Kearns and her daughter brought the wagon to Huntington. Likewise, “The Spirit of 1776” wagon travelled throughout Long Island during July 1913. Coincidentally, General Jones was a descendant of the Hewlett family, who had once owned “The Spirit of 1776” wagon. Six weeks later, General Jones led her army on a 245-mile march from New York City to Washington to petition the newly elected President, Woodrow Wilson.

She later led a 140-mile march from New York City to Albany in December 1912 in order to petition the newly elected Governor, William Sulzer, to support votes for women. General Jones, as she became known, travelled across Long island with a yellow wagon to rally support for the cause. Suffragists, most notably Rosalie Jones of Cold Spring Harbor, had used wagons before to promote their cause. Just as the men of 1776 fought taxation without representation, so too did the women of 1913 fight for the same cause. The wagon was said to have been built in 1776 by Ebenezer Conklin, a Huntington native and supporter of the Revolutionary cause. On July 1, 1913, the company donated the wagon to the suffragists to use to promote their cause. Remsen company used the wagon-said to be the oldest on Long Island-as an advertising gimmick. Years later, in 1892, Wilson purchased Hewlett’s old wagon from one of the family’s employees. Wilson, president of the Remsen company, remembered that as a small boy shortly after the Civil War, he knew of an old farmer names Daniel Hewlett. The wagon was given to the suffragists by the Brooklyn based I.S. Kearns and her six-year-old daughter Serena from village to village and served as a speakers’ platform at rallies. Dubbed “The Spirit of 1776,” the wagon was used to ferry Mrs. In 1913, the movement received a gift that would help to draw attention to the cause-a wagon built by a Huntington patriot during the American Revolution. In addition to writing about the movement in local newspapers, she led marches and rallies across Long Island. One prominent leader of the movement on Long Island was Edna Buckman Kearns, a young mother, writer, and editor from Rockville Centre. Long Island women were particularly active in working for the right to vote. The effort made little headway over the next seven decades until a new generation took up the cause, working at both the state and national levels to secure votes for women.

Women had been agitating for the right to vote since at least the Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls in 1848. A new symbol of their cause-a Revolutionary war era wagon-added to the controversy of their cause and led to a confrontation with local anti-suffragists. The marchers came to rally support for women’s suffrage. Huntington village was crowded with hundreds of shoppers on the night of Saturday, Jwhen the fife and drum corps of the Huntington Fire Department led a parade down Main Street to the corner of Wall Street.

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