San Juan Island’s First “Lady” Politician

By Kris DayVincent

      Ethel Perry Sandwith was the oldest of six girls who were known locally as the “Perry Peaches,” Ethel, Grace, Hazel, Edith, Mabel, and Rachel. They were attractive girls who could cook, thus the name. They were the children of Park and Laura Baker Perry who ran a birthing and recuperating house at the Nash House (now Spring Street School annex) in the twenties and thirties.

Daughter Ethel Perry was a member of the first graduating class of Friday Harbor High School, the class of 1912. She was 21 years old at the time she graduated but 1912 was the first opportunity anyone had to graduate from high school on the island. After graduation, she took advantage of a woman’s newly sanctioned right to vote and hold office, and announced she was running for county clerk.

In the primary held on September 10, 1912, she beat her nearest Republican opponent, C. L. Carter by nearly 100 votes. Because there were no Democratic candidates, she ran unopposed in the general election.

As “liberated” as she might have been, as soon as she married veternarian Dr. Colin Sandwith in 1915, she gave up her post.  After her husband Colin died in 1933, she went back to the occupation of her parents and worked in the medical field, making house calls for the sick and injured and helping bring new babies into the world. She died on April 8^th, 1980.