Lydia Maria Child, Sugar Beets and the Split in Abolition

Lydia Maria Child had become a nationally famous author by the early part of the 1830s. Her novel Hobomok caused a stir. The American Frugal Housewife was a bestseller. Her Juvenile Miscellany was the country's first children's magazine. In 1833 she published An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, a stunning exposé of southern slavery. Sales of her other books plummeted in a virtual boycott of her work. In 1838 Child moved to Northampton with her husband, David Lee Child, to produce beet sugar as an alternative to slave-grown sugar cane. Her letters from Northampton describe a pivotal period in the history of anti-slavery and display her writing at its livliest. Her appointment to the business committee of the Massachusetts AntiSlavery Society in 1839 helped spark a walk-out of conservative members. Most Northampton abolitionists had sided with the conservatives and Child's disparaging remarks about Northampton have perhaps led her to be largely forgotten here until recently. She wrote her friend and lawyer Ellis Gray Loring on February 9, 1841: "As for the Connecticut Valley I dislike it more and more every week I live...Calvinism sits here enthroned, with high ears, blue nose, thin lips, and griping fist." In May of 1840 she and David moved to Lonetown, part of what is modern-day Florence with hopes of expanding their sugar making. They bought 100 acres, the Seeger Swamp farm, and installed their sugar making equipment in an old mill. Unfortunately, little went well for the business and by the spring of 1841 found themselves near insolvency. Maria took a job editing the National Anti-Slavery Standard in New York City, moving there while David remained behind on the farm for several more years.

Prudence Crandall and the Advent of the Northampton Association of Education and Industry:

Just as Child was relocating to New York, a group of radical abolitionists began to arrive in Broughton's Meadow (now Florence). The Northampton Association of Education and Industry started a year later and was from the outset committed to an agenda of anti-slavery, free thought and equal rights. A number of its members had been caught up in the controversy surrounding the school for black girls established by Prudence Crandall in Canterbury, Connecticut in 1833. After the school's demise, the Brooklyn Female Anti-Slavery Society was formed in 1834. At the NAEI women members had equal voting rights with the men, were paid the same wages, and held positions of leadership. While some chafed at the demands imposed by the hard-scrabble existence at the "Community" others found the liberation from conventional household tasks invigorating and took advantage of the resources the "Community" offered. Three women who played active roles left their mark at the Association and in their communities after the NAEI broke up in 1846.

Sophia Foord and the Educational Department of the NAEI:

Sophia Foord was a creative educator who came to the NAEI from Dedham in April of 1843 as the school began. We're fortunate to have a letter she wrote to a friend on May 8, 1843 describing her initial impressions of the utopia struggling to take shape: "Well, I am at length located in the looked for heaven. I will not say of rest for I have never anticipated rest here, either for the mind or body – Business is abundant that every one may be readily supplied, but to whom to apply for a judicious bequest of this abundance is not so immediately visible. Order is Heaven's first law, but as we have reason to suppose the earth existed in chaotic state at first before order was established, it is not to be expected that Communities in their infancy will attain it." An ardent abolitionist and friend of Garrison she was among the members Frederick Douglass recalled fifty years later as he looked back on his visits to the Community. George Stetson, a student of Miss Foord's remembered her unique teaching style: "Our schoolroom was frequently the plain back of the present braid factory. On the banks of the river we were taught to build the different geographical formations, miniature islands, capes, promontories, peninsulas, and isthmuses. I have frequently noticed that I have a much clearer idea of these formations than others of my age, who were my superiors in memorizing lessons." After Foord withdrew from the Community in June of 1845 she moved to Concord where she was for a time tutor to the Alcott and Emerson children. Louisa May Alcott recalled her former teacher after her death in 1885: "She is one of the most prominent figures in my early Concord days, when she kept school for the little Emersons, Channings and Alcotts in the poet's barn. Many a wise lesson she gave us there, though kindergartens were as yet unknown; many a flower-hunt with Thoreau for our guide..."

Dolly Stetson

In 1998 seventy-five letters were discovered written between NAEI members Dolly Stetson and her husband James. James had been dispatched to Boston to sell the finished silk the NAEI produced. Dolly is revealed as a thoroughly engaged member of the Community who appreciated the extra freedom sharing household duties and child rearing allowed her. We learn that the writings of Margaret Fuller and Lydia Maria Child were appreciated, of details of Frederick Douglass's speeches, of visits by Garrison, Charles Lenox Remond, Adin Ballou and others, and the result of Dolly's parenting in charming letters from her daughter Almira as well. We had already learned of Dolly's character through the recollections of Giles D. Stebbins, once a student at the NAEI school: "One evening, in their room, the talk was of anti-slavery, and she quoted some Bible texts favoring freedom for all. Gravely and with oracular air, I spoke of Paul and Onesimus, and of the Apostle sending back the slave to his master. I can see still the shade of amused pity that spread over her fine face as she heard me through. Then she took the matter and expounded the Scriptures in the light of liberty. I was confounded, – that I, one of the lords of creation,... should be so utterly humiliated by a person unlearned, and that person a woman! ...We became cordial friends, and having come to into a teachable mood, I learned much from her." When the the Stetsons withdrew from the NAEI Dolly lamented going back to a more conventional situation. She wrote James on Sunday, April 12, 1846: "This is a dull rainy sunday and between the community habits of the children and the sabbath notions of my neighbors I have a good deal to attend to. The transition from community life to life in the world is attended with no small inconvenience."

