Anne Royall

Anne Royall (June 11, 1769 – October 1, 1854) was a travel writer, newspaper editor, and, by some accounts, the first professional female journalist in the United States.

There, at 16, she and her widowed mother were employed as servants in the household of William Royall, a wealthy American Revolution major, freemason and deist who lived at Sweet Springs in Monroe County (now in West Virginia).

Royall, a learned gentleman farmer twenty years Anne's senior, took an interest in her and arranged for her education, introducing her to the works of Shakespeare and Voltaire, and allowing her to make free use of his extensive library.

She also penned a novel called The Tennessean before setting off for Washington D.C. She became an "itinerant storyteller", according to biographer Jeff Biggers, traveling first to the new state of Alabama, where she wrote the initial of her series of "Black Books".

While in Washington attempting to secure a pension, Anne caught President John Quincy Adams during one of his usual early morning naked swims in the Potomac River.

It is commonly recounted, but apocryphal, that she gathered the president's clothes and sat on them until he answered her questions, earning her the first presidential interview ever granted to a woman.

Afterward Anne toured New England, Pennsylvania, New York and Massachusetts, all the while taking copious notes and using her Masonic connections to help fund her travels.

Royall hired orphans to set the type and faced constant financial woes, which were exacerbated when postmasters refused to deliver her issues to subscribers, until her death at 85 in 1854, bringing an end to her 30-year news career.