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ments, Seymour and Sibley earned perhaps$100,000 apiece for their combined one hundredyears of redevelopment effort. The absenceof a water system accounted for the low pricestheir land had fetched. Once city water becameavailable, the brothers enjoyed what Sibley considered“big returns” on sales of parcels fromtheir remaining three-thousand-acre inventory. 60T.C. did not live to see his sons realize thefamily’s dream of creating wealth from theirpioneering investment in California real estate.In his early seventies he began to suffer fromepileptic seizures. He shared his distress at thesudden restriction of his independence with hissister-in-law, Mary Severance, in Cleveland, withwhom he annually exchanged letters around thetime of their shared March 1 birthday. SolomonSeverance’s widow commiserated with T.C. andsuggested that his rapid recovery from eachattack offered hope that his life would “yet belengthened by many years.” An evangelical Presbyterian,Mary Severance felt duty bound, however,to remind her “dear brother” that he mustprepare for the inevitable by placing his faith inJesus Christ. “Look back to the time when youfound him precious to your Soul,” Mary gentlyadmonished him. “Though you have sought throlong years for some other way, you must comeback to the feeling that there is no other namegiven but Jesus, whereby men can be saved.” 61T.C. made peace at least with his close confinementto home during the last five or six years ofhis life. He learned to take pleasure in simpleactivities, such as riding the streetcar to and fromthe post office, and doted on the company of hisniece. Caroline’s only brother, James Seymour,had followed his sister to California and livednearby at West Adams Boulevard and Grand Avenue.James’s daughter, Carrie, watched over heruncle during her aunt’s travels. She often joinedTheodoric for breakfast (a hearty meal of figs,oatmeal, chopped beef on toast and “a good cupof real nice coffee”), and he would eat an earlydinner at the Seymours’ table. Afterward, he andCarrie liked to play word games. 62Still, Caroline’s extended absences pained herhusband, who expressed his longing for his wifeof fifty years by letting her know that things wentto hell in a handbasket whenever she wasn’t athome. “McMullen has not come to plow,” hecomplained in a letter written in the early fallof 1890 when Caroline was away for two weeksat church camp, “but promises to be here thismorning & it strikes me that I shall give him atalking to—about his nice wife and baby!” Continuingwith his list of vexations, T.C. wrote, “Thisblot, below, was on this sheet, when I turned itup, so I trust you’ll not charge it to me. . . . Nowashwoman yet this week nor last, & if it was mycase I should set Jane at it, instead of allowing herto mouse around here doing nothing. She’s nottouched a thing of the work & I think she shoulddo something, what is she here for?” 63Theodoric Cordenio Severance passed awayon October 21, 1892. “The dear father is sadlymissed . . . ,” Caroline said of her seventy-eightyear-oldhusband. Her involvement with themovement to win the franchise for California’swomen would help to keep her mind off her loss.“I Have Gained My Majority”For nearly fifty years, Caroline Severance hadbeen active with the women’s suffrage movement,which had yet to achieve many victories.In 1866, she had helped Susan B. Anthonyand Elizabeth Cady Stanton organize the EqualRights Association, which soon disbanded overdisagreements about the wisdom of advocatingfor the voting rights of male African Americans,who might side with their white counterparts inopposing women’s suffrage. Believing in equalrights for all Americans, she had joined withLucy Stone in 1869 to cofound the Americancontinued on page 529