From collection Person List - History Trust
Ann Frances Greely (Jarvis) was born on 15 October 1831 in Ellsworth, the fifth child of Col. Charles Jarvis and Mary Ann Black. As such, she was the product of the two most prominent families in Ellsworth in the early 1800s. Her father, Charles Jarvis, had served in the Maine State Legislature, and had built a military road between Mattawamkeag and Houlton during the Aroostook War and a military training academy on the Bangor Road in Ellsworth. He became a lumber baron, and when he fell in love with the daughter of his arch rival in business, Col. John Black, it was only by means of an impassioned letter from his fiancée to her father that permission was unwillingly granted for the marriage to take place.
Ann, being from a relatively privileged background, had access to education at both Rev. Peter Nourse's local school and private schools. Ann taught in a private school at a young age: one of the few occupations that women of the day could hold. But even at the young age of 16, she was already expressing an interest in social reforms. Ann was very much aware of the women's rights convention held in Seneca Falls, New York in July of 1848 and gradually became an ardent abolitionist, and the first suffragist in Ellsworth.
In 1851, at the age of 20, Ann bought the store and the dry-goods business of Thomas J. Whiting, a former employee of her father back in the 1820s. She became Ellsworth's pioneer businesswoman, one of first women in Maine to engage in business. Ann gradually developed her store into a millinery shop, called the "Old Stand" (Risk, 2009), on Main Street and she worked in the millinery business most of her life, doing so for 38 years and continuing to lease the building thereafter.On 22 July 1853, the Ellsworth American carried the following marriage announcement: "In Ellsworth, July 16, by A. F. Drinkwater, Esq., Mr. Everard H. GREELY of the firm of Brown & Greely, to Miss Ann F. JARVIS of the firm of E. D. Shaw & Company."
Three women in particular, Ann Frances Greely, her sister Sarah Jarvis, and their friend Charlotte Hill from Gouldsboro, were the first women to organize events related to suffrage in Maine. They established dialogue with American national suffragists and referred to their nation's founding documents to argue their cause.
On New Year's Day of 1873, an article published in Woman's Journal called for a January 29 meeting at Granite Hall in Augusta to organize a State Woman Suffrage Association. That same year, as an officer and member of the Advisory Committee to the National Woman Suffrage Association, Ann signed a letter to Congress that requested they enact in the session of that year protections for women citizens granting the right to vote.
All her life Ann worked for equal rights. In 1891, the Maine Woman Suffrage Association, formed back at that meeting in Augusta in 1873, included Ann Frances Greely as one of its twelve vice-presidents. The municipal suffrage bill finally passed in the Maine House 79 to 54, after a speech by Ellsworth representative Hannibal E. Hamlin.
On 22 October 1914 Ann Frances Greely passed away at the age of 83. In her obituary, the Ellsworth American said that her death "marks the passing of one of Ellsworth's best-known and best-loved women, and during many years of her active life, the city's most prominent woman."
