Sadie Kneller Miller

Sadie Kneller Miller

lies beside her husband in the cemetery’s only traditional-style mausoleum. A memorial

such as this befits a most remarkable woman – a photojournalist when no other American woman was pursuing such an adventurous career.

Sadie, a Westminster native, began writing sports articles for the local Democratic

Advocate while attending Western Maryland College, but the public never knew the

stories came from a woman’s pen. She also attended photography lectures. After

graduation, she continued as a sportswriter and began giving dramatic readings at

Carroll County churches and other locations, thus learning how to catch and hold the

attention of her listeners.

In 1894, Sadie Kneller married Charles Robert Miller, also a Western Maryland graduate who played baseball and practiced law. The couple moved to Baltimore where Sadie wrote her sports stories under the initials “SKM” without anyone but her employers knowing her identity. She purchased a camera and began her first ventures into photojournalism by submitting her photographs to Leslie’s

Illustrated Weekly, a New York magazine that circulated throughout the country. Some of her photos won prizes. Soon she was on Leslie’s staff, and her career took off.

She covered events in the U.S. and abroad, combining a vivid style of writing with her

own dramatic photographs. No unfolding story seemed to faze her no matter the

potential personal danger in reporting it. She journeyed to Morocco where the Spanish

were fighting the Moroccans; she interviewed the Mexican guerilla Pancho Villa at his

base in Mexico; she covered the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904 (her first big story); and

she became the first outside woman allowed to photograph a leper colony on the

Hawaiian island of Molokai.

Leslie’s gradually eliminated assignments for Sadie and other foreign correspondents

between 1915 and 1918 as World War I changed the way press coverage worked

overseas. In 1918, when only 51, she suffered a stroke which seriously disabled her and

she died two years later of a heart attack. While many Carroll County women have left

significant local legacies, Sadie Kneller Miller’s life and work were known over much

of the western world.