Windham COUNTY · Education, abolition and civil rights
Canterbury’s school for equality: Sarah Harris, Prudence Crandall and their students
A student’s request for education changed a Canterbury school and provoked a struggle that reached Connecticut’s courts. Later architectural photographs preserve the place, while archival records preserve the conflict.
Historical focus · 1832–1834; photographs from 1940
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The story in photographs
July 16, 1940
The former school building, 1940
Historic black-and-white view of the clapboard Elisha Payne House with its central entrance and Palladian window.
Image credit & source
Stanley P. Mixon, Historic American Buildings Survey; Library of Congress, HABS CT-163.
U.S. government HABS photograph; no known restrictions. Existing repository crop via Wikimedia Commons. Repository JPEG display copy; no cropping or reconstruction by this website.
Original source · Reuse termsJuly 16, 1940
Staircase and hallway, 1940
Historic photograph of a staircase, patterned carpet and arched hallway inside the former school building.
Image credit & source
Stanley P. Mixon, Historic American Buildings Survey; Library of Congress, HABS CT-163.
U.S. government HABS photograph; no known restrictions. Existing repository crop via Wikimedia Commons. Repository JPEG display copy; no cropping or reconstruction by this website.
Original source · Reuse termsTHE STORY BEHIND THE PHOTOGRAPHS
People, places, and change.
Sarah Harris asks to learn
In 1832 Sarah Harris, a young Black woman, asked to attend the Canterbury Female Boarding School. Principal Prudence Crandall admitted her, encouraged by Harris and by Maria Davis, a Black woman working in the household who shared the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator. After white residents opposed integration, Crandall reopened the school in 1833 for Black and Brown students arriving from several states. [1]
A school challenged by law and violence
Connecticut’s “Black Law” restricted out-of-state Black and Brown students from attending without local approval. The State Archives identifies a June 26, 1833 complaint and warrant and a sheriff’s arrest dated June 27. Further court records preserve the prosecutions and appeal. The case was ultimately dismissed, but a nighttime mob attack in September 1834 forced the school to close. The legal record and the closure are separate parts of its history. [1] [2]
Students, memory and the limits of a photograph
Students including Julia Williams, Mary Miles and Mary Harris later became educators and reformers. The surviving building also has a later history: HABS photographed its exterior and hallway on July 16, 1940. Those views document the house more than a century after the school. The museum cautions that few sources explain the school-era use of individual rooms, so the pictured furnishings should not be described as the students’ classroom arrangement. [1] [3]
Keep the sources close.
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Building dates and photograph dates are recorded separately. Later photographs are identified in their captions; unknown exposure dates remain unknown. Follow each image’s credit and reuse terms.