From collection Candidates
Mary Jewett Telford, of Grand Junction, Colorado, was a leader of the state Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and a suffrage activist. As a delegate, she attended the national convention of the Prohibition Party, and in 1894 was nominated for the state assembly by members of the Prohibition Party from Mesa County. At the state party convention, however, she was selected to run as the party's candidate for lieutenant governor. Telford was born in 1839 in Seneca, New York. She was married July 8, 1864 to Civil War veteran Jacob Telford. She served as matron of a general army hospital in Nashville, Tennessee. In addition to her work for the WCTU, the Woman's Relief Corps (auxiliary to the Grand Army of the Republic, a veterans organization), and the Woman's Board of Missions, Telford spent time as a teacher. She was also one of a group of Colorado women who believed that temperance and suffrage should go hand in hand. According to historian Suzanne M. Marilley, from the first issue Telford made her temperance publication, Challenge, also a pro- woman suffrage newspaper. (Woman Suffrage and the Origins of Liberal Feminism in the United States, page 153). Telford died in Hinsdale, Illinois at the age of 67.
