The Temperance Movement comes to Keedysville

In 1907, 20 women in Keedysville engaged with national events by forming their own Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, advocating against the consumption and sale of alcohol.

By forming their own WCTU, these women joined a long history of Americans who participated in the temperance movement from the early 19th century to Prohibition in the 1920s and 1930s.

The first Woman’s Christian Temperance Union began in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1874. The WCTU’s platform integrated temperance and Christian values. Working nonviolently for temperance legislation, the WCTU supported the 18th Amendment, which prohibited the production, sale and transportation of alcohol in the US beginning in 1919.

Some temperance activists chose more extreme methods, such as Caroline Amelia Nation, better known as Carrie Nation. Born in Kentucky in 1846, Carrie Nation emerged as a high-profile temperance activist with her hatchet-wielding, saloon-smashing tactics.

In 1900, after a Supreme Court decision weakened Kansas’s prohibition laws, Carrie earned a reputation for protesting illegal sales of alcohol in Kansas by entering saloons and smashing bar mirrors, bottles of alcohol and other bar fixtures with a hatchet. Carrie faced jail time and fines as she moved across the country, lecturing to her fellow temperance activists.

Newspapers both ridiculed and supported Nation’s beliefs, and saloons displayed signs that read “All Nations Welcome But Carrie.”

Carrie eventually passed through Pennsylvania and into Western Maryland. She arrived in Keedysville in 1907 to speak to the local Woman’s Christian Temperance Union that had formed more than 20 years before.

During the summer of 1886, 20 Keedysville women met at the home of 49-year-old Kate E. Wyand and her husband, David H. Wyand. Kate worked as a milliner, making and selling women’s hats, while David was a hotel proprietor. The group met again at the United Brethren Church of Keedysville on August 5, 1886, officially forming the Keedysville WCTU. Kate acted as Treasurer.

Born July 8, 1837, in Franklin County, Pa., Catherine “Kate” Elizabeth (Wilson) Wyand had married David Henry Wyand in 1862. The couple had three children. The Wyand family’s involvement with the WCTU deepened, and by October 1892, the Wyands deeded a parcel of land along North Main Street to the WCTU for $100.

The deed included a provision that “no alcoholic or intoxicating drinks could ever be sold on the property,” and plans were soon made to build a WCTU hall.

The Keedysville WCTU Hall still stands at 38 N. Main St., and looks very much as it did when photographed in 1927.

It was at this very WCTU Hall in 1907 that Carrie Nation, by then an icon of the temperance movement, spoke. The temperance movement's goals in 1907 remained much the same as they had since the beginning: to stamp out the harmful social effects of alcohol consumption, including alcoholism and alcohol-related poverty, loss of wages, and abuse.

Women in particular, who in 1907 lacked the ability to vote, were unable to advocate for themselves or their children if their spouses faced these negative effects of alcohol.

Many Washington County women did fight for temperance, such as Mollie (Poole) Cook in February of 1901. The Daily Mail of Hagerstown and The Baltimore Sun both printed articles about young Mollie Cook, a temperance activist “belonging to an anti-saloon society.”

A native of Williamsport, Mollie returned to her hometown to visit six saloons, speak, and distribute anti-saloon literature. The Daily Mail on Feb. 17 stated that Mollie intended to “pull a Carrie Nation act on the saloons of the town.”

It was into this environment that Nation herself lectured in 1907 at the WCTU Hall in Keedysville. Although she was ill at the time, Nation gave two speeches to a full hall, selling autographed hatchets afterwards. Later that year she passed through Hagerstown as she left Western Maryland.

Carrie Nation died in Eureka Springs, Arkl,, on June 9, 1911, after collapsing during a temperance speech. Kate Wyand, treasurer of Keedysville’s WCTU, passed away in 1919, and David Wyand passed away in 1929 at age 99. The Wyands are buried together in Fairview Cemetery, Keedysville.

It is interesting to note that Kate Wyand named her first daughter, born in 1865, Lorena Temperance; she named her second daughter, born in 1872, Carrie — nearly 28 years before Carrie Nation began smashing saloons in Kansas.

If you take a drive along North Main Street in Keedysville, be sure to keep an eye out for the WCTU Hall — a reminder of the local people of our past who gathered together to advocate for their personal beliefs and engage with the national issues of their time.

Abigail Koontz is the curator/program director for the Washington County Historical Society.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Keedysville's temperance hall bears witness to a women's crusade