Connecticut State Route 169
Prudence Crandall Museum, CT

Crandall, Prudence (1803-90), American teacher and reformer, born in Hopkinton, Rhode Island, of Quaker parentage. In 1831 she established a private school for girls in Canterbury, Connecticut offering a cultured education, including classes in moral philosophy, music, drawing and French, taught by a gentleman. Her efforts to groom women into young scholars were praised in the well-to-do village of Canterbury until Crandall entertained radical notions of admitting black students in her school. Then trouble started. In 1833, she admitted a black girl into the school, Sarah Harris, 19, who carried hopes that she would one day become a teacher of her own people.

Her enrollment of young ladies and little misses of color aroused the violent opposition of her neighbors. She lost her white patrons, and in 1833 she decided to open a school exclusively for young ladies and little misses of color. She received 15 or 20 black pupils. Locals welcomed her pupils by smearing cow manure on the steps, throwing eggs and stringing up a dead cat on the front gate. Her neighbors, by boycott, insult, abuse, and enforcement of an obsolete vagrancy law, tried to close the school. Public meetings were called, petitions were circulated, and a few months later State Sen. Andrew Judson pushed through the legislature a Black Law that barred out-of-state black students, forbade anyone to set up or establish any school for education of nonresident blacks, or to instruct or teach in any such school without the consent of local authorities. For resisting this law Prudence was arrested, imprisoned, and, in October 1833, convicted of educating blacks whom the judge said were not subject to constitutional guarantees of equal rights.

In July 1834, the court of errors reversed the decision on a technicality. Soon afterward her house was attacked and partially destroyed, and she abandoned her project. The affair intensified the conflict between the abolitionist and anti-abolitionist elements, forcing Crandall, after marrying, to spend the remainder of her life in Illinois and Kansas.

The building now houses a museum for visitors to tour.