Prudence Crandall Annuity

[W. Gray]

In 1877, Prudence Crandall moved to Elk Falls from Illinois after her husband died.

One source says she started a school for Indian children at Elk Falls but I had never heard that before. What few Indians there were near Elk Falls had moved south to Oklahoma seven years earlier.

Mark Twain pushed the Connecticut legislature to provide her with a pension and he also offered to buy her a Connecticut home, but she declined the offer.

From the Hartford Courant of April 9, 1886:

Mrs. Prudence Crandall Philleo writes from her "three-room pioneer box house" at Elk Falls, Elk County, Kan., under date of April 5 to a gentleman who telegraphed her the news on the day of the final passage of the resolution giving her an annuity of $400. After expressions of thanks to him and to others who had advocated her cause, she says:

What an amount of obligation I am under to the press generally, and above all to those noble, progressive persons who got up the petition at the first to be presented to their State Legislature in my behalf.

I wish to express my gratitude and thankfulness to that worthy body for the appropriation, with which I am more than satisfied. In 1833, when the law was passed by which my life prospects were destroyed, it was celebrated by ringing the bell hung in the steeple of the church, into which we were not allowed to enter, and by firing a cannon 13 times, placed upon an eminence a few rods from my door; and to-day, when your telegram arrived, the only jubilant display I wished to make was to have a private nook where my tears of joy and gratitude could flow, unobserved, for the change that has been wrought in the views and feelings of the mass of the people. Yours truly, Mrs. P. C. Philleo


Her Elk Falls house was torn down several years ago, but the last time I was in Elk Falls there was a sign in a yard noting that that was where her house stood.

She was 83 when she began receiving the pension and died four years later.

[sixdogsmom]

Waldo, according to a history about Prudence Crandall that I read from the Moline City library she was really 'into' spiritualism. I believe the history was part of a thesis written by an Emporia teachers college student in the 1950s. Very interesting stuff.