Category: Progressive Era

By Amy O’Hair
With research contributed by Kathleen Laderman

An eight-year-old firebrand of a girl stands before the camera, knowing perhaps that she is leaving an indelible mark on the public record. She exudes a strong sense of self and an unaffected sense of style. Form follows function, and for climbing the rocks and hills around the Point Conception Lighthouse, for stalking prey in the untamed brush like a ninja, only trousers and a sweater could ever do.

She proudly wears her unconventional attire for an official photograph; those shiny curls and that fancy hat are down to the women at the lighthouse. It’s a bargain, and she struck it. Lillie is a force majeure, even at eight, and if she is determined to wear trousers, perhaps the best the women around her can hope for is to get her hair into some sort of girlish shape for the camera.^[1]

Lillie Young had come to the lighthouse on the coast of Santa Barbara County to live with her foster father, Edward Young, who worked as one of the keepers. A photographer from the US Coast Guard had arrived that week, hefting his bulky camera, in order to record the facility and some of its occupants.

It was January 1894, a few years before San Francisco would be treated to stories about this remarkable girl who defied the strictures of late Victorian womanhood, venturing where she pleased in the open land and wild hills around Ocean View and boasting all the requisite skills of any boy her age. The photograph was taken at the midpoint of the best and wildest year of her childhood. It was not the last time she attracted wonder and awe—and surely disapproval—before she seemingly disappeared from view, a bold flame extinguished. Continue reading “Artemis Lost: The Story of a Bold Girl in Turn-of-the-Century Ocean View” →