historical marker materials. Wikipedia+3Kentucky Women’s History Project+3Kentucky Women’s History Project+3
Western Kentucky University, Kentucky Museum, “Political Bandwagon: Biographies of Kentucky Women – Mary Elliott Flanery.” Western Kentucky University
Kentucky Press Association, David Thompson, “Mary Elliott Flanery: Female journalist, first female legislator in Kentucky and the South,” April 26, 2019. Kypress+1
Pike County Historical Society, “William David Deskins” and related essays on Pikeville’s Mary Elliott Flanery and Effie Waller Smith. Pike County Historical Society+2Pike County Historical Society+2
KET, Kentucky Life, “Who is Mary Elliott Flanery?” video segment and companion text. youtube.com+1
“Mary Elliott Flanery” and “Kentucky Women Remembered,” Wikipedia and related National Women’s History Museum entry, used as guides to dates and reference trails, cross checked against the sources above. Wikipedia+3Wikipedia+3Wikipedia+3