in Cheyenne on April 2, 1902, at age 87. She is interred at Lakeview Cemetery in Cheyenne, where a simple stone monument adorned only with her name marks her grave site. Since 1960, a statue of her sculpted by Avard Fairbanks has been one of Wyoming's two statues in the National Statuary Hall Collection in the United States Capitol. Another statue stands at the Wyoming State Capitol. In 2018, The New York Times wrote a belated obituary for her. Role in women's suffrage Evidence suggests that the public record celebrating Morris's role as a suffrage leader is largely fabrication. Reports of Morris as suffragist in South Pass City, where she was said to have hosted a momentous tea party for the electors and candidates for Wyoming's first territorial legislature, are not supported by any contemporary accounts, and only appear nearly fifty years after the fact. For many years, Esther Hobart Morris has been celebrated as the "Mother of Woman Suffrage". The legislation had been written a year before she became a justice of the peace, by Civil War veteran and South Pass City resident William H. Bright. Many commenters opposing the women's suffrage movement viewed Morris's appointment as a "dangerous" sign of things to come. Some newspaper columns even opined that more women holding office would cause women to become a "third sex" and unsettle gender expectations. On the other side of the debate, suffragists often pointed to Morris's appointment as evidence of women's ability to hold office. Melville C. Brown's recollection of the 1889 Constitutional Convention Some modern-day researchers have suggested that Morris's oldest son, who became editor of a Cheyenne newspaper, may have played a role in the origins of the story of his mother's role. Critics say that he "concocted it". Other research leads to Morris's friend Melville C. Brown, who was president of the 1889 Constitutional Convention in Cheyenne, who claimed that she had presented the suffrage bill to the legislature. Morris's son Archy Slack followed suit and subsequently referred to his mother in the Cheyenne Sun newspaper as the "Mother of Suffrage". H.G. Nickerson's recollection of a tea party The tea party story might have faded quietly were it not for H.G. Nickerson. Nickerson, who had discovered and opened the Bullion Mine in 1868, later served as a territorial legislator for Lander. He wrote a letter published on February 14, 1919 in Wyoming State Journal,