Suffragist, realtor. Salley was born in Augusta, Georgia, on December 11, 1883, the daughter of Marguerite Eulalie Gamble and George Kinloch Chafee. Her father was in the kaolin (porcelain clay) business, and her mother was an accomplished pianist and product of one of Baltimore\u2019s finest finishing schools. Salley spent an enjoyable but sickly youth, often with rheumatic fever, on her maternal grandparents\u2019 plantation in Louisville, Georgia, before moving to Aiken in 1892. Her economic status and social class insured schooling by governesses, private tutors, and a year each at Mary Baldwin College in Virginia and at Converse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina. In 1906 she married the prominent lawyer Julian Booth Salley, then mayor of Aiken. She then bore two children and appeared headed for the life of a traditional southern lady.<\/p>\n
Salley\u2019s interest in women\u2019s rights was sparked by the plight of Lucy Dugas Tillman, granddaughter of Lucy Pickens and wife of Ben Tillman, Jr., son of the prominent South Carolina senator. During Lucy\u2019s illness, her husband had her two children deeded away to his mother. When she recovered, Lucy spent virtually everything she had in an unsuccessful bid to regain them in a case that called attention to women\u2019s legal inequities.<\/p>\n
Salley soon immersed herself in the woman suffrage movement. Claiming that it was \u201cthe best dollar I ever spent,\u201d she responded to a newspaper advertisement to join the South Carolina Equal Suffrage League (SCESL). Salley then got five women together around 1912 and organized the Aiken County Equal Suffrage League, serving as its first president. Salley was an aggressive and innovative suffrage campaigner, traveling on unpaved county roads to canvass door-to-door, staging a myriad of fund-raisers (she once took boxing lessons and performed in a prizefight as a \u201cGold Dust Twin\u201d), and riding in an airplane with a pilot scattering suffrage pamphlets over the town. Some, including her husband, regarded her actions as scandalous. Salley knew firsthand and greatly admired Carrie Chap- man Catt and Anna Howard Shaw, leaders of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and she had little regard for the \u201cunladylike\u201d militant wing of the movement. In 1919 Salley became SCESL president. Once suffrage was achieved, she joined in the formation of the South Carolina League of Women Voters (later serving as regional vice president), and she worked tirelessly to achieve its goal of ending discrimination against women. Salley was invited to stand behind the governor when he finally signed the Nineteenth Amendment into law in the state in 1969. Scolding Democrats by pointing out that it took a Republican senator to insure that the amendment was finally approved in South Carolina, the eighty-five-year-old Eulalie Salley remarked: \u201cBoys, I\u2019ve been waiting 50 years to tell you what I think of you.\u201d<\/p>\n
To fund her suffrage work, Salley applied for and received a real estate license in 1915, becoming the first woman realtor in the state and launching a career that helped put Aiken on the map and made her something of a legend. Her style of real estate catered to the needs of the growing numbers of wealthy people who came south for the winter between the two world wars. Clients found flowers in full bloom, well-trained servants, and a Salley-owned antique shop from which to furnish spacious \u201ccottages,\u201d with meals awaiting them on their arrival\u2013all dovetailing with her slogan, \u201cWe do everything but brush your teeth.\u201d In addition to selling at one time or another virtually \u201cevery large piece of property in Aiken,\u201d Salley maintained an office in Beaufort and sold numerous large hunting preserves in the lowcountry. She knew personally many of the wealthy and famous who seasonally visited. Salley was among the founders of the Aiken Board of Realtors, vice president of the South Carolina Association of Real Estate Boards, and in 1959 was chosen the \u201cFirst Lady of South Carolina Realtors.\u201d Eulalie Salley and Company continued to thrive as a successful real estate company in Aiken after her death.<\/p>\n
Long enamored with the life, beauty, and stories of Lucy Pickens, and disturbed at finding the historic Pickens house, Edgewood (near Edgefield), falling into disrepair, Salley impulsively purchased it. During the Great Depression it was moved piece by piece to Salley\u2019s grandfather\u2019s first homesite in Aiken and remained the Salley home until their deaths. Salley died on March 8, 1975, after a short bout with cancer. Ever the individualist, South Carolina\u2019s \u201cFirst Lady of Real Estate\u201d insisted on burial, not with her husband, but in a \u201csecondhand section\u201d of St. Thaddeus Episcopal Cemetery, with only a single white camellia to mark her remains.<\/p>\n
Bull, Emily L. Eulalie. <\/em>Aiken, S.C.: Kalmia, 1973.<\/p>\n \u201cMrs. Salley, Leader of Suffrage, Dies.\u201d Aiken Standard, <\/em>March 10, 1975, p. 1.<\/p>\n Salley, Eulalie Chafee. Interview by Constance B. Myers. Tape recording. Winthrop University Archives, Rock Hill, South Carolina.<\/p>\n \u2013\u2013\u2013. Papers. South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Suffragist, realtor. Salley was born in Augusta, Georgia, on December 11, 1883, the daughter of Marguerite Eulalie Gamble and George Kinloch Chafee. Her father was in the kaolin (porcelain clay) business, and her mother was an accomplished pianist and product of one of Baltimore\u2019s finest finishing schools. Salley spent an enjoyable but sickly youth, often […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":-1,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","class_list":["post-14811","entry","type-entry","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","ecms-a-z","ecms-aiken-county","ecms-business-and-industry","ecms-civil-rights-era-1955-1969","ecms-encyclopedia","ecms-great-depression-1930-1938","ecms-industry-and-the-gilded-age-1878-1889","ecms-jazz-age-1919-1929","ecms-midlands","ecms-politics","ecms-post-war-america-1946-1954","ecms-recreation-and-leisure","ecms-s","ecms-the-modern-state-1970-present","ecms-turn-of-the-century-1890-1913","ecms-women","ecms-world-war-i-1914-1918","ecms-world-war-ii-1939-1945"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n