One of the first things you see at the Adirondack History Museum’s suffrage exhibit is an antique wooden voting box, the size and shape of a dorm room refrigerator. The wood is rough, the stenciled lettering faded, the lock long gone. But the testament is as sturdy as the box itself, used for years to house Essex County ballots.

“That’s probably the ballot box they used when they voted for Lincoln,” said the museum’s director Aurora McCaffrey, considering the box and the exhibit she helped curate. The high-ceilinged room is a showcase for black-and-white photographs, newspaper clippings, posters, leaflets and artifacts from the years leading up to the historic amendment, sourced from the New York State archives, the Library of Congress and the museum’s own collection. Quotes from leading suffragists Alice Paul, Ida B. Wells and Inez Milholland are stenciled high on the walls. A loop of both suffrage and anti-suffrage songs plays, seeming from an Edison player dating to the early 1900s.

A century is telescoped on the walls, moving through sections that showcase aspects of the movement: race and suffrage, persecution and the jailing of suffragists, the anti-suffrage movement, temperance and suffrage, suffrage in the Adirondacks.

“We never planned to have it be a permanent exhibit,” said McCaffrey. “But it’s been so popular, we might keep it and make adjustments to it. Why take it down?” The exhibit, which opened in 2017, has expanded over the last three years. It began with a focus on New York state’s support of women’s rights, with the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. New York voted to ratify the 19th Amendment in 1919.

An exhibit at the Adirondack History Museum showcases local suffragist Inez Milholland. (Enterprise photo — Amy Scattergood)

A few miles down the road from the museum in the village of Lewis is the well-marked grave of Inez Milholland, the local suffragist who became one of the best-known faces of the movement after she marched in the Woman Suffrage Procession in Washington, D.C., wearing a long white cape and riding a white horse. Milholland, a labor lawyer and war correspondent from a prominent Brooklyn family who summered in Lewis, was an early member of the NAACP and worked for civil rights as well as women’s rights.

A recent section of the exhibit showcases the overlap between abolitionists and suffragists, with photography and literature from Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass as well as lesser-known Black activists Hester C. Jeffrey, Mary Burnett Talbert and Sarah J. Tompkins Garnet. A nearby leaflet shows a woman changing a tire on a Model T. Lifesize mannequins sport long dresses, big hats and suffragist sashes.

“We had this great trove of stories in this area,” said Margaret Bartley, a retired history teacher now living in New Russia who, along with University of Albany history professor Gerald Zahavi of Elizabethtown, was instrumental in curating the exhibit.

“This area, for being remote, was pretty active. A lot of the women who were active in the suffrage movement in the cities brought it up here,” said Bartley. “The men stayed in the city to work. The women would come up and bring their political ideology.”

The early movement was not always a peaceful one, something that Bartley finds resonant today, with the political and racial protests taking place across the country.

A ballot box used in the historic 1918 vote is on display at the Adirondack History Museum. (Enterprise photo — Amy Scattergood)

“I guess people think that old ladies in their hats were polite. It wasn’t polite,” she said of the early suffrage movement. “These women went down and chained themselves to the White House fence. They would get arrested and thrown in jail, and in jail they’d go on hunger strikes.”

Before COVID-19, the exhibit included interactive features, including ballots that could be filled out.

The anti-suffrage posters read both as artifacts and cautionary tales, especially one that shows George Washington saying “Did I save my country for this?”

“We have eight days of early voting and we don’t have a machine,” said Bartley of the November election, noting that a standing machine for absentee ballots costs $52,000.

“Women’s votes are actually more important now than they’ve ever been.”

Inez Milholland is buried in Lewis, New York, where her family had a home. (Enterprise photo — Amy Scattergood)

Signs and posters from the Adirondack History Museum’s suffrage exhibit. (Enterprise photo — Amy Scattergood)

Petition signatures from Franklin Co. women dating to 1917. (Enterprise photo — Amy Scattergood)