Chapter 1: Anna Perkins

The Fashion Camel of Cleveland

Anna Perkins
1848-1900

The skin-blistering wind whipped off the Lake Erie shoreline on that mid-November afternoon in 1899. The first snowflakes of the season also began to blanket the hub of Cleveland’s commercial district on Euclid Avenue, giving downtown merchants a collective boost of hope that the wintry backdrop would put customers in the spending mood for the approaching holiday-shopping season.

On the southeast quadrant of Public Square, in front of the May Company department store, five-foot-tall “Newspaper Annie” violently stamped her feet on the pavement to ward off frostbite. Although she was clad in her daily garb of a man’s coat of coarse white flax, cotton stockings, sturdy boots and a floppy black hat that covered her ears, she uncontrollably shivered in the freezing elements as she cackled “'Penny Press!' 'Penny Press!' Fourth Edition!” with the piercing, nasal vocals that passersby had come to recognize.

Venerable grocer W.P. Southworth watched the pitiful sight from the window of his bustling Ontario Street market. Feeling sorry for the woman, he marched to her corner and, after a quick exchange of words, escorted her across the street to the E.R. Hull & Dutton clothing store. He then told manager J.C. McWatters that he wanted to buy a man’s overcoat for his frozen charge. “A woman’s cloak wouldn’t interest her, you know,” Southworth announced.

Longtime newspaperman Charles E. Kennedy witnessed the transaction. “I recall the old gentlemen counted out forty dollars for the purchase, and Annie passed from the store with a thick, comfortable, masculine outer garment reaching to the top of her ears and, at the base, covering entirely the white stockings,” reported Kennedy, who was in the store to sell advertising space to McWatters. “By disregarding the jeers of boys, who looked upon her with disapproval, meek little Annie, in her manly costume, pointed the way in Cleveland to greater freedom and comfort in feminine wearing apparel.”

Annie’s reputation as a 19th-century lesbian, feminist and fashion reformer finally had reached its zenith. But to understand her eccentricities is to trace her life back to her Seneca County birthplace of Adams Township about 25 miles southwest of Sandusky.

Born Anna Perkins in the summer of 1848, she was the elder of two daughters of Alva and Cynthia Parmenter Perkins. After the birth of a younger daughter, Fanny, in 1850, the family hitched a wagon and moved their belongings 30 miles east to the quaint Erie County burg of Berlin Heights, where her Massachusetts-born father -- who was known by his neighbors as “Boss” -- ran a thriving broom-making business. Her mother, a New York native, stayed at home and took care of the two girls.

At the same time, humorist Artemus Ward was giving the Perkins’ new hometown its 15 minutes of fame in a series of 1858 articles about the night when “I pitched my tent and enfurled my banner to the breeze in Berlin Hites, Ohio.” One story detailed his chance encounter with the Free Love Community, whose members migrated to the village from the East Coast to endlessly preach about a lifestyle that would rival the hippies’ movement more than a century later. The group’s tenets against marriage and in favor of communing with nature included bathing nude together in a public pond. Berlin Heights’ townsfolk was shocked. Ward empathized, after he set up camp in a field near “the Love Cure,” as the Free Lovers christened their outdoor bathtub. “A ornerer set I have never sawn,” he wrote in his trademark folksy style, complete with intentional misspellings and grammatical errors. “The men’s faces was all covered with hare, and they lookt half-starved to deth. Their pockets was filled with pamplits, and they was barefooted. They sed the Postles didn’t wear boots & why should they? That was their stile of argyment.”

The group’s fashion statement also appalled Ward, especially the women who wore men’s trousers and straw hats festooned with green ribbons. They also carried blue-cotton umbrellas. “I addrest them as follers: You women folk, go back to your lawful husbands, if you’ve got any, and take orf them skanderlous gownds and trowsis, and dress respectful like other wimin,” he wrote. “I pored 4th my indignashun in this way til I got out of breath, when I stopt. I shant go to Berlin Hites again, not if I live to be as old as Methooseler.”