Francis Judd

Few former NAEI members looked back on their Community years as fondly as Frances Judd. Arriving as Frances Birge from Colebrook, Ct. in May of 1842, she married Hall Judd, the son of noted historian and editor Sylvester Judd. Frances thrived in the Community. On the status of women in the NAEI she remembered, "The question of the equality of the sexes was never discussed. It was accepted as one of our fundamental principles. A wife has been known to vote contrary to her husband, and the family remain intact. Some of the more timid women looked to their husbands as their teachers. I remember one instance when some subject was under consideration, the opinion of the members was asked regarding it. One woman replied, 'My opinion has gone to the West,' referring to her husband's absence from home." Unlike Sophia Foord and Dolly Stetson, Frances Judd remained in what became Florence after Community days. She was a founding director of the Free Congregational Society of Florence, taught school and was elected president of the Hampshire County Women's Suffrage Association in 1872. She withheld taxes to protest that she and other women were denied the vote.

Sojourner Truth's Transformation:Launching a National Campaign from Her Home in Florence

The equal rights community that Sojourner Truth stepped into in 1844 must have seemed like entering a foreign country. As her amaneunsis Olive Gilbert observed in the Narrative of Sojourner Truth, "it must have been no small thing to have found a home in a 'Community composed of some of the choicest spirits of the age,' where all was characterized by an equality of feeling, a liberty of thought and speech, and a largeness of soul, she could not have before met with, to the same extent, in any of her wanderings." The Community provided the medium for her transformation from a charismatic preacher and singer to the sharp-witted abolitionist and women's rights advocate. At a rally organized by the black citizens of Northampton in 1844, Sojourner Truth gave her first anti-slavery speech, launching a career that would last through the Civil War and beyond, to her work on behalf of freedmen in Washington, D. C. Truth was finally settled in her own home in Florence when the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was passed. Having achieved the dream of owning her home, she spent her remaining time as a resident of Florence on the road, going from one speaking engagement or convention to another, until resettling in Battle Creek, Michigan in 1857. Shortly before her death in 1883 she gave a final interview to the Chicago Inter-Ocean in which she remembered her friends in Florence: "At Northampton I worked under Sam Hill, one of the best antislavery men in that abolition community. I was with them heart and soul for anything concerning human right, and my belief is in me yet, and can't get out. George Benson, brother-in-law of William Lloyd Garrison, was one of them. What good times we had! If any were infidels, I wish the world were full of such infidels. Religion without humanity is a poor human stuff. They built me a house in Florence. I was there about seven years ago, and they still call it by my name. Sam Hill built that house for me, and I paid him for it.

Elizabeth Powell Bond, Religious Leader & Educator:

Elizabeth Powell arrived in Florence in 1871 to share the speaker's position at Florence's Free Congregational Society with Charles C. Burleigh, the noted abolitionist. In doing so she would become the first woman to lead a religious congregation in our area. Her family was comprised of committed Quaker abolitionists from Ghent, New York. Friends of William Lloyd Garrison, they hosted Wendell Phillips when he was in the area. The twenty-two-year-old was with Garrison and his family on January 1, 1863 when the Emancipation Proclamation was enacted in Washington. She spent time in Concord as well becoming acquainted with the Emersons and the Alcotts. She was appointmented instructor of Physical Education at Vassar where she became friends with the pioneering astronomer Maria Mitchell. Seth Hunt, a leading member of the Free Congregational Society of Florence, put her name forward as co-speaker though she had little formal training. She was married to Henry Herrick Bond on May 23, 1872 and resigned her position. After Henry died in 1881, at the age of only thirty-eight, she became the sole speaker of the Free Congregational Society, a director of the Florence Kindergarten and opened the Bond School in her own home on Pine Street along with her sister-in-law Mary White Bond. In 1886 she become Dean at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. She is buried in the Spring Grove Cemetery next to her husband Henry Herrick Bond.

