Laura Towne on Repairing Books

Laura Matilda Towne (1825-1901) was a trained homeopathic physician, having studied at Women’s Medical College in Philadelphia. However, she was also an abolitionist. When calls went out for volunteers to help the freed slaves in the Sea Islands of South Carolina, Towne volunteered to go.

She arrived in Port Royal on April 9, 1862 and never looked back. The islands had been captured by the Union army in August 1861. The plantation owners and their families had fled. But thousands of poverty-stricken former slaves remained behind. There she joined other abolitionists, who using funds donated by northern abolition groups, distributed food, clothing and provided education.

At first, hesitant to teach and full of the prejudices she brought with her, Towne served as a housekeeper for the abolitionists there and tended to the medical needs of the community. But after a few months, she helped found a school at the Brick Church for eighty adult students.

Teaching became her joy, especially preparing black women to be teachers. But the need for schools was great. To help, the Pennsylvania Freemen’s Relief Association sent a school house in sections. This was set up opposite the Brick Church school and became known as the Penn School.

At the end of the war, she encouraged the government to distribute the plantation lands to the former slaves. They were eventually given ten acres each.

She and her life-long companion Ellen Murray bought Frogmore Plantation. Together they adopted several freed children who needed homes.

But the post war period proved difficult. Money that northerners had been sending to help the freed slaves dried up. Towne ended up using her own money to run the schools and keep them in repair. Despite malaria, Towne operated Penn School until her death in 1901. The school operated school until 1901. She left the school to Hampton College, which at that time was known as Penn, Normal, Industrial, and Agricultural School.

Towne persisted in spite of these difficulties. In the excerpt below taken from her diary, she describes how she had to patch school-books together for her students.

September 27, 1874 For three weeks now, all day, and for a long time in the evening too, I have been mending school-books. W. helped me, and indeed, was so skillful at binding that he did most of it for two weeks; but now he is away, I am patching torn leaves. Sometimes I put nearly a hundred patches into one book, so you may know the labor. I use thin paper and paste over the print. These books have been put away as worn out, but now that the fund is nearly exhausted, we cannot afford new books, and must have some, so I have undertaken a heavy, tiresome job. It will take me another week of incessant labor all day long to finish, and then I will have secured ten to twenty dollars’ worth of—before—worthless books. I like to do it fortunately. There is a satisfaction in turning out a neat, nicely bound, and patched book, from a horrid pair of covers and many ragged leaves. In some cases I put two half-worn books together, rejecting bad parts, and so make one as good as new.