Mary Ashley is another Santa Barbara pioneer too interesting for history to much remember. But without Ashley, Cottage Hospital would not exist today and this Thursday’s grand birthday bash to celebrate its 125 continuous years in service would have never happened.
Photos of Ashley taken in her sixties suggest a stereotypical late-19th-century do-gooder and civic civilizer: a stoutly built, square-jawed woman with thin lips, steady gaze, and redoubtably kind eyes. She was an ardent feminist long before the term was coined, states Elizabeth Gilbertson, a freelance historian — a suffragette who championed women’s right to vote as early as the 1870s. If ignorant and inebriated men were allowed to vote, Ashley argued, women should have the same right. Like many protofeminists, Ashley was an ardent member of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. She was also a strong financial supporter of the Spiritualist church, then settling in Summerland.
Ashley’s most lasting impact, however, would be the creation of Cottage Hospital along with 40 other women who came together in 1888. The founding mothers emerged from the ranks of upper-crust Yankees moving west, educated, older, and mostly Protestant and Unitarian. But it was Ashley who made their collective dreams come to fruition, serving 10 years as president of Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital Society. And it was Ashley who came up with the name. Initially, Cottage Hospital was to be made up of small adjoining cottages, the theory being that they allowed for better air circulation. High construction costs proved prohibitive, so the first iteration of Cottage was a big three-story Victorian box instead. Still, the name stuck. “It has such a cozy sound,” Ashley once explained.