Laura Matilda Towne

Laura Matilda Towne (May 3, 1825 – February 22, 1901) was an American abolitionist and educator who founded the first school in the United States for the education of freedmen, the Penn School, in 1862 on Saint Helena Island, South Carolina. The school was established as part of the Port Royal Experiment during the American Civil War.

Early life and education Towne was born on May 3, 1825, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to John Towne and Sarah Robinson.

Career She was raised in Philadelphia and was influenced by sermons about the abolition of slavery by William Henry Furness at the First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia. She volunteered in several charity schools in the late 1850s and at the start of the American Civil War in 1861, she was working as a teacher at a school in Newport, Rhode Island. After the Union Army captured Port Royal, South Carolina, and the Sea Islands, the slave-owning plantation owners fled and abandoned over 10,000 slaves. The former slaves soon began to suffer from hunger and disease. Salmon P. Chase, the secretary of the United States Treasury, appointed abolitionist Edward L. Pierce to solve the suffering of the slaves and salvage the valuable cotton crops. He developed the Port Royal Experiment where freed slaves continued to work the land abandoned by slave owners. they founded the Penn School on Saint Helena Island, the first school for newly freed slaves in the United States. The Penn School became a part of the South Carolina public school system in 1948.

In 1867, Towne and Murray purchased and lived on a former plantation on Saint Helena Island named Frogmore. She died at Frogmore on February 22, 1901, and was interred in Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia. A monument was erected in the Brick Church graveyard on Saint Helena Island in her memory.