Helen Augusta Knowlton: Maine’s first female lawyer

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Maine Women in History Rediscovering Their Lives and Legacies

The first woman admitted to the Maine bar more than a century ago was a sharp-eyed Rockland resident who was just as comfortable hunting rabbits as she was in a courtroom.

“She was extremely intelligent and she loved books,” Judy Shorey recalled of her grandmother Helen Augusta (Knowlton) Orne. “She came from a large family and they were wonderfully close and had wonderful times together. She loved nature and birds, knew all the wildflowers and loved to hunt rabbits with her brothers.”

For the past few months Shorey has been compiling information about her grandmother and has been recounting her ground-breaking story to local historical societies.

Shorey has cartons of documents and newspaper articles from all over the country about her grandmother. She always knew her grandmother had practiced law as a young woman but never realized the acclaim she received as Maine’s first female lawyer. Shorey was 16 years old when her grandmother died.

“I used to love going to her house because she told such wonderful stories about her growing up in Rockland,” Shorey recalled.

It took a special act of the Maine Legislature to make it possible for Helen Augusta Knowlton to become Maine’s first female lawyer.

Knowlton was admitted to the Knox County Bar in 1899 at the age of 24. Before that could happen, however, special legislation was needed because at that time, women were not allowed to hold any state office and lawyers were viewed as officers of the state. When Chief Justice John Peters interpreted that the state law allowed only men to practice law, Knowlton’s advocates petitioned the Legislature to allow her to take the bar exam.

The young woman, who had completed her courses at Rockland High School in two years, handled 70 written questions on 21 subjects as well as several hundred oral questions with ease. She scored a 97.

Rockland Mayor D.N. Mortland, who sat on the examining board, was quoted in the Courier Gazette at the time as having “openly expressed the opinion that the court room and bar were not proper places for women,” yet was later outspoken in his praise of the manner in which she conducted herself in examination. “It was as good an examination as I ever saw any applicant take,” he said.

Knowlton worked as a secretary in a Rockland law office and quickly became so adept at recording depositions that her employer, Col. William H. Fogler, suggested she study law. He was an able teacher and she was a ready pupil.

Some of the state’s lawyers scoffed at the idea of a woman at the bar. One complained, “It would not be good fortune” to square off in court against a woman lawyer because “they are such a novelty that a jury will sympathize with them.”

Another expressed concerns that “her presence would be a trifle awkward at bar suppers and picnics where a certain amount of liberty and informality is exercised.”

Knowlton replied that she “would not for a moment” think of attending events where wives or sisters of attorneys were not invited.

“I shall keep to my sex socially but at business meetings of the bar I shall consider it my duty to attend,” she told the Courier. “This is purely business with me. I have a livelihood to make and see no reason why a woman should not make a success of the legal profession as well as men.”

When Knowlton set up an office in Rockland, the national press had a field day. One smitten Boston reporter wrote, “The squire is not, as might be inferred, gray and severe but is a slender and graceful figure with a silvery voice as if unversed in the doubtful balance of right and wrong.”

Another wrote, “Her office is as spick and span as milady’s drawing room and yet is businesslike as the law shop of the most pronounced tobacco-smoking barrister of the sterner sex.”

Although acknowledging that she was a trailblazer, Knowlton always made it clear she was not one of those “rabble-rousing” women of the times that marched for equality and the right to vote, Shorey said. In fact, she added, her grandmother never voted until 1932.

Although she could have practiced anywhere, Knowlton said she never considered any place other than Rockland.

“I like Rockland better than any place I have visited in Maine and shall make my initial effort at earning my livelihood as an attorney right here among my own people,” she said.

Knowlton enjoyed recounting the day that a man burst into her law office only to stop abruptly when he saw her sitting there. When he asked if it was a law office, Knowlton replied that it was. When he asked if she was the lawyer and answered the same, the man could only reply “you, you, you.” Still he stayed, she recalled, and she won the case for him.

Knowlton always said she would never take on a client knowing he was guilty, but if she had doubts she would consider it her duty to bring about a settlement without going to trial.

Knowlton practiced law in Rockland until she married Arthur Lewis Orne in 1906. Knowlton was the only female lawyer to practice law in the city until Jean Chalmers arrived in the early 1970s. The Ornes had two children, one of whom was the father of Shorey and her late brother Peter.

“I loved spending my summers at my grandmother’s house. I loved to listen to her voice as she was telling us stories. She had such a wonderful voice,” Shorey said. “That’s why I am gathering her things together. I really want to get this done before I die. My brother had four children and I had four children and we have 16 grandchildren. I’m doing this for them.”

wgriffin@bangordailynews.net

338-9546

Maine’s history is full of female pioneers who blazed a path for the women of today. The Bangor Daily News, in cooperation with the Maine Historical Society’s online museum Maine Memory Network, and the Maine FolkLife Center, has highlighted a different woman each day throughout March.

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