A federal appeals court once stopped, in the middle of a fight about a brewery fortune, to record exactly how often two women wrote to each other: 106 letters in 125 days.
Portland, autumn 1905. Dr Marie Equi was thirty-three, one of very few women practising medicine in Oregon. Harriet Speckart was twenty-two, an heiress whose uncle Leopold Schmidt founded the Olympia Brewing Company. They met at a fashionable residential hotel and were inseparable within months.
Harriet’s mother, Henriette, was the executrix of her late husband’s will. Harriet had been left a third of the estate outright — she was never disinherited — but her mother would not account for it or hand it over. When Harriet was taken back to the family home in San Diego, the letters ran daily. Her mother found the bundle in her room. The count appears in Speckart v. Schmidt, 190 F. 499 (9th Cir. 1911), which describes the family’s objection to “that strange friendship which they deplored.”
The letters were seized and Equi was made to promise she would never write to Harriet again. She kept writing — hiding letters inside books on the shelves of the Portland public library for Harriet to collect.
In June 1907 the two of them rode together in an open carriage at Portland’s Rose Festival and placed second in Carriage and Pair. That same month Harriet appeared in a Washington court and asked that every order made against her be reversed and annulled. On 20 December 1907 the Supreme Court of Washington did exactly that — State ex rel. Speckart v. Superior Court, 48 Wash. 141. The administration was vacated and the order that would have halved her share was void.
She was twenty-four.
They lived together in Portland for years afterwards and raised a daughter, Mary. Around 1920 Harriet took her to the Oregon coast; they stayed close until Harriet died in 1927.
Sources: State ex rel. Speckart v. Superior Court, 48 Wash. 141 (1907); Speckart v. Schmidt, 190 F. 499 (9th Cir. 1911); Michael Helquist, Marie Equi: Radical Politics and Outlaw Passions (Oregon State University Press, 2015); The Oregon Encyclopedia; City of Portland LGBTQ+ Historic Context Statement.
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