While the Free Lovers didn’t make a favorable impression on Ward, they certainly influenced Anna in her adult years. By 1880, she had attempted to reform the village’s dress code by shamelessly wearing pairs of men’s slacks cut off at the knees and snipping off her hair at the neckline. She also adopted a strictly vegetarian diet of raw fruit, cornbread and graham crackers and relied on hydrotherapy, or “water cures,” to rid her of disease, just like the Free Lovers promoted more than two decades beforehand. Not surprisingly, her sister fled the family homestead in embarrassment, unable to deal with Anna’s decadent behavior.

The way Anna treated her aged parents also stunned the Perkins’ neighbors. On December 9, 1880, Alva died at the age of 83 in a house that Anna refused to keep warm. By July 28, 1882, Cynthia had fallen so ill that Berlin Township’s law-enforcement officers had to forcibly tie up Anna with rope because she threatened to shoot anyone who tried to seek medical help for her mother at the Erie County Infirmary in nearby Perkins Township. A letter to the editor from “a citizen of Berlin Heights” set the record straight in the "Sandusky Daily Register" four days later. “Mrs. Perkins was afraid of Anna and dared not say a word,” the anonymous scribe declared. “Anna tore the roof off of their house and took down the chimney while her mother was lying sick within. It is only a wonder that the old lady did not die. It has been a case of extreme cruelty on the part of Anna toward her mother. And I have not told half of the facts!”

But Anna, all alone, focused on a more pressing matter: her poetry. In 1883, she commissioned Nashville printer W.S. Bailey to produce a limited-run edition of her poem, “What Is It?” Measuring three inches by five inches and protected by a yellow cover, each copy of the four-page work carried a five-cent price tag. Not a bad deal, if Anna’s fashion trend piqued a reader’s interest. In an A-B-A-B-C-C rhyming pattern, the poem tried to explain her mission for a uniform dress style between the sexes:

Is it man or is it woman?
Wonder question, is it -- oh, what?
Seems it nearly like the human --
Fashion’s Camel it is not.
It is this perplexes us --
This perchance that vexes us.

Anna broke from her rhyming scheme three-fourths of the way through the piece by placing the last five stanzas under the heading, “My Plea.” Switching to an A-A-B-B structure, she envisioned a society free of the restrictive garments of the late 1880s. A few readers even interpreted her words as a one-woman campaign for public nudity.

Yes, I know you think it queer,
That in this attire I appear;
But this suit is good and grand --
Leaves me free in foot and hand.

I can take the open air --
Be the weather foul or fair.
I can climb, and jump, and run,
Be it work, or be it fun.

Nature’s costume I desire --
Give me simple, grand attire.
Every muscle free to lay,
Clad in Nature’s easy way.

Costume should never impede,
But conform to human need.
Sack and trousers is the suit, --
All objections I refute.

Best for woman as for man,
Like to each was Nature’s plan;
It is easy, light and free --
Just the suit I know for me.

After her 74-year-old mother’s death in the infirmary on June 1, 1883, Anna was practically homeless for the next four years. The Perkins’ home had fallen into such disrepair that she “lived in a piano box in a gravel pit behind A.B. Phillips & Sons’ fruit farm” on East Main Street. She often returned to her makeshift hut to find that village hoodlums had either toppled or demolished it, said 80-year-old Irvin Schatz, the owner of the Village Basket retail shop and treasurer of the Berlin Heights Historical Society.

Thirty-nine-year-old Anna had endured enough of being the town outcast. In the summer of 1887, she scraped together a $1.50 fare, hopped on a streetcar and made her way to the Ceylon Junction depot three miles north of Berlin Heights. She then boarded the eastbound #200 interurban train for a one-way, 75-mile trip to Cleveland on the Lake Erie Electric Railway. After sitting through stops in Beulah Beach, Lorain and Rocky River, she would debut her plans for fashion reform to a more open-minded audience in the big city. Or so she thought.

