Abby Crawford Milton

Milton's hardest month was August 1920, spent in Nashville lobbying legislators. National suffrage president Carrie Chapman Catt called the Tennessee fight one of the fiercest of the whole campaign. At the Hermitage Hotel, fistfights broke out in the lobby, anti-suffragists held the mezzanine and plied lawmakers with liquor, and every morning the lobby filled with red roses, their symbol. Milton held a law degree from the Chattanooga College of Law but never practiced. Later she worked to create the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, stood for the TVA when running for the state senate, and lived to 110.

What the plaque says

Abby Crawford Milton Abby C. Milton of Chattanooga was a leader in the women's suffrage movement in Tennessee. The campaign culminated in a vote by the Tennessee Legislature in 1920 to ratify the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, giving women the right to vote. As the late president of the Tennessee Equal Suffrage Association and the first president of the Tennessee League of Women Voters, Milton's leadership was manifest before, during and after this historic event. At the 1924 Democratic National Convention, she seconded the nomination of William Gibbs McAdoo as the party's presidential candidate.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Bessie Smith Cultural Center — 0.2 mi
  Chattanooga's African American museum and performance hall on the old Ninth Street, named for the Empress of the Blues, who started out singing for change on that same street.
• Tennessee Aquarium — 0.6 mi
  A river-themed aquarium that opened on May 1, 1992, on the Chattanooga bank where John Ross kept a trading post, tracing a raindrop from the Appalachians to the Gulf.
• Walnut Street Bridge — 0.7 mi
  An 1890 truss bridge now open to walkers, and the place where Alfred Blount in 1893 and Ed Johnson in 1906 were lynched, the case that led to the Supreme Court's only criminal trial.
• Ross's Landing — 0.7 mi
  The Tennessee River landing where Chattanooga began and where Muscogee (Creek) and Cherokee people were put on boats and ferried out in 1837 and 1838.

More markers nearby

• First Coca-Cola Bottling Company in the United States — steps away
• William "Uncle Bill" Lewis — steps away
• Martin Hotel — steps away
• Chattanooga's First School — 0.2 mi