Sojourner was long a resident and laborer in reform in Michigan, from which State she went out to the District of Columbia to befriend her people, as well as to other distant fields. She went to help feed and clothe the refugees in Kansas in 1879-80, and in reaching one locality she rode nearly a hundred miles in a lumber wagon. She closed her eventful life in Battle Creek, where she passed her last days, having reached the great age of one hundred and ten years.
Mrs. Laura C. Haviland is another noble woman worthy of mention. She has given a busy life to mitigating the miseries of the unfortunate. She helped many a fugitive to elude the kidnappers; she nursed the suffering soldiers, fed the starving freedmen, following them into Kansas,[1] and traveled thousands of miles with orphan children to find them places in western homes. She and her husband at an early day opened a manual-labor school, beginning by taking nine children from the county-house, to educate them with their own on a farm near Adrian. Out of her repeated experiments, and petitions to the legislature for State aid, grew at last the State school for homeless children at Coldwater, where for years she gave her services to train girls in various industries. Mrs. Sybil Lawrence, a woman of strong character, and charming social qualities, exerted a powerful influence for many years in Ann Arbor. Being in sympathy with the suffrage movement, and in favor of coëducation, she did all in her power to make the experiment a success, by her aid and counsels to the girls who first entered the University. Her mother, sister, and nieces made a charming household of earnest women ready for every good work. Their services in the war were indispensable, and their sympathies during the trying period of reconstruction were all on the side of liberty and justice.
There are many other noble women in Michigan worthy of mention did space permit, such as Miss Emily Ward, a woman of remarkable force of character and great benevolence; Mrs. Lucy L. Stout, who has written many beautiful sentiments in prose and verse: Eliza Legget and Florence Mayhew, identified with all reform movements; Mrs. Tenney, the State librarian; and Mrs. Euphemia Cochrane, a Scotch woman by birth, who loved justice and liberty, a staunch friend alike of the slave and the unfortunate of her own sex. Under her roof the advocates of abolition and woman suffrage always found a haven of rest. Henry C. Wright, Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, Sojourner Truth, Theodore Tilton, Frederick Douglass, Abbey Kelley and Stephen Foster could all bear testimony to her generous and graceful hospitality. She was president of the Detroit Woman Suffrage Association at the time she passed from earth to a higher life.
- ↑ Spending the summer of 1865 at Leavenworth, I frequently visited Mrs. Haviland, then busily occupied in ministering to the necessities of the 10,000 refugees just then from the Southern States. On May 29, I aided her in collecting provisions for the steamer, which was to transport over a hundred men, women and children, for whom she was to provide places in Michigan. I shall never forget that day nor the admiration and reverence I felt for the magnanimity and self-sacrifice of that wonderful woman.—[S. B. A.
