Collection Relating to the Financial Empire of a Woman & her Daughter

Hailing from an immigrant family that rose to prominence in the West, Mary Tritch Rogers and her daughter Georgette Houston were often overlooked in their own time in favor of the family patriarchs. Mary's father George Tritch (1829-1899) was, after all, a German immigrant whose evolution from downtrodden pioneer to millionaire rail road and real estate magnate was documented in Sketches of Colorado (1911) and celebrated in numerous newspaper and society articles in his lifetime. Meanwhile, Mary's husband Benjamin W. Rogers (1842-1917) was Colorado's first dentist and a community cornerstone. Yet the present collection reveals that Mary, and Georgette after her, were more than ballroom delights. Savvy investors and business women, in their own quiet way they built and maintained their own empire even in the face of scandal, marital separation, and disinheritance. Without the documents preserved here, we might never know their story. The territory and later state of Colorado had varying property laws for women across Mary's emergence to adulthood. It was a space where white male settlers drastically outnumbered their female counterparts; and when statehood in 1876 stripped women of suffrage, there was little incentive for men to vote to reinstate it immediately. That said, the increasing number of Married Women's Property Acts extending across the US did provide expanded protections for women to have control over their own wages, their inheritance, their land ownership and their investments. Mary Tritch Rogers used this to her benefit, as portions of this collection show. Taking the allowances given her first by her father and later her husband, she was able to grow her own little empire based in stock investments, real estate purchases, and interest earned from rents and loans to members of the community. This financial privilege allowed her to legally separate from her husband and her unhappy marriage in 1900 (signing over $15,925 -- or $576,000 today -- for his promise to depart peacefully and disconnect from her). It also allowed her to survive disinheritance from her father -- something reported by newspapers following his death, and potentially connected to the public scandal of her separation. Along with her daughter, she relocated to Massachusetts for the remainder of her life. Though newspapers suggested this was for her "health," it's far more likely that the distance from her estranged husband and perhaps even Massachusetts' own property laws were a larger appeal. With her independent wealth, Mary Tritch Rogers was also able to provide freedoms for her daughters that weren't available to her. Georgette would be widowed early on in her marriage, and lived as a single mother to her children William and Dorothy. Account books from her household show, however, a comfortable life similar to her mother's. According to the 1910 and 1920 US Censuses, she took up residence near Boston, Massachusetts with her children and mother, keeping at least one maid. Yet neither women list employments other than head of household. Notably, neither show signs of remarrying either. By the time of Mary's death in 1935, her estate was valued at $269,458 -- or $6.02 million today. A full accounting of her assets and debts owed for settlements and funeral expenses is included. The research rich assortment of ledgers, checkbooks, letters, travel and stock documents, legal materials and other personal ephemera give scholars an opportunity to examine not only the individual lives of these women, but also how their financial savvy contributed to or harmed the white and Indigenous communities around them. To what extent did these women's lives in Colorado, in Europe (where Mary lived for a time), or in Massachusetts expand or contract based on the localities' laws surrounding women's finances? And to what extent did the women replicate or depart from some of the more fiscally aggressive and harmful practices of the men around them? Collection conta.…