Bio: Pope, Cora Scott (1914) 
Contact: crystal@wiclarkcountyhistory.org

Surnames: Pope, LaFollette, Case, McGowan, Tourjee

----Source: History of Eau Claire County, Wisconsin (1914) pages 817-819

Cora Scott Pond Pope, daughter of Levi W. Pond and Mary Ann McGowan; born in Sheboygan, Wis., March 2, 1856, and at the age of two years came to Eau Claire, Wis., one of the youngest of the baby pioneers.

I lived the uneventful life common to all young people in that new lumbering town of few inhabitants, attending our rather primitive schools and entering - with great zest into all the out door sports of summer and winter.

At the age of eighteen I united with the Congregational church, but soon fell into trouble by refusing to partake of fermented wine of the Communion service. The prohibition of the Holy "Writ meant prohibition for me. "If meat maketh the brother to offend," etc., meant wine in that day in this. In 1877 at the age of twenty-one, I entered the University of Wisconsin and studied there for three years.

"Bob LaFollette and Belle Case, who afterward became his wife, were my close friends. The later career of these two people have more than fulfilled their early promise and they stand today two of the bravest, most advanced characters in American history.

At the University I began the study of dramatic work and in 1880 went to Boston, where I continued it for four years at the New England Conservatory, under Eben Tourjee. Then I taught in that institution for a year.

I was naturally a reformer and at the age of sixteen I saw the need of reform in women's dress and abjured corsets and to this day have not worn them. Since early life I have been a militant Prohibitionist. In Boston I met and became inspired by those wonderful women, Mrs. Lucy Stone, Rev. Anna Shaw, Mary A. Livermore, Julia Ward Howe and others and joined with them in the work for women's suffrage and for six years I worked with them and organized eighty-five Woman Suffrage Leagues, raising money for state work by subscription and great bazaars, dramatic entertainments, etc.

In 1890 I was urged by Mary A. Livermore to carry that work into other states and raise money for different charities, so for the next fifteen years I gave these entertainments in most of the large cities of the United States. In 1891 I married John T. Pope, of Chicago. He had three little boys, Lester, Marshall and Clarence, who lived with my mother for twelve years, while Mr. Pope and I continued the work I had begun.

Since 1886 I had been investing in real estate in Los Angeles, and in 1905 we permanently located in that beautiful city. I have had a European trip since coming here. The Los Angeles Examiner invited me to chaperon four of its young women contestants to Europe. We were gone two months, visited twelve cities in America and twelve in Europe, France, Belgium and Holland, boosted for the Examiner and had the best of hotels, guides, service, meals and tours in all these cities at the expense of the Examiner, one of the most remarkable publications in the country.

I return to Los Angeles and to real estate. If I win out in my real estate deals I hope to spend many years yet in the service that I love, urging greater justice to the mothers of our race; to help to better the development of children; to urge the moral safeguardings of young girls and boys in order to abolish vice and to raise the "one standard" of morals for men and women, in marriage and out of it; to give justice to the great army of labor that creates all our necessities and comforts of life, and to give equal laws and equal suffrage to men and women—equality for all alike before the law for every race and clime and color.

Only by so doing, as God gives me light, shall I hope for life eternal.

If I have helped in any measure I have only repaid a life of unselfish devotions given to me by my father and my mother.

"If you have a kindness shown, pass it on.

"Twas not meant for you alone; pass it on.

Let it travel down the years, let it wipe another's tears,

'Till in Heaven the deed appears, pass it on."