There’s
always a lot of looking back and remembering which man did what first, but
discovering which woman did the very same thing and when is rare.
We’re pretty
confident that Elmer Elwood bought the first automobile in this part of
Southern Oregon in 1903, and just about as confident that in 1904 A.C. Allen
bought the next one. A year later, A.C. followed up his 1904 car with the
purchase of a 1905 Oldsmobile, the third auto owned in the valley.
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| A. C. Allen |
Sometime
before buying that second car, Albert’s sister-in-law, Margaret Keith, came to
visit. According to A.C.’s wife, Margaret became the first woman to actually
drive in the area. Some say Margaret owned the car she drove, but it seems more
likely that A.C. let her drive his.
Within a
couple of months of buying that 1905 Oldsmobile, A.C. sold his 1904 version to
the first woman to own an automobile in the valley, Medford’s telegraph
operator, Carrie George. We don’t know if she ever drove it, but if she did, it
wasn’t for long. She quickly traded the 1904 horse-buster for a quarter block
of residential property in west Medford.
By spring
1909, there were 150 automobiles in the valley, and by fall there were over
200, although, how many of those cars were actually driven or owned by women
wasn’t reported. There were, however, a couple of local women who were setting
records behind the wheel.
In 1908,
Mrs. Ina Olwell, wife of a prominent real estate salesman, was the leader of a
five-car caravan to Crater Lake. “We’ll make it to Crater Camp tonight,” she
vowed, “or we’ll bust every tire on this machine.”
It took her
10-1/2 hours of constant driving, but
she made it.
No sooner
had Edgar Hafer, head of a Butte Falls lumber company, taken delivery of his
1909 Packard, than Annie, his wife, motored off on a record-setting drive. She
was the first woman to reach the rim of Crater Lake in an automobile, and she
did it in just 8 hours, 52 minutes.
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| 1909 Packard |
The last
five miles up the rim had been the toughest.
“You steer
the car with one hand,” she said, “and with the other you throw rocks under the
rear wheels as the car advances inch by inch. The right foot is engaged,
forcing gas into the tired motor. The left foot is kept free for the
oft-anticipated leap to safety should the car slide overboard.”
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| Motoring at Crater Lake, Oregon |
A few months
later, surprised to find Annie wearing a greasy duster over her dress in her
garage and working on the Packard’s engine, a Portland newspaper reporter
dubbed her “the best woman auto driver in Oregon.”
By the
summer of 1910, a Mail Tribune reporter couldn’t say how many women drivers
were behind the wheel, but he believed it was 20 to 40 ... or more.
“At any
moment of the day,” he said, “huge machines of many different makes are seen
darting hither and thither with some member of the fair sex at the steering
wheel.”
It seems the
ladies had just made a significant turn, and now they were driving in a
completely new direction.
