Present-day Florence was one of the most active centers of the anti-slavery movement in America. In 1842, members of the Northampton Association of Education and Industry, including Samuel L. Hill and George Benson, established a utopian community organized around a communally owned and operated silk mill. Those drawn to it sought to challenge prevailing social attitudes by creating a society in which “the rights of all are equal without distinction of sex, color or condition, sect or religion,” and they were especially united around the abolition of slavery. Most were followers of William Lloyd Garrison. Sojourner Truth, born Isabella, came from Ulster County, New York, in 1843 to join the Association as a former slave, and there she came into contact with abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, and Wendell Phillips. Through them and other members of the Association, she was introduced to a wider world of nineteenth-century reform and thereafter became well known not only in anti-slavery circles but also in the women’s rights and temperance movements. Florence was also a major station on the Underground Railroad. David Ruggles, who had assisted over 600 slaves to freedom and owned the first African-American publishing house in New York, arrived at the Northampton Association in November 1842 broken in health and nearly blind. There he found supportive companionship and rest, became an advocate and one of the first practitioners of hydropathy, and after successful treatment in Boston became a student and then a doctor of hydropathy, establishing the first hydropathic hospital in the nation in Florence.

Photo: Don Morfe

Photo: Don Morfe