Laura Smith Haviland, affectionately known as Aunt Laura, was born in Canada in 1808 and became one of Lenawee County's best-known and most admired figures through a life devoted to helping others. She married Charles Haviland in New York at age 16, moved with him to Michigan around 1829, and lived in Raisin Township, where they raised eight children. Beginning in 1832, she took up humanitarian and social justice work that continued until her death in 1898, most notably in aid of African-Americans and later in the temperance movement. Originally members of the Quaker Church, Laura and Charles left it by 1834 amid divisions over slavery and eventually joined the Wesleyan Methodists, whose antislavery views matched their own. In 1845, disease in Raisin Township killed her husband, her mother, her father, and her youngest child, while she herself survived after being stricken. She nonetheless continued her work as a teacher, nurse, missionary, abolitionist, temperance reformer, and mother. In 1832 she joined the Logan Female Antislavery Society, regarded as the first antislavery society in Michigan and the first women's antislavery society in the old Northwest Territory. In 1839 she created the Raisin Institute, considered the first integrated school in Michigan, and she later started and taught at schools for African-Americans in Cincinnati, Toledo, and Canada. She also personally helped move fugitive slave families northward toward freedom, making repeated trips to Cincinnati from 1846 to 1856 to assist stations on the Underground Railroad, and slave owners at one point placed a $3000 bounty on her. During the Civil War she worked tirelessly for soldiers and freedmen, providing supplies, money, and relief from poor conditions. In 1874 she became involved with the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and served as the Adrian group's first president, and in 1881 her autobiography, A Woman's Life Work, was published. She died in April 1898 and was buried at the Raisin Valley Friends Cemetery in Birdsall.