Mayfield Farm: Sarah Wallis and the Suffrage Circle

In the eighteen eighties and nineties, the farmhouse that stood on this Palo Alto site was one of the most politically charged addresses on the West Coast. Sarah Armstrong Wallis built her home here and made it a headquarters for the California women's suffrage movement. She is said to have hosted national suffrage leaders, turning a Peninsula farm into a gathering place for the fight to win women the right to vote.

Wallis died before the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in nineteen twenty. The farm was later subdivided, leaving only this marker to recall that one determined woman's living room was where the future of California suffrage was planned.