Unsung heroes: Kate, Kate, Caroline and Harriet Hamilton Pier—a family of women lawyers who made legal history in Wisconsin

Kate Hamilton Pier

Kate H. Pier

Caroline Hamilton Pier

Harriet Hamilton Pier

Images from the 1887 and 1891 University of Wisconsin Law School graduating class photographs. University of Wisconsin Law Library Digital Repository, Alumni Photos Collection.

By Amy Rabideau Silvers
 
In the history of Wisconsin law, it’s safe to say there has never been anything quite like Kate Hamilton Pier and her daughters.
 
Their story began in the 19th century, decades before women won the right even to vote. Miss Kate Hamilton Pier, daughter of mother Kate Hamilton Pier, graduated from high school in Fond du Lac at 16 and wanted to study law at the Wisconsin State University in Madison, now the University of Wisconsin.
 
Mrs. Pier decided to attend law school, in part to accompany her daughter but also to develop her own business skills.
 
“She greatly desired that her daughters should begin business life under her personal supervision,” according to a sort of who’s who published in 1893 with the weighty title A Woman of the Century: 1470 Biographical Sketches Accompanied by Portraits of Leading American Women in All Walks of Life, edited by Frances Elizabeth Willard and Mary Ashton Rice Livermore.
 
“She had started alone and knew what pioneer business undertaking meant for a woman,” the entry continued. “She wished her girls to benefit by her experience.”
 
Mother and daughter completed the two-year law course in one year, graduating in 1887 with high honors.
 
By 1891, two younger daughters, Caroline Hamilton Pier and Harriet Hamilton Pier, followed suit. Of the eight women then practicing law in Wisconsin, four of them were named Pier.
 
They became, as a headline in The Ladies’ Home Journal declared in 1892, “A Law Firm of Women.”
 
That was just the beginning.
 
“Besides practicing law, the Piers also successfully advocated for legislative changes that expanded opportunities for women,” said an article in Wisconsin Lawyer, published by the State Bar of Wisconsin. “One such accomplishment was to secure statutory amendments that removed bans prohibiting women attorneys from appointments as court commissioners.”
 
The change cleared the way for Mrs. Pier to be appointed Milwaukee County circuit court commissioner in 1892—the first woman to serve as a judicial officer in the United States. The Wisconsin Lawyer article, written by Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah C. Dugan, noted that it would be 44 years before a Wisconsin woman was appointed to serve as judge by a governor, and 78 years before a woman was elected. 
 
Daughter Kate was involved in several state Supreme Court cases, writing one brief soon after law school graduation and appearing with her father, attorney C.K. Pier. In 1889, daughter Kate—under the name Kate H. Pier—became the first woman to argue before the Wisconsin Supreme Court. She won that case and later others.
 
In 1894, she became the first woman to argue before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago, also a victory for her client.
 
The four Piers were among the first 20 women admitted to the U.S. Supreme Court bar, though none of the Wisconsin women argued before that court.
 
To further their feminist mission, “these first twenty women began to move each others’ applications for admission to the Supreme Court bar,” wrote Mary Clark in “The First Women Members of the Supreme Court Bar, 1879-1900." The younger Kate was part of that process, successfully moving to admit her mother and sisters to the U.S. Supreme Court bar.
 
“Regardless of their aspirations to practice in the Supreme Court, these women were motivated to join the bar at least in part by their commitment to furthering opportunities for women. … Their roles as ‘first women’ in the law—attending and establishing law schools, holding positions within the legal profession previously closed to women, and joining bars—reflected and refined their consciousness of breaking down barriers for women in the legal profession. For them, joining the Supreme Court bar was another in a series of steps towards eliminating impediments to women’s participation in the legal profession.”
 
A matter of appearances
 
For its part, The Ladies’ Home Journal observed that the Piers were all “feminine” women who had lost “none of their womanly qualities.” Mrs. Pier was described as a handsome woman whose face “indicates a strong and sweet character, which would temper justice with mercy.”
 
“Miss Kate is very beautiful,” the article continued. “It may be of interest to feminine readers to know that Miss Pier wore, when she plead and won her first case at Madison, a pretty black silk dress, brightened with a bit of color at her throat. It must have been a strange scene, when five most ‘potent, grave and reverend seigniors’ listened to a slip of a girl as she plead her case, and plead it well and with convincing power.”
 
Caroline and Harriet, new members of the family law firm, were also described as pretty girls, “at whom one gladly looks twice.” 

Photographs of the September 1892 edition of The Ladies' Home Journal by Amy Rabideau Silvers.

