Lucretia Mott

LUCRETIA MOTT (1793-1880)

Lucretia Coffin Mott and her family moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1809. An ordained Quaker minister, she was active in the anti-slavery, temperance, peace, and women’s rights movements. She and her husband formed the Philadelphia Free Produce Society in 1826, to encourage people not to buy goods made by slave labor. After meeting fiery abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison in 1830, Lucretia co-founded the Female Anti-Slavery Society, a racially mixed women's organization which worked for slavery's abolition, and she was its president for many years.

Because abolitionists had trouble finding people willing to rent meeting space to them, they bought Pennsylvania Hall in 1838, and the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women was scheduled to start its first session on May 14th of that year. But anti-abolitionists, angered that Black women would be attending, tried to disrupt the gathering. The mayor of Philadelphia requested that Black women not be allowed to attend the convention, but the abolitionists refused. A mob burned the hall to the ground.

The Mott family entertained other abolitionists often, including Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and William Garrison, and the Mott family home became a stop on the Underground Railroad. She helped establish the Stephen Smith Home in Philadelphia, a nursing home for people of color. And when the Quaker college at Swarthmore opened in 1869, Lucretia brought two oak trees from Roadside to plant on the campus as a memorial to her husband, who had served on the Board of Managers which established the school. She is buried in Philadelphia at the Friends Fair Hill Burial Ground.

The town of La Mott, Pennsylvania, once called Cheltenham, is named her. She moved here in 1856 with her husband James, to a farmhouse six miles outside Philadelphia which they called Roadside. The home was a stop on the Underground Railroad, and a hotbed of anti-slavery activity.

When John Brown was tried and executed in 1859 for trying to incite an anti-slavery rebellion, his wife stayed with the Motts during the trial, and Lucretia spoke at his memorial service. When the Civil War began in 1861, Roadside became a Union encampment, “Camp William Penn,” and she addressed the 600 soldiers there on July 12, 1863, at the age of seventy.

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