Birth of Susanna Medora Kinsey (later Susanna M. Salter), near Lamira, Ohio, beginning the life of the woman who became the first woman mayor in the U.S.
On March 1, 1860, Susanna Medora (Madora) Kinsey—later known to history as Susanna M. Salter—was born near Lamira, Ohio, into a Quaker family whose values emphasized education, sobriety, and civic responsibility. Some later biographical summaries relocate her birth to Kansas, but careful historical work, including an Ohio History Journal article, places her origins in rural Belmont County, Ohio.
Her birth in 1860 came at a moment of intense national turmoil in the United States, just on the eve of the Civil War and decades before women would gain full voting rights. Growing up in a religious community that supported reform movements such as abolition and temperance, Susanna absorbed ideas that would shape her later activism in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and her openness to women’s political participation.
Although nothing on that day suggested she would become a pioneering public official, historians now see her birth as the starting point of a life that would intersect with the women’s suffrage and temperance movements and with the early history of women in municipal office. Her long lifespan—more than a century—allowed her to witness the transformation from a nation where women rarely voted to one in which they could hold office across all levels of government. This modest beginning on an Ohio farm thus anchors the story of the woman who would later be recognized as the first woman mayor in the United States.
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