A Fire, A Suffragette and an Inventor

Today in New Jersey history: 

May 20

1755 A massive forest fire began near Little Egg Harbor, and burned for several days. A contemporary account reported that it “rendered desolate lands to the extent of nearly thirty miles, and most of the inhabitants reduced thereby to meer [sic] penury and want.”

1825 Antoinette Louisa Brown was born in Henrietta, New York.  Brown graduated from the Monroe County Academy in 1840 and began work as a teacher the following year.  Antoinette decided that she wanted to become a minister, an unheard of occupation for women at the time, and attended Oberlin College in Ohio, a radically progressive institution run by a relative.  She graduated in 1850 and became pastor of a Congregational Church in Butler, New York in 1853.  A well-known advocate for abolition, women’s rights and temperance, Brown married fellow radical progressive Samuel Blackwell in January, 1855 and moved to Newark and then Orange, New Jersey, shortly afterward.  Antoinette Brown Blackwell founded the New Jersey Women’s Suffrage Association in 1867 and spent the rest of her life in the state, advocating for causes and serving as a minister. She died in Elizabeth in 1921, at the age of ninety-seven.

1891 Thomas Edison demonstrated a prototype of his kinetoscope short film viewing machine to members of the National Federation of Women’s Clubs at his West Orange laboratory.