The Jessie Daniel Ames Home
Home of Women’s Suffrage and Civil Rights Leader
Jessie Daniel Ames was a prominent women’s and civil rights leader who moved to Georgetown from Palestine, Texas, and graduated from Southwestern University in 1902. After graduating, she moved to Laredo and married Roger Post Ames. When he died in 1914, she and her children moved back to Georgetown where she bought the house that is historically recognized as hers today. Her work with the Texas Equal Suffrage Association, The League of Women Voters, and The Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching were all significant and affected legislations that remain today. Ames’ civic work also included founding the Women’s Club of Georgetown, which is still active.
In the Georgetown community, she is remembered on a plaque outside of her Georgetown home, located on Church Street, placed in her honor by the Women’s Club in 1988, 16 years after her death in 1972. The plaque briefly encapsulates her life and work as a civil rights leader for both women and people of color in the South. Her memory remains very significant to the community as her work established the basis of not only the women’s rights movement, but also the Civil Rights movement as a whole in the 1960s and 70s.
The home is recognized with a historic marker and the plaque informs individuals that may pass by about who Jessie Daniel Ames was, emphasizing how she is constantly remembered within the community. She continues to be looked up to as a prominent woman and civil rights figure in the South rooted within the Georgetown community specifically.