From the moment she stepped off the train at the Bolivar Street depot, Anna was met with furrowed eyebrows because of her seemingly odd choice of attire and hairstyle. But she ignored the stared from the natives, who thought she resembled more of a circus act than the new girl in town. And she set out to find a one-room apartment at 385 Ontario St., the first in a string of sparsely furnished dwellings she rented during the rest of the century.

Anna’s proximity to Public Square made it convenient for her to land a job as an independent “news agent” for the "Cleveland Penny Press." Competing with teenage boys in a morning scramble to meet the horse-drawn delivery truck, she paid a penny for every two copies she thought she could sell. She then scanned the front page for the boldest headlines, before slinging her news bag over her shoulder and taking her post on the southeast side of the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument. At ear-splitting decibels, she screamed the news of the day and charged each customer a penny for a copy, doubling her investment in the process. To make the venture more lucrative, she cradled copies of “What Is It?” in one arm for any interested buyer. “'Penny Press!' Poems, two cents!” became her daily mantra.

At first, downtown pedestrians ridiculed and harassed Anna for her appearance, The cops who worked the Public Square beat arrested her at least once for challenging Victorian Age mores on clothing. But in time, she earned tolerance from her 238,000 fellow Clevelanders, who came to know her as “Newspaper Annie.” If anybody dared to question her fashion sense, she simply turned the other way and bellowed her sales calls even louder.

When she wasn’t barking out headlines, Anna occupied her time as an orator for both the Sorosis and Franklin clubs. Founded in New York City in 1868, the Sorosis catered to women who promoted the arts, literature and science. The coed Franklin group served as a forum for debates on such topics as economics, public policy and the role of women in society. Anna often pitched in her two cents in discussions on the Free Love movement that she admired during her Berlin Heights days.

But a cloud of lies and half-truths shrouded the rest of her personal life. For example, Anna concocted a sob story about how her parents died when she was a young girl, even though she was a 38-year-old spinster at the time of her mother’s death. She also tweaked the spelling of her name to “Ana Perkin” or the more peculiar “Ana Purkin.” And between 1889 and 1895, she hid her sexual orientation by telling the publishers of the annual Cleveland Directory -- a predecessor to the modern-day telephone book -- that she was married, although she could produce no document to back her claim.

Nearly year after year, Anna packed up her belongings and moved from one dingy apartment to another. From her Ontario Street digs, she lived for a couple years in “the saloon district” near George Davies’ watering hole at 652 Detroit St. (The busy thoroughfare became Detroit Avenue during a citywide street-name overhaul in 1906.) She then uprooted herself to a cramped room on old Race Street south of where Progressive Field is today. In an apparent yen to live by the lake, she subsequently rented a room for a year at 83 Davenport St. near the shoreline before relocating back to Alcohol Alley in 1899 to yet another dreary space at 171 Detroit St., just east of what is now West 25th Street and near the banks of the Cuyahoga River.

No matter where Anna called home, neighbors vouched that her only worldly possessions consisted of a bed, tin cup, eating utensils, small oil stove and, of course, a meager wardrobe of men’s clothes. That she scrubbed her room with soap and water every day was common knowledge. And her subsistence on raw fruit, crackers and cold water provided juicy gossip. Which takes us back to that brisk, mid-November day in 1899, when the generous W.P. Stallworth laid out $40 for her brand, new overcoat.

The looming afternoon snowstorm signaled the start of weeks of frigid weather during the 1899-1900 winter season. Even the coat couldn’t keep Anna from getting sick, despite her arguments that hydropathic therapy would cleanse her body of disease. By the middle of January, just a couple weeks after the dawn of the 20th century, she was bedridden with a raging 104-degree temperature. Yet, she refused help from her neighbors, who offered to rush her to the hospital.

