State’s sufferage centennial exhibit includes photos of Colfax farm woman

Photos of a former Colfax farm woman are among those featured in the showcase of Washington State’s traveling centennial celebrating women in Washington winning the right to vote in 1910.

Spokane’s Museum of Arts and Culture (MAC) will be the final stop for the road show.

The show opened Saturday and will be on display until May 7.

May Christine MacFarlane was born in Detroit, Mich., in 1873. She was the middle child of five children born to Daniel and Mary MacFarlane. Though May contracted a childhood illness early in life which left her nearly deaf, she learned to read lips, and communicated well.

Her father was a captain who served aboard iron ore ships on the Great Lakes.

Her mother died of consumption when May was just eight years old. After a few years of hiring housekeepers to help with the children, her father decided to send the three youngest to his sister ‘Libbie’ and her husband Jake Crawford to be raised in Pullman. In 1889, when she was 15 years old, May was put in charge of her younger brother and sister when they traveled by train to Pullman.

At the time that the children arrived, Jake Crawford owned and operated a meat market on Main Street in Pullman. Three years later, in 1882, May married Charles Hull, a nephew to Jake, and the son of Harvey and Anna (Crawford) Hull, homesteaders on Spring Flat Creek.

Charles and May homesteaded on the Prune Orchard Road, near Spring Flat Creek, four miles south of Colfax.

In 1910, May posed with her home-made sign urging ‘Votes For Women.’ She was then a 37-year-old mother of five children: Alma, Homer, Phebe, Ralph and Ann. Their last child, Donald, was born in 1916.

May Hull was a strong pioneer woman of character who served as a role model to her family, then and now.

Submitted by Sharon Hull Kunze, Colfax, May Hull’s paternal granddaughter.