Prudence Crandall’s Female Academy
I have continued to search for letters and other primary documents that will reveal to me more about the women who attended Prudence Crandall’s Female Academy. By far, the most information is available about her first student, Sarah Harris. Her family celebrated her history and so kept careful care of documents related to Sarah’s life. Sarah also married into a family of well-established and well-regarded blacksmiths, who had a family habit of meticulous record-keeping; a business account book for the family blacksmith shop begins in 1809 and goes through 1868. Sarah’s family was literate, proud of their history, and had the means and foresight to preserve many of the letters, account books, photographs, and other ephemera — to my great delight.
Receipt for Sarah Harris’ Subscription for The Liberator shows that she was a faithful reader of Garrison’s publication for many years. Ephemera contained in the Fayerweather Family Papers.
Unfortunately, Sarah’s classmates remain terribly elusive. My continued search for primary source data pertaining to the 20 other students who attended Prudence Crandall’s Female Academy remains fruitless. Letters are the best and most frequent primary source evidence I have found in researching women. I believe this is because letters were the primary means of communication between literate persons, and also because letters are intimate and deeply relational so people often hold on to them. I still have a shoebox filled with letters from my grandmothers and from my mother who often wrote to me when I was away at college. (All are bound with ribbons, of course.)
Where are Sarah’s classmates letters? Did they have few literate people in their lives with whom to exchange letters? Did they die young? Did they just meticulously purge their homes of old letters and receipts? Are their letters in a special box in some descendant’s attic? Or, might some papers be waiting for me in some small library or historical society collection I have not yet discovered? You can be sure I will let you know when I find out.
Sally Prentice Harris, Sarah Fayerweather Harris’ mother.
In the meantime, perhaps someone out there can help me decipher a passage from a letter from Sally Prentice Harris to her daughter Sarah Harris Fayerweather about sister Jane Harris and her husband David who was ill of smallpox (click on the excerpt and it should give you a close-up). Sally wrote without punctuation and the transcription reflects this:
Excerpt of a letter from Sally Prentice Harris to her daughter Sarah Harris Fayerweather.
“David had the small Pox and you know how frightened every body is well so it was with all the neighbors around here and no one dared come in and there was her sick husband no one to attend upon him and he left so that she could attend upon David well she took care of him until the Dr said he could not live then you know Jane was gone for she always was so nervous when any one dies in the house where she was much more one that she had the care of as she did of him she could not standit no longer and through the Dr Mr ? and his wife came and staid with him until he died she was sick in bed and could not see him when he died but he had his senses until an hour or so before he died then he was a little ? and got up and said he wanted to go home to NH they had to bury him the same afternoon… and Mr. Land and another man and the People Jane said acted like Idiots and then she and Gertrude were alone and she was sick and troubled to death to think that he should die there ….”
Please write in the comment field if you think you can decipher Sally’s handwriting where I have indicated in bold above!
Prudence 