Published: March 22, 2008 10:48 pm            

Ebensburg woman was a political pioneer

Sarah McCune Gallaher served only one term in the state House in the early 1920s, and she decided that was plenty.

“I remember it as a very pleasant and instructive experience but not one that I cared to repeat,” she told The Tribune-Democrat four decades later. “I did not care to devote my time to the legislature.”

The Ebensburg resident had many other activities to fill her time.

Remembered mainly as one of the first eight women elected to the state House of Representatives, Gallaher also was a women’s suffrage advocate and renowned educator and scholar whose life spanned a century.

Jeanne Schmedlen, a state legislative staffer who wrote a book on women who have served in the House, offers a succinct summation of Gallaher’s career.

“She was incredible,” Schmedlen said.

Gallaher’s modest beginnings did not foreshadow her later accomplishments. She was born June 8, 1864, in the small town of New Washington, Clearfield County.

Gallaher attended the “village school” until age 16, and then she began to teach, documents at Cambria County Historical Society show.

But Gallaher was not finished with her education. She earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree from Indiana Normal School in the 1880s.

She proceeded to study at prestigious institutions including Cornell University in New York, University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, the Sorbonne in Paris and Oxford University in England.

Historical society records say Gallaher fulfilled a lifelong dream in the early 1900s when she and her sister Ada opened Hallesen Place, a private boarding school in Ebensburg.

The school, bearing the maiden name of Gallaher’s mother, educated thousands of pupils.

A pamphlet from 1915-16 touts the benefits of Hallesen Place, including a “healthful, invigorating climate” and an “excellent music department” along with “the highest elevation of any boarding school in Pennsylvania.”

Gallaher also was well known outside Ebensburg. She was an authority on George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and William Penn.

Schmedlen’s book notes that, before Gallaher opened the school, she “was a professional reader and in great demand as an entertainer both at institutes and in some of the wealthiest homes of New York and Philadelphia.

“The dress for her appearances was black chiffon over satin, with a deep yolk of real Irish lace,” Schmedlen wrote. “She was large-boned, dignified and had unforgettable gray eyes.”

Thirty-eight female candidates vied for the Pennsylvania House in 1922, the first full election cycle for state office since the August 1920 national ratification of the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote.

Voters selected Gallaher for the House in the 1922 general election, and she joined seven other women – all Republicans – in Harrisburg.

Gallaher clearly was an independent soul, scoffing at any thought of a “women’s bloc” in the legislature.

And she was modest, not allowing her picture to be taken for publication during her political campaign and afterward.

A news article from that time noted Gallaher’s consternation when “an enterprising photographer had ‘snapped’ her on the steps of the Capitol.”

The writer noted, however, that “Miss Gallaher is taking it good-naturedly.”

But in the Tribune interview on the occasion of her 100th birthday in June 1964 – just a month and a half before her death – Gallaher acknowledged her role as a political trailblazer.

“I only ran the first time because women were given the right to sit and most of them were timid about running,” she said. “I did it to give them an example.”

        

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