Priscilla Baltimore

Priscilla "Mother" Baltimore (13 May 1801 – 28 November 1882, died age 81 ) was a Black, multiracial, abolitionist, nurse, and community organizer who was formerly enslaved. She adopted orphaned children and assisted former slaves. Her father sold her at age 10. She brought her mother back to St. Louis.

Founding of Brooklyn, abolitionism In 1829, she fled St. Louis, and Missouri (a slave state), crossing the Mississippi with eleven black families, and, on the opposite bank, founded Brooklyn, Illinois, described as a freedom village, according to local oral histories (a village where the inhabitants could, despite the "black codes" in law at the time, live more freely, including escaped slaves legally liable to recapture). After the end of the US Civil War in 1865, Priscilla Baltimore was active in social and religious organizations helping freed slaves coming north. The Brooklyn Historical Society fundraised

Brooklyn is the only known black town founded in the US in the 1800s that survives as a living community. Priscilla Baltimore is still locally remembered and respected as the founding mother of the town.