Susan B. Anthony gravesite, Rochester NY, photographed yesterday. (Photo credit: Greta Paige-Mann.) pic.twitter.com/X6GmmOactM
— KStreetHipster (@KStreetHipster) April 20, 2016
This Tuesday, historically-minded citizens in Rochester, New York found a new use for their "I Voted" stickers—they gave them to Susan B. Anthony.
After casting their ballots, dozens of happily enfranchised voters headed from their polling places to Mt. Hope Cemetery, where Anthony's "modest white marker" sits within a family plot. The social reformer spent decades leading the fight for women's suffrage, and was even arrested for attempting to vote in Rochester in 1872. She died in 1906, fourteen years before the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.
In 2014, writer Caurie Putnam noticed a similar sticker tribute and traced it back to Sarah Jane McPike, who has brought flowers to Anthony's grave since the first year she voted, in 2004. That year, McPike photographed two stickers on the headstone, placed right above Anthony's name.
This year, though, the site was even more festive—there were several bouquets, small rocks stacked on top of the stone, and enough stickers that many of them had to be pressed on its sides, like jaunty feathers in a cap.
Throughout her life, Anthony saved trunks' worth of letters, newspaper clippings, and other voting-related errata, which she used to write the six-volume History of Woman Suffrage. She collected so many materials, she nearly collapsed her sister's attic, which she was using as storage space. Still, she'd probably welcome this new batch.
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