Burn Memorial

Febb Ensminger Burn and her son, Harry Burn, made Tennessee the state whose ratification of the 19th Amendment enfranchised American women, a giant step toward a more perfect union. After reading bitter anti-suffrage speeches and attacks on suffragists, Febb wrote to her 24-year-old son, a legislator from Niota, urging him to do the right thing and vote for woman suffrage. Though he believed his constituents opposed it, he faced a tie that would defeat ratification, switched his vote, broke the tie, and cast the final necessary vote to make women’s right to vote constitutionally protected and to make East Tennessee the place where woman suffrage came of age. After his historic tie-breaking vote, Governor Roberts called in the National Guard to protect him, and a grand jury was convened to investigate his last-minute change of vote. Harry later said that a mother’s advice is always safest for a boy to follow and that his mother wanted him to vote for ratification. Harry T. Burn, born in Niota, Tennessee, served in the Tennessee House of Representatives from 1918 to 1922 and in the Tennessee Senate from 1948 to 1952. Febb Ensminger Burn, a graduate of U.S. Grant University, taught before marrying James Lafayette Burn in 1894, and along with Harry Burn’s brother Jack, she ran the 120-acre Hathburn Farm while remaining intensely interested in national and international issues.

Knoxville, Tennessee · United States