Laura Smith Haviland
Laura Smith Haviland (1808-1898) ruffled feathers on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. She far overstepped the role of the typical female Underground Railroad worker concerned chiefly with rustling up food and clothing for fugitives hidden in her husband's barn. Furthermore, Haviland ignored the Railroad's usual modus operandi, in which it conducted its work collectively and in secret. Haviland operated out in the open and, usually, alone.…In the early1830s…Haviland headed abolitionist writer ElizabethChandler's local antislavery society (first of its kind in Michigan), the Logan Female Antislavery Society.
For more information or a full account of Laura Smith Haviland see:
Fugate, Sandy. For the Benefit of All: A History of Philanthropy in America. Michigan:
W.K. Kellogg Foundation, 1997, 32.