Susan Look Avery

Susan Look Avery (née Look; October 27, 1817 – February 1, 1915) was an American writer, suffragist, pacifist and supporter of temperance as well as a single tax. She hosted Lucy Stone and husband Henry Blackwell when they came to Louisville, Kentucky for the American Woman Suffrage Association meeting—the first suffrage convention in the South—in 1881. In 1890 she started the Woman's Club of Louisville, and in honor of her birthday, the suffrage club of Wyoming, New York, named itself after her. Early life The eldest of six children of Samuel and Polly Lommis Look, Susan Howes Look was born on October 27, 1817, in Conway, Massachusetts. She moved with her family to western New York where she grew up in a rural setting and among the many who were impacted by the Second Great Awakening in the "Burned-Over District." She enrolled in the Utica Female Seminary at age seventeen and after graduation stayed to teach there. In 1843 she traveled to the village of Wyoming, New York with her sister Julia who had been hired to teach in Middlebury Academy there. On her way home, she visited friends in Aurora and there she met Benjamin F. Avery, an industrialist. Benjamin Avery and Susan married on April 27, 1844. The next year, they bought a summer residence - Hillside - in Wyoming which they shared with Susan's sister, Julia and her husband, Albert Capwell, a lawyer in Brooklyn, New York. Together, they had six children: Lydia Avery Coonley Ward (born 1845), Samuel (born 1846), Gertrude (born 1849), George C. (born March 1, 1852), Helen "Nelly" (born 1855) and William (born 1858). On December 25, 1847, the Avery family moved to Louisville, Kentucky to start up an agricultural foundry and plow factory. By 1868, with the founding of a new firm B.F. Avery and Sons (Samuel and George with son-in-law J.C. Coonley), the Averys became one of the wealthiest families in Louisville. During the Civil War, the Avery Plow manufacturing buildings were converted into a Union soldiers' hospital and Mrs. Avery would bring the dying into her own home for hospice care. They were outspoken Unionists and family lore is that they were the first in Louisville to fly the U.S. flag despite the threats from the Knights of the Golden Circle. For two years during the Civil War, she toured Europe. In 1873 the Averys moved in to a mansion at Fourth and Broadway, the most fashionable residential area in the city. There, in 1885, Benjamin Avery died.