Traveling to History: Three
You Can’t Have a Hero Without a Villain
By James F. Lee
Portrait of Prudence Crandall at the Prudence Crandall Museum. The original of this painting is at Cornell University
Sometimes history presents a momentous choice.
In the fall of 1832, Sarah Harris made a request to Prudence Crandall: “If you admit me to your school, I shall be under the greatest obligation to you.”
Crandall agreed to admit Harris to her private girls’ school in Canterbury, Connecticut, despite the likely consequences.
Sarah Harris was a young African American woman.
The blowback didn’t take long. White families pulled their children out of the school. Undaunted, Crandall had other plans.
My wife and I visited the Prudence Crandall Museum in Canterbury to see the house where Crandall’s courage placed her on the right side of history.
Former museum curator Kaz Kozlowski explained that Crandall was a young Quaker woman originally from Kingston, Rhode Island, who moved to Canterbury when she was nine, and later studied at the prestigious Moses Brown School in Providence. Townspeople invited her to set up a school for Canterbury’s female children – white children.
The school was a success – until the admission of Sarah Harris.
That led to the opening of a new boarding school in April 1833 for “young ladies and little misses of color,” where Black girls could get a broad education in reading, writing, arithmetic, English, natural and moral philosophy, history, chemistry, music, and French.
The town reacted with hostility. The girls were jeered on the streets. One night somebody tried to burn the school down. Newly arrived students had to walk the six miles from the stagecoach stop in Brooklyn, Connecticut, carrying their bags, because no one would offer a Black girl transport to Canterbury.
Later that year, the state of Connecticut passed the “Black Law,” making it a crime for African Americans to enter Connecticut from another state for the purpose of an education. It also made it a crime to operate such a school without local permission. Crandall was charged and found guilty of violating this law. Her case was overturned on appeal on a technicality.
Enraged, a mob ransacked the house.
Worried about the girls’ safety, Crandall finally closed the school in 1834.
Today, the tidy, 16-room federalist house looks much as it did when Crandall opened the Canterbury Female Boarding School in 1831. Most of the furnishings are contemporary to Crandall’s time, many donated by the Crandall family. Display cases and panel presentations are interspersed throughout the house.
Former museum curator Kaz Kozlowski explaining a panel at the museum.
Kozlowski said as many as 24 students might have lived in the house.
“It was elbow to elbow people at that point,” said Kozlowski.
We stopped before a large portrait of Crandall in the hallway, painted in 1834 during the height of the school’s troubles. She wears a plain Quaker dress, and holds a book, symbolizing her role as a teacher.
A dining room display, “a place at the table,” shows the food that the residents ate: potatoes, peas, cheese, and codfish cakes, provided by one of the few stores in Canterbury willing to trade with the school, and from the Crandall family’s nearby farms. On the wall hangs an original portrait of Andrew Thompson Judson, a lawyer and Crandall’s neighbor, instrumental in passing the Black Law, and a prosecuting attorney at her trial.
I asked why his portrait was there. Kozlowski said that the museum wants to tell the whole story and that Judson is central to the events that occurred there, a symbol of the broad opposition to the school.
“You can’t have a hero without a villain,” she said.
A display honoring Julia Williams, a student at the school. The focus of the museum’s research is no longer Prudence Crandall and her family, but rather on the students at the school.
In a downstairs bedroom, we saw a hands-on display created by museum junior docents, providing a glimpse into the life of Julia Williams, from Boston, a student at the school. A trunk contains replicas of everyday items a student from the 1830s would bring to school with her: a writing cabinet, quill pen, hairpin and bonnet, as well as a top, and a cup with a ball attached by a string.
Upstairs, several panels describe education in Connecticut and the education of free Blacks as well. In a display case are inkwells, a school hand bell, and also volumes of The New American Practical Arithmetic and Watson’s Complete Speller Oral and Written, texts Crandall’s students might have used.
At the “Lives and Legacies” display, we learned inspiring stories about some of Crandall’s students, such as Mary Elizabeth Miles, who moved to Canada, where she set up schools like her mentor’s and was later honored by the Canadian government. Another, Mary Harris from Canterbury, became a professor of English at Straight University in New Orleans.
Today, Crandall is honored as the State Heroine of Connecticut. A bronze statue of the teacher and a pupil stands at the state capitol in Hartford.
“It’s such a multi-faceted story,” said Kozlowski. “A lot of folks can’t grasp how big the story is.”
This piece was written after my visit to the museum in 2016. The museum is currently closed for repairs and will reopen in 2021.
The Prudence Crandall Museum in Canterbury, Connecticut. This was the house where Prudence Crandall ran her boarding school for “young ladies and little musses of color.”
