LGB Heritage: People

Johnston was the first woman to professionally photograph Mammoth Cave, she went on to photo-document life, blue collar workers and presidents alike.

Western explorer and Scottish nobleman William Drummond Stewart spent the winter of 1834-1835 at Fort Vancouver.

Born along the St. Lawrence River, determined Harriet Colfax found herself far upstream along the treacherous coast of Southern Lake Michigan after moving to a young Michigan City in 1853. For 43 careful years she watched the rough frontier city blossom to a Duneland metropolis; she fearlessly maintained the harbor beacon as lighthouse keeper while enduring the ensuing hardships with her lifelong companion Ann Hartwell.

Alice Dunbar Nelson was a poet, critic, journalist and activist who was a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance.

Henry Blake Fuller was a key figure in the Chicago Literary Renaissance, renowned for pioneering social realism in American literature. He is noted for being one of the first American novelists to explore homosexual themes. Fuller had a complicated love-hate relationship with Chicago. He frequently found solace at Indiana Dunes, which served as a retreat from urban life and a source for inspiration.

Stormé DeLarverie was a butch lesbian with zero tolerance for discrimination, or as she called it, “ugliness.” She was born in New Orleans on Christmas Eve to a Black mother and white father. She had a beautiful baritone voice and discovered a love for jazz at a very early age. She started singing in New Orleans clubs at 15, and soon after began touring around Europe, eventually landing in New York City.

Katharine Lee Bates was a professor and writer best remembered as the author of the lyrics to the song “America the Beautiful.” She shared a home for almost three decades with her companion, fellow academic and social reformer Katharine Coman.

By the mid-1880s, Shaw was establishing herself as an advocate for temperance, a cause she took in part because of her time doing medical work in Boston. She first worked as a paid lecturer with the Massachusetts Women Suffrage Association, a position she secured through her connections with the prominent suffragist Lucy Stone. Moving up the ranks, Shaw was subsequently hired to work with the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, or WCTU, a national organization.

Cathay Williams became the first African American woman to enlist in the U.S. Army; she posed as a man, enlisting under the pseudonym William Cathay.

Robert Rayford’s life is mysterious; there are few records of his family, his personal interests, or even the location of his grave. Unfortunately, Rayford’s life and death have slipped into obscurity. Nonetheless, he remains an important figure in medical and social history as the first HIV/AIDS patient in the United States.