​​Indeed, it was not only the ladies’ magazine that covered matters of personal appearance during court appearances.
 
The Milwaukee Daily Journal, reporting in 1889 on the younger Kate’s Wisconsin Supreme Court appearance, headlined one item “Raving Over a Lady Attorney.”
 
“She is a beautiful girl, little over 20 years of age, a brunette, with bewitching eyes and very heavy lashes, but her striking feature is her splendid black hair, which falls nearly to the floor in a massive braid,” it read.
 
Nowhere in that hundred-plus-word report did it mention the name of the case or other legal details.
 
The Milwaukee Journal report on her case before the Court of Appeals did only slightly better, at least noting the case in question.
 
“For several hours she compelled the attention of Judges Woods, Baker and Seaman, who sat in begowned dignity while Miss Pier expounded law principles,” it recounted. “The fair pleader wore a tightly-fitting gown of black velvet, with a big American Beauty rose pinned on her breast. The case was a personal damage suit against the Crane Elevator company, which Miss Pier won for her client in the lower court, but which the company appealed.”
 
The appeals court upheld the verdict in Crane Elevator Co. v. Lippert. Kate’s client was a 15-year-old employee of the Western Union Telegraph Co., seriously injured after he fell navigating a dark hallway—no gas jets were lit—where the elevator company had left components during a replacement project.
 
Early family life
 
Colwert K. Pier (aka C.K. Pier), was born into a Fond du Lac County pioneer family. His future wife, Kate Hamilton, was born in Vermont in 1845 and later grew up in Fond du Lac, where she taught for three years after graduating high school.
 
“Her first job was teaching school in the town of Empire. Here she received her board and $5 a month,” according to an obituary after her death in 1925. She next taught in the Fond du Lac schools, where high post-Civil War inflation helped push her wages to $22.50 a month.
 
C.K. returned to his law practice after serving in the Union Army, and the two married in 1866.
 
After the death of her father, Mrs. Pier began handling the estate left to her and her mother, which led to others asking her help on real estate matters.
 
“Inheriting an estate from her father while she was still young, circumstances developed Mrs. Pier into one of the pioneer business women of Wisconsin,” an obituary said. “She had training in real estate in her father’s office … and in the bank and law office in which her husband was interested.”
 
So when her oldest daughter wanted to attend law school, Mrs. Pier had reason to think a law degree could be useful to her, too.
 
The Piers move to Milwaukee
 
After graduating, the women returned to Fond du Lac and began practicing law. In 1888, the Pier family moved to Milwaukee, a more likely spot to support their burgeoning family of lawyers. Daughter Kate worked in the Wisconsin Central Railroad’s law department for a year before joining the family firm.
 
C.K. died in 1895. The Pier women continued to practice.
 
Mrs. Pier’s official duties as court commissioner came to include officiating at the weddings of daughters Caroline and Harriet. The elder Kate died in Fond du Lac at the age of 80.
 
Daughter Kate married railroad contractor James Alexander McIntosh in 1901, moving to New York City and quitting her law practice. After her husband’s death in 1916, she returned to Fond du Lac, where she assumed management of the family’s real estate and was again involved in the legal community, including the Wisconsin Bar Committee on Women Lawyers. She died in 1931.
 
Caroline Hamilton Pier married attorney John Roemer in 1897. As a young lawyer, she specialized in maritime and admiralty law. She died in 1938.
 
Harriet Hamilton Pier specialized in real estate law and argued before the Wisconsin Supreme Court. She married Charles G. Simonds, an electrical engineer, in 1905, and later lived in Rhinelander.
 
“There is probably no woman in the state who has a better idea of the lands of northern Wisconsin than Mrs. C.G. Simonds … who, although residing in Milwaukee, spends much time in the wilds of the north,” reported The Milwaukee Sentinel in 1919. “She is also considered an expert in judging lands and her advice is frequently sought.”
 
An obituary in 1943 called her a pioneer timber cruiser (riding trains to estimate timber value), conservationist, philanthropist, and, of course, one of Wisconsin’s first women lawyers.
 
All were “demonstrating most clearly that they are qualified to rank with men in the learned and honored profession of law,” opined The Ladies’ Home Journal article.
 
“It is not probable that any one of these young ladies is unfitted for a home because she has identified herself with an unusual calling for a woman. Only a few years ago, if a woman found it necessary to work for a living, as she often did (apparently suffering both the curse of Adam and Eve) there was no career open to her save school-teaching or dress-making. Now, as a progressive woman says, ‘she can do anything where her petticoats do not catch in the machinery.’”

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