Mary White Bond, Educator & Treasurer of Florence Savings Bank:

The Bond family came to Florence from Canterbury, Connecticut, twenty years after many early members of the NAEI arrived from the same area of northeastern Connecticut. Daniel Webster Bond became District Attorney. Henry Herrick Bond was a talented lawyer and the founding treasurer of the Florence Savings Bank. But perhaps most distinguished was Mary White Bond, superintendent of Florence schools and the first woman elected a member of the school committee of Northampton and re-elected every year until her death. She and her sister-in-law Elizabeth Powell Bond founded the Bond School where German, Shakespeare, botany and other advanced subjects were taught. When her brother Henry died in 1882 she took over as treasurer of the Florence Savings Bank, becoming the first woman in the United States, of which we are aware, to serve in this position. She continued at the Florence Savings Bank until her death in 1891.

Anna Garlin Spencer, Ethical Culture, Women's Rights & Peace Advocate:

Anna Garlin Spencer was born in Attleboro, Mass., and grew up in Providence, R.I. where she taught school for three years, wrote for the Providence Daily Journal and began to speak in public. In 1878, she married William Henry Spencer, a Unitarian minister. In 1881 she joined him in becoming co-speaker of the Free Congregational Society of Florence. The Spencers left Florence in 1884 and Anna Garlin Spencer launched a career with impact on the larger society. In 1891, she became the minister of the Bell Street Chapel (Independent) in Providence. She was the first woman ordained in Rhode Island. In 1902, she moved with her husband and family to New York City. Joining the New York Society for Ethical Culture, she became its associate director in 1904; she left this position in 1912. She was Professor of Sociology and Ethics at the Meadville Theological School (1913-18), lecturer at the University of Chicago (1918), and from 1920 until her death, a special lecturer at Teachers College, Columbia University. Active in many reform movements and charities, she was a champion of women's rights and a pacifist.

Sarah Askin, Ladies Industrial Union & Free Congregational Society:

Born in Lanesborough, MA in 1818 to a mixed race or "mulatto" family, Sarah Ann Askin, moved to Florence with her six children in 1849 to join her husband Nelson, who had opened the town's first livery business. Soon after she arrived, her husband abandoned the family leaving Sarah to raise six children on her own. According to the U.S. Census of 1850, two families of African Americans, one member, the known self-emancipated slave Lewis French, lived with Sarah and her children in Florence, possible documentation of a free-born black providing refuge to fugitive slaves. Several other households along Nonotuck Street showed similar settlement. Sarah supported her children by taking in laundry and "working out by the day." Her son Luther played on the Eagle baseball team and is the first known African American to play on an integrated team in the country. He became foreman at the Florence Manufacturing Company. She was active in the Free Congregational Society and the Ladies Industrial Union, sitting at the head of the table at its public suppers. Sarah purchased a twofamily home on Nonotuck Street and lived there until she died in 1906 at the age of 88. Sarah and four of her children are buried in the Park Street Cemetery. Luther is buried in the Spring Grove Cemetery.

Elizabeth Palmer Peabody: Florence Kindergarten

In 1875 Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, one of the inner core of Boston transcendentalists in the 1830s and '40s, was committed to early childhood education. She assisted Bronson Alcott in his controversial Temple School in 1834-35 where corporal punishment was frowned on and conversation with students was encouraged to coax from them their own opinions of what their education should entail. Her Record of School is a detailed accounting of the school's operation. She opened the first kindergarten in the U.S. in 1860 and in 1867 travelled to Germany study the original Froebel kindergartens first hand. In 1875 she gave a lecture series at Cosmian Hall about the kindergarten concept. Samuel L. Hill was in attendance and the next year he established the Florence Kindergarten in the parlors of his house on Maple Street. Peabody herself trained the first batch of teachers. Though a leading officer of the NAEI, Hill had helped with young students at the Community School. He created an endowment for the Florence Kindergarten so that all children in Florence could attend for free, regardless of their race, sex, or background. By 1876 the school had outgrown the rooms in his house and he built a beautiful structure adjoining his house that still accommodates the kindergarten today.

Auretta Roys Aldrich: Florence Kindergarten

Auretta Roys Aldrich, a trained teacher who had also travelled to Germany for study, become the first "kindergartner" by 1877. That year she published The Kindergarten Hand Book with Milton Bradley in Springfield. She had grown up in the Hopedale Community, a "utopian" experiment contemporaneous with the NAEI. She moved into a separate house that Hill had built for the head of the kindergarten. Her daughters, Ida and Florence, married Charles, Jr. and Edward Burleigh, the sons of leaders of the Free Congregational Society. When Aldrich appealed to Peabody to leave Florence to become a teacher of teachers, Peabody insisted she stay, "I want Florence to continue to be a city set on a hill sending out Diamond Light all over the country and I do not want any dross interwoven in its web of gold." The kindergarten continues to this day as part of the Hill Institute that also offers numerous popular adult education classes.