Lelia Seton Wilder Edmundson
Lelia Seton Wilder Edmundson (1861-1948) was the first woman from Alabama to run for the U.S. Congress, in the 1922 Democratic Primary for the Eighth Congressional District. Although she did not win her race, Edmundson remained active in politics through the League of Women Voters and the National Farmers Union, advocating for issues important to Alabama farmers. Indeed, Edmundson was a prominent north Alabama cotton planter whose great success earned her the nickname of “Cotton Queen of Alabama.”
Lelia Seton was born on August 19, 1861, to William Harrison Seton and Rachel Cantwell Seton in Olivesburg, Ohio. A U.S. Army captain in Company D, 26th Ohio Infantry Regiment, William was wounded in October 1862 and died from the effects of those wounds on September 28, 1864. In 1866, Rachel married James M. Horton, and in 1870 gave birth to a son. The young family sought new opportunities in Decatur, Morgan County, where Rachel’s uncle, physician and former U.S. Army surgeon, Jacob Y. Cantwell, had settled. Seton attended school in Memphis and moved back to Decatur upon graduation.
In November 1883, Lelia Seton married Charles Rollin Wilder, a real estate speculator from Cincinnati. Wilder acquired a 1,500-acre farm outside of Decatur on the banks of the Tennessee River. He died in 1885, leaving Lelia Wilder $15,000 in debt and forcing her to sell the farm. Because of a real estate boom, the land sold at auction for more than $40,000, and more than twice what it was expected to bring. After a yellow fever epidemic scared away investors from the Decatur area, she was able to buy the land back for $10,000.
Wilder left the farm in the hands of an overseer and traveled for several years, returning to find it in a neglected condition. She devoted all her energy and resources to making it profitable. First, she worked on her relationship with the tenants who worked the land. She encouraged each tenant to keep their own set of books, assisted by the children who were learning math and writing in the school she had built for them. Wilder had a reputation for honesty when it came time to settle accounts after the sale of the cotton crop. Her tenants could see the fruits of their labor and were motivated to work after seeing a profit at the end of the year. In addition, she encouraged them to raise their own hogs and feed and plant a vegetable garden. Overall, approximately 20 families, most of whom were Black, lived on and worked the property on various-sized tracts.
Wilder adopted the latest agricultural methods for her farm. In 1910, she began a program supervised by the U.S. Department of Agriculture by which 22 acres were planted in cotton and corn, and she hosted lectures by government experts, much like the future agricultural extension programs. In 1911, Wilder established an experimental hog-breeding enterprise on her property, with similar government supervision. Wilder’s reputation and political connections led to her selection as an Alabama representative at both the Cotton States Exposition of 1895 in Atlanta and the Paris Exhibition of 1900. All this notoriety prompted a writer for Leslie’s Weekly to nickname her the “Cotton Queen” in a March 1900 article.
In June 1912, Wilder eloped with Wallace B. Edmundson, a businessman who had moved to Decatur in 1904. The two married in New York before they embarked on a honeymoon in Paris. The couple surprised everyone when they returned to the farm, which continued to be known to locals as “the Wilder Place.” They would remain married until his death in 1938. She never remarried.
The 1922 U.S. election was the first after the 1920 passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, which secured to women the right to vote. Lelia Edmundson decided to enter the Democratic primary to take on Edward B. Almon, incumbent in the Alabama Eighth Congressional District. (The district encompassed the northernmost counties of Lauderdale, Limestone, Madison, and Jackson, as well as Colbert, Lawrence, and Morgan Counties.) This made her the first woman from Alabama to run for Congress. She ran as a farmer whose experience had taught her how best to help those who worked the land. She supported auto magnate Henry Ford’s bid to purchase the newly constructed Wilson Dam and develop an industrial center at Muscle Shoals, Colbert County. She was also in favor of an engineering project to build dams and locks to make the Tennessee and Tombigbee Rivers navigable, and she supported a formula of federal government spending two dollars to the state’s one on road projects.
Although Edmunson was very well received at public events and garnered favorable media coverage, she could not overcome the support Almon received from the Democratic Party and the prejudice against her gender. She outperformed Almon’s prediction that he would beat her by a margin of 8-1; the final primary vote count was Almon 2,977, Edmundson 1,340. Although she would not run for office again, Edmundson remained in the political arena, next taking the stage in Washington, D.C.
In 1924, Edmundson was a member of the executive committee of the National Farmers Union. In this capacity, she lobbied the Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry to advocate for auto magnate Henry Ford’s plan to purchase Wilson Dam. At the May 24 hearing, Edmundson stated her belief that the cheap fertilizer and electrical power produced by the Ford plan would allow farmers to produce cotton more cheaply and increase yield and profits even while selling at a lower price, thus benefiting consumers. Congress rejected the Ford plan, but these benefits were realized when the Tennessee Valley Authority was created and placed under the direction of the federal government during Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency. Edmundson was obliged to sell 740 acres of her land in the Tennessee Valley Authority’s flood control program in 1933, when Wheeler Reservoir was created by Wheeler Dam. When mining company Calumet and Hecla Copper needed a riverfront location for their Wolverine Tube Division at Decatur in 1946, Edmundson kept the negotiations for the sale of a large piece of her land simple because she was a booster of industrial development in her adopted home. She had already sold acreage off as early as 1919 as the city of Decatur expanded.
One of the grandest gestures Edmundson made near the end of her life was gifting Decatur’s Old State Bank building to the American Legion on July 3, 1946. Her mother, Rachel, had inherited the building after her uncle died, and it passed to Edmundson upon her death. The bank would be used by the Legion and others as a meeting place and was given the name “Lelia Cantwell Seton Hall.” It remained in the hands of the Legion until they deeded it to the city of Decatur in the 1970s. It became a museum in 1984. Edmundson died on May 22, 1948, and was buried in Decatur City Cemetery.
Additional Resources
- Allison, John. "Cotton Queen of Alabama: Lelia Seton Wilder Edmundson." Alabama Heritage 153 (Summer 2024): 12-21.
