Angela Rose Canfield was born in 1840 in New York State.[1][2] Around the 1860s, she married O.J. Hildreth; she later remarried.[1]
During the Civil War, she served as superintendent of the U.S. Army messhouse in Nashville.[1] She then worked as a Pinkerton private police officer and combatted the Molly Maguires in Pennsylvania in the late 1800s.[2]
Around 1881, Canfield settled in Warren, Illinois, where she became active in the statewide women's suffrage movement.[2][3] She was also affiliated with the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and various other women's activism organizations.[3] In the early 1890s, she established a milliner's shop in the town.[3]
In April 1915, Canfield was elected mayor of Warren, Illinois.[1][2][3][4] She defeated two other candidates by a plurality of four votes.[1] On her election, at age 75, she became the first woman mayor in the town as well as across the entire state of Illinois.[2][3][5]
Canfield took office on May 1 of that year and served a two-year term.[1][2] She vowed to punish "boodlers and grafters," as well as law enforcement officers who didn't pull their weight.[2] She stepped down after finishing her term in 1917.[6]
Canfield died on August 23, 1925, in McMinnville, Oregon.[7][8]
