Collection is open for research.
Gift of Adrienne Zell, April 2021 (RL2021-018).
Effie Decker Simmons, nee Comstock, was born in 1874 in California. In 1897, she married Clayton B. Simmons. She was living in Portland, Oregon, by 1908, when she joined the Portland Woman's Club. Simmons was present at the founding of the National League of Women Voters in 1920 in Chicago, Illinois, and was appointed as a regional director with the task of organizing the organization's Oregon branch. In 1922, she was elected state representative for Multnomah County; she was the first woman to represent the county in the Oregon State Legislature. In 1924, she unsuccessfully ran to be a state senator. Simmons died in 1961.
Sources: Articles in the Oregonian and Oregon Journal, 1922-1986; vital records on Ancestry.com; notice in the Oakland Tribune, December 18, 1897, accessed through Ancestry.com.
Photographs of and letter to Effie Simmons, Coll 940, Oregon Historical Society Research Library.
The collection consists of three portrait photographs of Effie Simmons taken between approximately 1920 and 1930, and a letter to Simmons from Myrtle A. Johnson (signed as Mrs. G. E. Johnson) dated February 10, 1923. In the letter, Johnson congratulates Simmons on her election to the Oregon House of Representatives and says that Simmons has been mentioned in the local papers of Boston, Massachusetts, where Johnson was residing. Johnson also says she misses her friends from Oregon, but expects to return there in 1924, when her daughter Helen has finished studying at the New England Conservatory of Music.
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