Garden Home is fortunate to have a number of old homes still standing each with its own intriguing history. One of these homes sits just back from Garden Home Road between S.W. 77th and 78th Avenues. When the house was built, probably in 1920, and before the southern section of the property was built upon, it faced Garden Home Road, then known as Nichol Street. 77th Avenue was then Wilson Road and 78th was known as Firlock Lane.
We aren’t sure who the builder or the first owner was but in 1930 the house was owned by Olive Stott Gabriel, the granddaughter of early pioneers Samuel Stott and Lucy Denny Stott. She attended St. Mary’s Academy in Portland during the time Abigail Scott Duniway was publishing THE NEW NORTHWEST, a weekly newspaper devoted to women’s rights. It may be that her life in Portland during the years Abigail Dunaway was publishing the paper was what prompted her to focus her life on gaining equality for women. In the immediate years following graduating in1889 from St. Mary’s academy, Olive taught school. During this time it is reported she married Adolphe Gabriel, a clothier. Sometime prior to, or just around the beginning of, 1900 Olive moved to New York City to attend New York University to study law. There she received both a L.L.B. and a L.L.M. finishing her graduate work in 1903.*
Olive went on to a career devoted to obtaining equal rights for women. Upon graduation she began her law practice and in 1906, along with ten other women lawyers, she formed The Women’s Association of the Bar, the only bar association of women in the world at that time.** She also joined the Women Lawyers Club, now known as the National Association of Women Lawyers. Over the years she worked continuously for the rights of women, including coming to Oregon in 1912 to campaign for women suffrage. In 1930, the year she returned to Oregon, she became president of the National Association of Women Lawyers serving for three terms.
She returned to Oregon and the home in Garden Home in 1930 where she continued to be active in promoting the ideals she had worked for throughout her life. Olive had no children and upon her death in 1944 the house and property passed on to her two great-nephews, Bill and Jim Partlow.
* Kimberly Jenson. 1912-2012 Oregon Woman Suffrage.
** Women’s Who’s Who of America. John William Leonard, 1914. Page 312
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