Named in 1923 after Dr. Marcia Gilmore (1859-1939), who owned this land since at least 1911 but called Pasadena her home since the 1890s. The Iowa-born Gilmore received her M.D. at the University of Michigan in 1884 and was living in California by 1888. By all means an independent woman, Dr. Gilmore never married, was active in several Pasadena clubs (above all the Shakespeare club), spent a year abroad in 1904, was devoted to the Unitarian Universalist Church, and was an avowed suffragist: in an 1896 letter to the Los Angeles Record, she wrote, “I want women themselves to decide whether they will vote.” Among her other opinions, at a 1900 book club she praised Edith Wharton’s The Touchstone and Robert Grant’s Unleavened Bread while decrying most modern fiction as “literary trash”.
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