Partner Alice Griffith
Queer Places:
Hill Farm, 3125 Sir Francis Drake Blvd, Fairfax, CA 94930
Cypress Lawn Memorial Park, 1701 Hillside Blvd, Colma, CA 94014, United States
Elizabeth Haywood Ashe (June 16, 1869 – January 25, 1954) was a pioneering American nurse, public health advocate, and community organizer whose
remarkable life of service spanned disaster relief, landmark social welfare institutions, and wartime heroism.
Born in California into a lineage characterized by historic bravery, her grandfather was North Carolina Governor Samuel Ashe—who served as a lieutenant in the American Revolution and for whom Asheville is named—and her uncle was Civil War Admiral David Farragut, a Southern Unionist who captured New Orleans in 1862. Her parents, Dr. Richard Porter Ashe (1823–1871) and Caroline Loyall Ashe (1832–1904), were true pioneers who arrived in San Francisco in 1848 just in time for the gold rush. She grew up alongside her siblings: William Loyal Ashe (1859–1908), Richard Porter Ashe (1860–1929), Caroline Loyall "Linie" Ashe McLaren (1863–1941), and Camilla Loyall "Millie" Ashe Sewall (1870–1931).
Displaying a natural instinct for civic leadership early on, Elizabeth became a community activist in her teens while teaching Sunday School at what later became Grace Cathedral, then located at the intersection of California and Stockton. Through her classes, she grew deeply concerned for her neighbors from Telegraph Hill—mostly Irish, Italian, German, and Latin American immigrants living in overcrowded, unsanitary tenements without heat or plumbing, particularly noting the vulnerability of unsupervised and working children. Despite outbreaks of diphtheria, tuberculosis, whooping cough, and typhoid fever, she remained deeply committed to the area. At just 21 years old, alongside her friend Alice Griffith, she established San Francisco's first settlement house to provide struggling families with healthcare, daycare, and education, an organization that lives on today as the Telegraph Hill Neighborhood Center.
Elizabeth formalized her commitment to public health by graduating from the School of Nursing at Presbyterian Hospital in New York. Just four years later, she faced the devastation of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Her work helping city residents recover from the fiery aftermath left such a grim and permanent impression that everything she did afterward seemed manageable by comparison. Expanding her coalition-building efforts, she established the Hill Farm (later known as the Bothin Convalescent Home for women and children) in 1903, which she expanded in 1910 with the help of steel magnate and philanthropist Henry E. Bothin. Shortly after in 1911, she and Alice Griffith raised $20,000 from wealthy donors to open the Arequipa Sanitarium for tuberculosis patients. Designed by Dr. Philip King Brown and the prestigious architectural firm Bakewell and Brown, Arequipa became renowned for its state-of-the-art facilities and low costs, maintaining a long waiting list for decades. As the need for tuberculosis treatment eventually waned, Elizabeth repurposed the space, gifting a building to the San Francisco Girl Scouts in 1948 for troop camping—paving the way for the property to become the Henry E. Bothin Youth Center and Camp Bothin, which continues to operate today.
When World War I erupted, Elizabeth was intensely driven to serve overseas. It took her three years of persistent persuasion to convince the Red Cross—initially hesitant to dispatch a woman in her mid-40s to such hazardous zones—to send her to France, where she led the nursing staff of the Children's Bureau of the Red Cross from the summer of 1917 to the summer of 1919, attending to the medical care of French and refugee children. On August 16, 1917, she found herself in Northern France close to the front lines during an air raid. Describing the moment in a letter three days later, she wrote, “The Tocsin [siren] sounded and the fearsome took to the cellar... I figured it is as dangerous as crossing Market Street…” In another wartime letter to Alice Griffith from “Somewhere in France,” she reflected on the grim landscape: “No other women have ever been so near the lines… We visited several demolished villages en route… Christ on his crucifix in many villages is the only thing erect, where women and little children by thousands must work in the fields under shell fire wearing gas masks… [It] did not make the dreadful impression on me I anticipated, it is not a circumstance to our fire.”
True to her knack for finding unexpected beauty amidst destruction, she wrote on July 23, 1917, after an artillery attack rattled their camp: “Just how much I can tell you of yesterday’s attack, I don’t know, but we tumbled out at 7am, clad hastily… The firing lasted about thirty minutes. The shots went all over and around us, but except for a few broken windows, no damage was done.” Two sentences later, she added, “The coast is very lovely. With glasses we can see quaint houses and we smell the new mown hay.” Operating as part of the Children's Bureau unit, Elizabeth tackled France's alarming infant mortality rate by educating new mothers in Paris tenements and country farms on prenatal hygiene, healthy feeding, and infection prevention, while also advising orphan asylums and even teaching French children how to play leapfrog. Remarkably, on her days off, she volunteered at Neuilly’s American Military Hospital, treating wounded servicemen in harrowing conditions where stretchers in the receiving garage were packed so closely together that stepping between them was impossible.
When her unedited wartime letters were compiled and published as Intimate Letters from France during America's First Year of War in 1918 (with digital text available through HathiTrust) and later expanded as Intimate Letters from France and Extracts from the Diary of Elizabeth Ashe, 1917-1919 , the San Francisco Chronicle praised the volume as "not only informative, but essentially human," cementing her image as a brave and deeply empathetic nurse. Known to her closest friends as Betty, she once shared a proud milestone in a letter from July 1917: “Did I tell you that Miss Maxwell, in introducing me to a group of nurses, told them that I had humanized her training school, had showed them that all nurses did not have to be made after the same pattern? I felt that I had not lived in vain.”
Elizabeth passed away at the age of 84 on January 25, 1954, in San Francisco, and was laid to rest at Cypress Lawn Memorial Park in Colma, San Mateo County, California, leaving behind an institutional and community legacy deeply woven into the fabric of California and beyond.
Historical archives document that Elizabeth Haywood Ashe shared a profound lifelong personal and professional partnership with Alice Griffith. The two women lived together and collaborated for decades on foundational civic initiatives, including co-founding the Telegraph Hill Neighborhood Center and the Arequipa Sanitarium. In the study of women's history and early 20th-century social reform, such committed domestic and professional partnerships between women—often historically recognized as "Boston marriages"—are examined by historians as vital components of early women's networks and queer history, representing independent lives forged outside conventional marital structures.
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