Lucy Wright Trundle (1890-1960) was the first woman member of Montgomery County Board of Education.
Lucy Wright Trundle was born on Carroll Springs, her family’s estate near Forest Glen, Maryland. Her mother, Jessie Waite Wright, was an active suffragist who impressed Elizabeth Cady Stanton and was president of several Equal Suffrage organizations in DC and MoCo. For many years, her mother and father Dr. George H. Wright operated the homeopathic Carroll Springs Sanitarium in Forest Glen on the B&O Railroad and the Brightwood Electric Car Line (trolley). Lucy attended Washington area schools. She was a musician and dancer who sailed to Europe after high school graduation to study piano at the Berlin Conservatory in Germany. After returning to the U.S. in 1910, Wright spent some time in New York where she participated in some of the first movies made in the city and graduated from the Washington College of Music in June 1911.
Lucy, the trained musician and dancer frequently performed at society events and women’s clubs. She organized “suffragist dancing class” and Tango Teas. In 1915 she married farmer Americus Dawson Trundle and moved to Poolesville, Maryland. Lucy was active in the Poolesville Women’s Club and was later named to the Board of Directors of the Montgomery County Federation of Woman’s Clubs.
In May 1920, after years of lobbying efforts by women’s clubs throughout the county, Maryland’s Governor appointed Lucy to the County Board of Education, the first woman to hold this position. The Montgomery County Board of Education is the official educational policy-making body in the county. Trundle served from May 10, 1920 (when she was also caring for a four-year-old and twin two-year-old daughters) to February 17, 1925 (when she added a one-year-old son and a newborn daughter). Trundle also became active in community affairs and participated in the annual Rockville Fair.
In the following years, she and her family lived in Sandy Spring, Ashton, and her parental home in Forest Glen. Trundle maintained an active role in the League of Women Voters, the Current Comment Club, and the public school system. In the 1940, Richard Montgomery yearbook, Lucy Trundle is listed as ‘faculty’. During World War II, she was employed at the Maritime Board in Washington. She was also a saleswoman for the Pencraft Company. She died in 1960 at age of 70.