Mercer Girls

The Mercer Girls or Mercer Maids were women who chose to move from the east coast of the United States to the Seattle area in the 1860s at the invitation of Asa Mercer. Mercer, an American who lived in Seattle, wanted to "import" women to the Pacific Northwest to balance the gender ratio.[1] The women were drawn by the prospect of moving to a boomtown with a surplus of bachelors.[2] These events formed the basis of the television series Here Come the Brides.[3]

First expedition

Frontier Seattle attracted numerous men to work in the timber and fishing industries, but very few single women were willing to relocate by themselves to the remote Pacific Northwest. Only one adult out of ten was a woman, and most girls over 15 were already engaged. White men, and women of the Salish tribes, did not always feel mutually attracted. Prostitutes were also scarce, until the arrival of John Pennell and his brothel from San Francisco.

In 1864, Asa Mercer decided to go east to find women willing to relocate to Puget Sound.[4][5] Mercer first enlisted prominent local married couples to act as hosts for the women once they arrived to assuage Victorian era moral concerns over the propriety of importing single women to the frontier. Mercer also had support from the governor of Washington Territory, but the government could not offer any money.

Mercer proceeded to travel to Boston and later to the textile town of Lowell and recruited eight young women from Lowell and two from the nearby community of Townsend, willing to move to the other side of the country.[6] They traveled back through the Isthmus of Panama, although in San Francisco locals tried to convince the girls to stay there instead. They arrived in Seattle on May 16, 1864, where the community staged a grand welcome on the grounds of the Territorial University.[7]

Only eleven women undertook the journey, well under the fifty initially reported in The Seattle Gazette. The Mercer Girls of the first voyage were Annie May Adams, Antoinette Josephine Baker, Sarah Cheney, Aurelia Coffin, Sarah Jane Gallagher, Maria Murphy, Elizabeth Ordway, Georgia Pearson, Josephine Pearson, Catherine Stevens, and Katherine Stickney.[1] Daniel Pearson and Rodolphus Stevens, the fathers of three of the young women, completed the westward party.

All but two of the women were married in short order: Josie Pearson who died unexpectedly a short time after she arrived, and Lizzie Ordway, the oldest of the ladies who was 35 when she arrived in Seattle with Mercer. Mercer was subsequently elected to the Territorial Legislature. [8]

Second expedition

Mercer decided to try again on a larger scale in 1865, and again collected donations from willing men. He asked for $300 to bring a suitable wife and received hundreds of applications. However, in the aftermath of Abraham Lincoln's assassination, his next trip east went wrong, until speculator Ben Holladay promised to provide transport for the women. However, the New York Herald found out about the project and wrote that all the women were destined to waterfront dives or to be wives of old men. Authorities in Massachusetts were not sympathetic, either.

The Mercer Girls on deck aboard the Continental, sketched by A.R. Waud for Harper's Weekly, 1866.[4]

Due to the bad publicity by the time Mercer was to depart on January 16, 1866, he had fewer than 100 recruits, when he had promised five times that many. His ship, the former Civil War transport S.S. Continental, sailed for the West Coast around Cape Horn.

Three months later, the ship stopped in San Francisco, where the captain refused to go any further. Mercer failed to convince him otherwise, and when he telegraphed to Washington governor Pickering to ask for more money, the governor could not afford it. Finally, he convinced crewmen on lumber schooners to transport them for free. Among the financiers of the expedition had been Hiram Burnett, a lumber mill manager for Pope & Talbot, who was bringing out his sister and wanted wives for his employees. A few of the women decided to stay in California instead.

When Mercer returned to Seattle, he had to answer a number of questions about his performance. At a meeting on May 23, public dismay softened, probably because the women were with him.

Mercer ended up marrying one of the women, Annie Stephens, a week later, and most of the others found husbands as well.

See also

References
  1. Bagley, Clarence B. (March 1904). "The Mercer Immigration: Two Cargoes of Maidens for the Sound Country". The Quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society. Vol. 5, no. 1. Retrieved February 18, 2022. On Puget Sound the scarcity of women was a serious matter. It affected the social, industrial and moral condition of the several communities. It was a subject of frequent discussion and a matter of earnest regret.
  2. Jones; Williams; Saez (December 2019). "3 Seattle Pioneers You Need to Know – Lizzie Ordway". Seattle Metropolitan. Retrieved 2020-02-18. Eager to escape a town crippled by the Civil War—men lost to soldierhood, Lowell's mills starved of southern cotton—the cadre of spunky young women found Seattle's bachelor surplus and boomtown prospects appealing. They traveled by ship to Panama, crossed Central America overland, then sailed again to the Northwest. Most of the Mercer Girls wed soon after taking up their west coast teaching positions (one to Mercer himself), but Lizzie [Ordway] never did.
  3. Marmor, Jon (June 1, 1995). "First UW president is best known for bringing women to the Northwest". Columns. Retrieved February 18, 2022. Asa Shinn Mercer helped build the University of Washington with his bare hands, personally recruited students, was the school's first teacher and its first president. But he is much more famous for bringing shiploads of women around Cape Horn to the then-wild Puget Sound area in the 1860s than for first presiding over one of the nation's great research universities. The ABC TV show Here Come the Brides (which aired 1968-1970) was based on Mercer's 1860s voyages.
  4. "Emigration to Washington Territory of Four Hundred Women on the Steamer "Continental."". Harper's Weekly. Vol. 10, no. 471. January 6, 1866. pp. 8–9. Retrieved February 18, 2022. No more curious or more suggestive Exodus ever took place than The Exodus of Women to Washington Territory under the leadership of Mr. Asa S. Mercer.
  5. Speidel, William C. (1967). "Immorality and Immortality – The Matchmaker". Sons of the Profits or There's No Business Like Grow Business The Seattle Story 1851–1901. Nettle Creek. pp. 107–109. ISBN 9780914890065. At this point, Asa Mercer, the rosy cheeked, naive young man who had scoured the logging camps hiring "students" for the University, came up with what he thought was a brilliant idea. He approached the Reverend Mr. Bagley with a notion about bringing a load of decent unmarried young ladies from the East out to the town for purposes of clearing the air with wholesale marriages.
  6. Engle, Flora A. P. (October 1915). "The Story of the Mercer Expeditions". The Washington Historical Quarterly. Vol. 6, no. 4. Retrieved February 21, 2022. The two Mercer expeditions were without doubt important events in the history of the Puget Sound basin: First, they resulted in attracting to Washington Territory many who otherwise would not have sought homes on the Pacific Coast, and who in their turn were instrumental in bringing others to this north-northwest corner of our United States.
  7. Morgan, Murray (1951). "Mercer's Maidens". Skid Road: An Informal Portrait of Seattle. University of Washington Press. pp. 61–69. ISBN 9780295743509. Lowell was a textile town, racked with depression since the Civil War had cut off Southern cotton from its looms, and there Mercer found eleven virgins willing to forsake the land of the cod. They sailed from New York, crossed the Panama Isthmus, rested briefly in San Francisco, and went by schooner to the Sound. They debarked at Yesler's wharf about midnight, May 16, 1864, and were welcomed by a delegation headed by Doc Maynard.
  8. "Seattle at 150: Ordway, the unwed 'Mercer Girl,' was still well-loved". Seattle Post-Intelligencer. 15 October 2001. Retrieved 30 June 2012.
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