Biographical Note

Kate Stevens Bates lived from 1852 to 1941. She grew up in Newport, Rhode Island, and Dorchester, Massachusetts. She was the daughter of Isaac Ingalls Stevens, governor of the Washington Territory from 1853 to 1857. She was married to Edward Wingard Bingham in 1886. After her first marriage, she moved to Portland, Oregon, where her husband had a home and a mother. E. W. Bingham and his brother John invented an improved horseshoe, and went to Boston and New York to promote it. They founded the Bingham Sectional Horseshoe Company. Kate Bingham accompanied her husband, and lived in Dorchester and New York from 1887-1888. The horseshoe business failed, so the couple returned to Portland, Oregon in 1888, where Mr. Bingham practiced law. His most famous case was the Terwilliger will case. He also was involved in ballot reform. Mrs. Bingham was a member of the Unitarian Society in Portland, prominent socially, and an amateur writer for newspapers and magazines. The diaries refer to such prominent Portlanders as the Strongs, Eliots, Deadys, Catlins, Griswolds, Failings, and McArthurs. At various times she and her husband visited Bingham Springs in Eastern Oregon and she visited friends in Olympia, Washington. Both places are fully described in her diaries. Mr. Bingham died in 1904, and in 1913 she married James H. S. Bates. After her second marriage, Mrs. Bates lived for a time in Massachusetts and after 1918 at Cloverfield Farms, near Olympia, Washington.