Underground Railroad’s ‘superintendent’ was a woman

In the mid-1800s, America’s Underground Railroad had a “superintendent.” She was Laura Smith Haviland, who lived on a farm in Raisin Township within Lenawee County, Mich., near Adrian.

 

Laura Haviland earned the honorary title of superintendent because she made it her life’s mission to help enslaved people attain freedom, wrote author Jacqueline L. Tobin, an Underground Railroad historian. During Laura Haviland’s lifetime, she helped free freeing thousands of slaves. 

The Underground Railroad grew to prominence in the 1830s as a secret network that was organized to help slaves travel north into Canada. It was called a railroad because the members used railroad terms. The “passengers” were guided by “conductors” from one “station” to another.

 

Laura Haviland, and her husband Charles Haviland, Jr., were devout Quakers who moved from Lockport, N.Y. (north of Buffalo), in 1829 to join her parents and other Quaker families who had settled in a rural section of the Michigan Territory along the River Raisin. 

The Quakers near Adrian began to gather for religious purposes in 1831, and Laura’s father, Rev. Charles Smith, became the first Quaker minister at the Raisin Valley Friends Meetinghouse, built as a place of worship in 1835. 

The majority of Quakers “condemned slavery as brutal and unjust.” Laura Haviland was deeply influenced by the writings of John Woolman, a well-known Quaker abolitionist, who believed “slaveholding was inconsistent with the Christian religion.” 

In her autobiography, published in 1882, Laura Haviland wrote: “The pictures of these crowded slave-ships, with the cruelties of the slave system after they were brought to our country often affected me to tears.” 

Sources said that the Haviland homeplace became Michigan’s first Underground Railroad station, hiding runaway slaves on the family farm. 

Laura Haviland shared an anti-slavery bond with a dear friend, Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, who had moved to Raisin Township in 1830 from Philadelphia, Pa. At a young age, Elizabeth Chandler began writing prose and poetry advocating universal emancipation.

 

Together, Laura and Elizabeth formed Michigan’s first anti-slavery society in 1832. Following a bout with fever, Elizabeth Chandler died in 1834 at age 26. Laura Haviland promised to carry the torch for the abolition of slavery forward in memory of her dear friend. 

In 1837, Laura and Charles Haviland founded a “manual labor school...designed for indigent children,” which was later known as the Raisin Institute of Learning. At the Havilands’ insistence, the school was open to all children, “regardless of race, creed or sex.” It was the first racially integrated school in Michigan. By the following year, the school expanded to accommodate 50 students. 

A calamity occurred in 1845 when an epidemic of erysipelas (a bacterial infection of the skin) killed six members of Laura Haviland’s family, including both her parents, her husband and her youngest child. Laura also fell ill but survived. 

At 36, Laura Haviland was a widow with seven children to support, a farm to run and the Raisin Institute to manage. A lack of funds forced the closing of the school in 1849. But she would persevere. 

In 1851, Laura Haviland helped organize the Refugee Home Society in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, which assisted in settling fugitive slaves. Later, she and a daughter, Anna Haviland Camburn, taught in schools founded for African-American children in Cincinnati and Toledo, Ohio. 

By 1856, she returned home to Michigan with sufficient funds to reopen the Raisin Institute. The institute would close again in 1864, however, when staff and students enlisted to fight with the Union in the Civil War. 

The war opened a new chapter in the abolition movement for Laura Smith Haviland.