Born in West Townsend in 1810, Clarina Howard Nichols became an early advocate of women’s rights. After a divorce in 1843, she married George Nichols. As editor of the Windham County Democrat, she strongly advocated women’s property rights, child custody, temperance, and suffrage. In 1852 she became the first woman to address the Vermont Legislature and lectured throughout New England and the Midwest. A staunch abolitionist, she moved with her family to Kansas, where her views on slavery and women’s rights were widely accepted. During the Civil War she was director of a home for orphaned black children in Washington, D.C. She died at her son’s home in Pomo, California, in 1885.