At the beginning of this year, I wrote about Mary Kiona , an Upper Cowlitz native of the Tai’t-na-pam tribe who was born on Jan. 3 in either 1849, 1852, 1853 or 1855 and died in June 1970, meaning she lived to be 107, 115, 117 or 121.
She was the oldest Pacific Northwest resident I’d ever heard of — until last week.
I received an email from Mary Lemons, who signed up for my author newsletter and suggested I write my next novel about her great-great-great-grandmother, Mary Ramsey Lemons Wood, an early Northwest pioneer known as the Mother Queen of Oregon.
She lived to be 120.
I immediately launched into research on ancestry.com and newspapers.com. Sure enough, I found articles about this Knoxville, Tennessee, native who was 2 years old when George Washington became the first president of the United States on April 30, 1789.
The Washington Post wrote about the Oregon woman on Nov. 26, 1905, under the headline “Oldest Woman in the Wide Wide World.”
“The child that learned to lisp when Washington was President in the eighteenth century still lives to talk of President (Theodore) Roosevelt in the twentieth century, and eyes that a hundred years ago looked lovingly upon her first-born, today smile with a fading light upon the ‘child of her old age,’ a woman now past seventy-five.”