For two weeks, Anna’s condition deteriorated so rapidly that her physician, L.B. Tuckerman, ordered her to check into St. Alexis Hospital on Broadway Avenue. On Monday, January 29, he diagnosed her in the last stages of typhoid fever, which is caused by a deadly bacteria that is transmitted by ingesting feces-contaminated food or water. But stubborn Anna declined medication and any meals that contained meat or vegetables.

Still, to the nurses’ surprise, her health started to improve. By Thursday, February 1, the fever that had completely left Anna flat on her back fell a few degrees. Shortly before 7 p.m., with two nuns keeping vigil in her room, Anna drifted off to sleep. But her condition suddenly shifted into reverse. Another St. Alexis doctor, S.D. Trowbridge, pronounced her dead at 9:30 p.m., and her body was transported to the undertakers of the Black & Wright Funeral Home at 142 Central Ave. to prepare for burial. Death records erroneously listed her age as 45 years old, another fib she consistently spread.

Anna’s demise made the front page of the next day’s "Plain Dealer," the same newspaper that she tried to outsell in nearly 13 years as a "Press" vendor. The headline to the story, which jumped to single columns on two other pages, screamed, “Ana Perkin’s Life Work Done,” with sub-headlines that characterized her as a “quaint character” who “tried to reform the world.” A pen-and-ink caricature of her dressed in men’s clothes, with a shoulder bag of newspapers slung over her left arm and a stack of poems tucked under her right, accompanied the article.

Toward the end of the byline-free piece, Lieutenant John Burns of the Cleveland Police Department’s Central Bureau described Anna as a “man-hater.” “As long as she has been known here in Cleveland, she has never formed masculine acquaintances,” the officer said. “She always lived by herself and usually in some small and miserable apartment.”

Burns also revealed one of Anna’s pet peeves of which most Clevelanders were not aware: She hated to be photographed. “Snapshot fiends were her special enemies,” he said. “If she noticed an amateur photographer endeavoring to take her picture, she would first do all she could to avoid it. If that failed, she would go for the photographer. I have heard that she made many a young photographer empty his camera of the plate on which was her photo exposure.”

In a fit of rage another time, Anna confronted a group of high-society ladies, who managed to get their hand-gloved mitts on a stray photograph of her image. “She noticed them and started for the pictures,” Burns said. “They retreated into one of the large stores in the neighborhood, and she followed. There was quite a scene in the store, but (she) came out victorious.”

One of Anna’s last wishes requested that her neighbors give Tuckerman the $15 she had saved to help defray her funeral costs. She also wanted to be buried next to her parents. So on Tuesday, February 6, she left Cleveland the same way she arrived: on a Lake Erie Railway interurban. Only this time, she was westbound, first to the Ceylon Junction railway station, then to Berlin Heights.

The next day, revered pastor and noted Erie County historian Hudson Tuttle led a 3 p.m. service at the village’s First Congregational Church at the corner of East Main and Lake streets. Unbelievably, despite all the torment and scorn that Anna endured before she skipped town 13 years beforehand, church records showed that the townspeople turned out in droves for the memorial to see the body of the legendary reformer for themselves. The church choir also sang spirituals to accompany Anna’s “passing to the great beyond,” the "Plain Dealer" reported.

Clevelanders also remembered “the newspaper girl,” who had created a stir when she rolled into town in 1887 with a passion to change fashion norms. At their annual elections meeting on February 14, members of Anna’s beloved Franklin Club met to vote for and swear in John Daykins as their president. As he accepted the honor, he devoted a part of his victory speech to “Newspaper Annie.” “As a society seeking social progress in all directions, we cannot help to admire the steadfastness with which she stood by in her convictions as a social reformer,” he told the roomful of members. “She was a shining example of all progressive people for the sincerity of truth in which she followed her ideals, loving martyrdom rather than conventional subjections.”

---

Anna Perkins was buried in an unmarked potter’s grave beside her parents at West End Cemetery on West Main Street in Berlin Heights. She was 51 years old.

Copyright 2010 Cris Glaser