The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture

HUME, ANNETTE ROSS (1858–1933).

Amateur photographer and clubwoman Annette Ross Hume, daughter of James and Catherine Darling Ross, was born on March 8, 1858, in Perrysburg, Ohio. Annette Ross married Dr. Charles R. Hume on December 27, 1876, and in 1890 they moved to Anadarko, where Dr. Hume was agency physician for the Kiowa, Comanche, and Wichita. Of five children, two sons survived, Carleton Ross and Raymond Robinson.

In the late 1800s, with the advent of light-weight cameras and less toxic chemicals, middle-class women enjoyed photography as a hobby. For twenty years beginning in 1891 Annette Hume photographed American Indians (including Geronimo and Quanah Parker) living near the agency as well as the settling of Anadarko after the land lottery in 1901. Her photographs, numbering more than seven hundred, add imagery to history as Oklahoma Territory transformed from reservations to towns and farm communities.

Before her death on January 19, 1933, in Minco, Oklahoma, Hume, a Presbyterian, was president of the Women's Territorial Synodical Society. Inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame in 1930, she was a charter member of the Anadarko Philomathic Club, organized in 1899, and had served as president of the Oklahoma Federation of Women's Clubs from 1913 to 1915. She wrote An Historical Sketch of the Federation of Women's Clubs of Oklahoma and Indian Territories, 1898–1908, published at Anadarko in 1908.

Linda D. Wilson