Death of Susanna M. Salter in Norman, Oklahoma, at age 101; she was later buried in Argonia, Kansas, remembered as the first woman mayor in the United States.
On March 17, 1961, Susanna M. Salter died in Norman, Oklahoma, at the age of 101, closing the life of a woman widely remembered as the first woman mayor in the United States. Detailed biographical sources, including Encyclopedia.com, record her death on this date, although some popular accounts erroneously give 1960 and an age of 100.
Salter had spent her later decades living quietly in Oklahoma after moving from Argonia with her family in the 1890s. By the time of her death, the political landscape she had helped reshape had changed profoundly: women across the United States had gained the right to vote with the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, and increasing numbers of women were serving in local and state offices. Yet her Argonia mayoralty continued to be cited in histories of suffrage, temperance, and municipal government as an early, concrete example of female political leadership.
Her burial in Argonia, Kansas, symbolically returned her to the community where she had made her most visible mark on history. The house built for her family there is now recognized as the Susanna Salter House, a site associated with the first woman mayor in the nation. Salter’s death date thus marks not only the end of an individual life but also a moment of reflection on the long arc of women’s political journey—from the experimental enfranchisement of Kansas municipal voters in the 1880s to the more established presence of women in public office by the mid‑twentieth century.