Carse, Matilda Bradley (19 November 1835–03 June 1917), temperance worker, editor, and entrepreneur, was born near Belfast, Ireland, the daughter of John Bradley and Catherine Cleland, Scottish merchants whose ancestors had migrated to Ireland in the seventeenth century. Educated in Ireland, Carse emigrated in 1858 to Chicago. In 1861 she married Thomas Carse, a railroad manager with whom she had three sons. After her husband’s death in 1870, her youngest son was killed by a drunken drayman, propelling Carse into the temperance cause just as the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was organizing. She devoted much of the rest of her life to business and volunteer activities related to that organization....
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Carse, Matilda Bradley (1835-1917), temperance worker, editor, and entrepreneur
Ruth Bordin
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Chapin, Sarah Flournoy Moore (14 March 1830?–19 April 1896), reformer and temperance worker
Ruth Bordin
Chapin, Sarah Flournoy Moore (14 March 1830?–19 April 1896), reformer and temperance worker, known by the nickname Sallie, was born in Charleston, South Carolina, the daughter of George Washington Moore, a wealthy Methodist minister, and Elizabeth Martha (Vigneron) Simons, who was of Rhode Island Huguenot ancestry. Sallie spent her childhood in Cokesbury, South Carolina, where she was educated at the Cokesbury Academy. In 1847 she married Leonard Chapin, a prominent Charleston businessman and philanthropist who was instrumental in founding the Charleston Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA). They had one adopted child....
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Comstock, Elizabeth Leslie Rous Wright (1815-1891), Quaker minister and reformer
Thomas D. Hamm
Comstock, Elizabeth Leslie Rous Wright (30 October 1815–03 August 1891), Quaker minister and reformer, was born in Maidenhead, Berkshire, England, the daughter of William Rous, a shopkeeper, and Mary Kekwick. Her parents were Quakers with family ties to the Society of Friends going back to the seventeenth century. They reared her in a strict Quaker atmosphere, an upbringing reinforced by education in Quaker schools at Islington and Croyden. In 1839 Elizabeth Rous returned to Croyden as a teacher; in 1842 she joined the staff of the Friends school at Ackworth. She remained there until her marriage in 1848 to Leslie Wright, a Quaker market gardener of Walthamstow in Essex. They had one child. After her husband’s death in 1851, Elizabeth Wright kept a shop for a time at Bakewell in Devonshire. In 1854 she immigrated with her daughter and an unmarried sister to Belleville, Ontario. Four years later she married John T. Comstock, a prosperous Quaker farmer of Rollin, Michigan, where Elizabeth Comstock and her daughter moved....
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Lumpkin, Joseph Henry (1799-1867), jurist and reformer
Timothy S. Huebner
Lumpkin, Joseph Henry (23 December 1799–04 June 1867), jurist and reformer, was born near Lexington in Oglethorpe County, Georgia, the son of John H. Lumpkin and Lucy Hopson, planters. At age seventeen Lumpkin entered the University of Georgia, but because the school soon fell on hard times he left to complete his studies at the College of New Jersey (later Princeton), where he graduated with honors in 1819. Afterward he returned to Oglethorpe County, where he studied law with Judge Thomas W. Cobb, established a law practice in Lexington in 1820, and married Callendar Cunningham Grieve, a native of Scotland, in 1821. Over the next several years, Lumpkin made a name for himself as a talented lawyer and an exceptional orator. He served a single term in the Georgia General Assembly in 1824–1825, founded a literary and oratorical society at the University of Georgia in 1825, and helped rewrite his state’s penal code in 1833....
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Quinton, Amelia Stone (1833-1926), advocate for Native-American rights and temperance leader
Sara N. Romeyn and Michelle E. Osborn
Quinton, Amelia Stone (31 July 1833–23 June 1926), advocate for Native-American rights and temperance leader, was born in Jamesville, New York, the daughter of Jacob Thompson Stone and Mary Bennett. She was raised in Homer, New York, educated at Cortland Academy, and after graduation taught for several years at various institutions throughout the country. While teaching at a seminary near Madison, Georgia, she met and married the Reverend James Franklin Swanson, a Georgia native. He died within a few years of their marriage. They had no children. She then moved to Philadelphia, taught at Chestnut Street Female Seminary, and formed a lifelong relationship with ...
