Prudence Crandall

The academy's change began with one student. Sarah Harris, the 20-year-old daughter of a free African American farmer near Canterbury, asked to attend so she could prepare to become a teacher, and Crandall admitted her. Parents demanded her expulsion; when Crandall refused, they withdrew their daughters, and in April 1833 she opened a school for African American girls. Townspeople threw rocks, eggs and manure and refused to sell her supplies, so goods were shipped in from outside, and William Lloyd Garrison advertised the school in The Liberator. Crandall and her brother Hezekiah are buried in Elk Falls Cemetery.

What the plaque says

Prudence Crandall In 1831, Prudence Crandall, educator, emancipator, and human rights advocate, established a school which in 1833, became the first Black female academy in New England at Canterbury, Connecticut. This later action resulted in her arrest and imprisonment for violating the "Black Law." Although she was later released on a technicality, the school was forced to close after being harassed and attacked by a mob. She moved with her husband Reverend Calvin Philleo to Illinois. After her husband died in 1874, she and her brother moved to a farm near Elk Falls. Prudence taught throughout her long life and was an outspoken champion for equality of education and the rights of women. In 1886, supported by Mark Twain and others, an annuity was granted to her by the Connecticut Legislature. She purchased a house in Elk Falls where she died January 27, 1890. Over a hundred years later, legal arguments used by her 1834 trial attorneys were submitted to the Supreme Court during their consideration of the historic civil rights case of Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education. Erected by Kansas Historical Society and Kansas Department of Transportation

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Little House on the Prairie Museum — 26 mi
  The Ingalls family's claim of 1869 and 1870 southwest of Independence, a squatter's homestead on the Osage Diminished Reserve, with a replica cabin, schoolhouse and post office.