On Nov. 3, 1906, San Francisco residents, still busy rebuilding the city after April’s earthquake and fire, were startled by a truly bizarre sight. It was a four-horse truck hauling a refugee “cottage” through the city streets, from Fillmore’s Jefferson Square Park all the way down to Ingleside. Hanging out of one of the structure’s windows was an agitated, gray-haired woman in her late forties clutching two placards. They read, “We demand a share of the Relief Fund,” and “We demand a distribution of food and supplies.”
The defiant protester in the window was Mary Kelly, a cleaning woman by trade whose family had been residing in a camp in Jefferson Square since they lost their home and worldly belongings in the earthquake. After months of surviving in cold, leaky tents with her invalid husband William, Kelly had begun squatting in the cottage—a small uninsulated shack with no sanitary provisions—out of sheer desperation. Heads of the city’s Relief Corporation—the organization set up to distribute supplies and donations to refugees—ordered Kelly’s removal on the truck after a month of her refusing to move out or pay rent. As they hauled her away, she is said to have shouted, “I’ll stay with this house if they take it to the end of the Earth!”
What was happening to Kelly was by no means standard practice for the Relief Corporation. It was an unusually harsh and public punishment doled out against an individual who had spent seven months loudly and persistently demanding dignity for those who lost their homes in the April 18 disaster. In that time, Kelly had transformed herself from a private, hard-working wife and mother into one of the most tenacious activists in the city. Her efforts made her a leader in her community, but a sharp thorn in the side of city officials and the Relief Corporation.
Once delivered to Ingleside, for three whole days, Kelly stayed inside her cottage, “firmly roped to the truck,” the San Francisco Call noted. She later reported that she was subjected to daily harassment and verbal abuse from Relief Corporation employees that would “turn the crowd of thugs in a tenderloin saloon, let alone a respectable woman.”
On her third day on the truck, the Relief Corporation roughly dismantled the cottage with Kelly still inside. “There seemed about ten men with axes and crowbars and hatchets getting on the roof and ripping off the shingles,” Kelly later wrote in a pamphlet titled Shame of the Relief. This despite the fact that Kelly was, according to the San Francisco Call, “worn and feeble” due to “a fast developing case of grip or pneumonia sapping her energy.”
