Profile: Minnie Adams (1879–1985)
Minnie Adams (1879–1985) was born Wilhelmina Katherine Lapp in Baden Baden, Germany, in
1879. She was brought by her parents to New York in 1882. In New York Minnie attended school
and met and married a young architect, Frederick J. Adams in 1905. They moved to Sewaren in
Woodbridge Township, at that time a fashionable seaside resort with mansions by the water, a
hotel, and a dock for steamers from New York. The couple remained in Sewaren, where they raised
their three children.
In 1914, Minnie Adams and her friends founded the Sewaren Equal Suffrage League, which
would grow to 150 members. The group held frequent meetings sponsoring suffrage speakers
such as Anna Howard Shaw, the president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.
Adams later recalled that one of the proudest moments of her life was to sit on the same stage as
Shaw and Carrie Chapman Catt (1859–1947) of NAWSA.
Adams was active in various women’s clubs and other local organizations in Sewaren
throughout her life. When the U.S. entered the First World War in 1917, Adams got her suffrage
group together and formed what became the Woodbridge Chapter of the Red Cross, sitting on the
board for many years. Additionally, she was an active member of the Sewaren Land and Water
Club and of the Salmagundi Literary and Musical Society, Woodbridge Township’s oldest social
organization. She also helped found and was a charter member of the Sewaren History Club.
the drive to convince the Board of Education to build a school in Sewaren, which her younger son
later attended.
Minnie Adams, 1910
Courtesy of Evelyn McKim Adams
Minnie Adams’ Red Cross Certicate for
service during World War I
Courtesy of Evelyn McKim Adams
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