Laura Smith Haviland

Laura Smith Haviland (December 20, 1808 – April 20, 1898) was an American abolitionist, suffragette, and social reformer. She was a Quaker and an important figure in the history of the Underground Railroad.

Early years and family Laura Smith Haviland was born on December 20, 1808, in Kitley Township, Ontario, Canada, to American parents Daniel Smith and Asenath "Sene" Blancher, who had immigrated shortly before her birth. The Quakers encouraged the equal education of men and women, an extraordinarily forward-thinking position in an age when most individuals were illiterate, and providing a woman with a thorough education was largely viewed as unnecessary. Quaker women as well as men acted as ministers. While most Quakers did not agitate vocally for abolition, the majority condemned slavery as brutal and unjust. Five years later, in 1837, Haviland and her husband founded a "manual labor school ... designed for indigent children," which was later known as the Raisin Institute. Haviland instructed the girls in household chores, while her husband and one of her brothers, Harvey Smith, taught the boys to perform farm work. Some of Haviland's white students, upon learning they were to study with African Americans, threatened to leave. Most were persuaded to remain, however, and Laura wrote that once the students were together in the classroom their prejudices "soon melted away." By 1839, in order to continue with their abolitionist work, the Havilands, her parents, and fourteen other like-minded Quakers, felt compelled to resign their membership. They then joined a group of Methodists known as the Wesleyans, who were equally devoted to the abolitionist cause. Laura remained on for several months as the settlement's teacher. She then traveled to Ohio, where, with her daughter Anna, she taught in a school founded for African-American children in Cincinnati and Toledo, Ohio.

She also traveled to the South on multiple occasions to aid escaped enslaved people. Her first trip was made in 1846, in an effort to free the children of fugitive enslaved humans Willis and Elsie Hamilton. The children were still in the possession of their mother's former enslaver, John P. Chester, a tavern-keeper in Washington County, Tennessee.

Chester had learned of the Hamilton's whereabouts and sent slave-catchers after them. When that failed, Chester attempted to lure the Hamiltons to his plantation with the promise that they would be treated as freedmen and reunited with their children.

Civil War and Reconstruction Laura Haviland holding slave irons. During the Civil War, Laura toured many refugee camps and hospitals, even venturing onto the frontlines, to distribute supplies to displaced citizens, freed slaves, and soldiers. Haviland's actual duties consisted of far more than inspecting hospitals. She spent the next two years traveling through Virginia, Tennessee, Kansas, and Washington, D.C., distributing supplies, reporting on the living conditions of Freedmen and indigent whites, organizing refugee camps, establishing schools, working as a teacher, volunteering as a nurse at freedmen's hospitals, and giving public lectures.

The Haviland Home orphanage After the Civil War, the Freedmen's Aid Commission acquired the former Raisin Institute, renamed it the Haviland Home, and converted it into an orphanage for African-American children. Its first residents were seventy-five homeless children brought by Haviland from Kansas. She is buried next to her husband in the Raisin Valley Cemetery in Adrian, Michigan.

Symbolically, at Haviland's funeral, hymns were sung by a choir of white and African-American singers, and then her casket was carried to the grave by a group of white and African-American pall-bearers. A statue of Laura Haviland stands in front of the Lenawee County Historical Museum in Adrian, Michigan.

Selected work (1866) Letter from Laura Smith Haviland to Sojourner