Harmonia Cemetery

Battle Creek, Michigan

By Jeffrey Insko

In the heart of downtown Battle Creek, Michigan, near the bank of the Kalamazoo River, stands a memorial statue of the abolitionist activist and orator Sojourner Truth. Twelve feet tall, bespectacled and beshawled, Truth towers over an oversized lectern, presumably addressing an enrapt audience, her right hand resting on a Bible. Dedicated in 1999, the monument commemorates the 27 years — the last 27 years of her life — Truth spent in Battle Creek, much of it just across the river from the memorial site in the home on College Street she bought in 1867.

But if you were to travel six miles downriver to Bedford Township, you might find, not far from the river’s southern bank and perched upon a hill at the edge of what is now an industrial park, Harmonia Cemetery, the last remaining vestige of the short-lived utopian community Truth joined when she first moved to Michigan in 1857. A year earlier, Truth had visited Battle Creek from her home in Northampton, Massachusetts, for the annual meeting of the Progressive Friends in Michigan, a group of dissident Quakers devoted to abolition, women’s rights, and Spiritualism. Truth had been introduced to Spiritualism — the belief that the living could communicate with the dead — through her friends the radical reformers Isaac and Emily Post. During the first half of the 1850s, Truth attended other yearly meetings of Progressive Friends (sometimes called the Friends of Universal Human Progress) in New York and Pennsylvania, as well as seances and various antislavery gatherings with many of the period’s leading reformers and social and religious dissenters.

The precise circumstances that caused Truth to decide to join permanently the Progressive Friends in Michigan remain unknown. Well before the move, she had already earned renown and respect among abolitionists for her powerful speeches, sharp wit, and fierce activism, so it’s easy to see why her Western friends would have been eager to have her join them. What’s more, her time with the Northampton Association of Education and Industry, a mixed-race communitarian experiment she had joined in 1843, had accustomed her to living among like-minded radicals and troublemakers. Whatever her reasons, she sold her Northampton property and paid $400 for a lot and house in the fledgling new village situated just south of the river, where the Hicksite Quaker Reynolds Cornell had purchased some 230 acres of land in 1850. Later, in 1855, he platted and parceled 140 of those acres into one acre lots and incorporated the Village of Harmonia. Its name derived from the 1850 Swedenborgian philosophical tract The Great Harmonia, dictated, or so the story goes, by the prominent Spiritualist Andrew Jackson Davis while entranced.

By 1855, the Battle Creek area was already a progressive haven, a welcoming home for the religiously and politically unorthodox, and a central hub for Western abolitionism. Cornell was active in the state’s antislavery society. The city’s first antislavery newspaper The Signal of Liberty launched in 1841, followed by the even more boisterously abolitionist paper The Michigan Liberty Press, which ran from 1848-49 until it was destroyed by fire. Battle Creek was also a “station” on the Underground Railroad, where so-called stationmasters like Erastus and Sarah Hussey, and Truth herself, assisted freedom seekers on their journey from enslavement. It was home, too, to a small but thriving free Black community.

As for Harmonia, too little is recorded of its history, although we know the community was biracial, socially lively (it was rumored to be a bastion of free love!), and included, along with a store and a blacksmith shop, a seminary called the Bedford Institute, probably conducted according to Spiritualist tenets and run by Cornell’s son Hiram. Census records indicate that Truth’s grandson Samuel Banks attended the school for at least one year in 1859. Vibrant though it may have been, the community remained small; as late as 1873, it appears that relatively few of the original lots were occupied with houses. Even worse, a tornado swept through the village in 1862, destroying much of it and shearing the top two floors off of the four-story school. The next year, the Cornells moved away from Michigan and Truth appears to have moved from Harmonia about the same time, though she left the house to her daughter Sophia, where she and her family lived for another 30 years. In 1867, Truth purchased and moved into the house on College Street.

Other than a handful of headstones, almost all visible traces of Harmonia have long since been erased, overwhelmed by the twin forces of empire and industrialization. During the first world war, the land of utopian dreams was converted into a military training ground named, unfortunately, for the Michigan native and disgraced Army general George Armstrong Custer; the schoolhouse itself was converted, literally, into a gun school. Today, Fort Custer remains a National Guard Training Center. The rest of the area hosts an industrial park populated mainly by facilities that produce automotive parts. Earlier this year, when a local historian set out to pinpoint the precise location of Truth’s Harmonia residence, plat maps revealed that the site is now the recycling center at a thermal manufacturing plant.

As for the Kalamazoo River at the bottom of the hill, for centuries the life-giving artery of the region for indigenous peoples, settlers, and utopians alike, it has suffered from decades of industrial pollution, not least the million gallons of diluted bitumen that gushed into the river after an oil pipeline burst just upriver from Battle Creek in 2010. Four years and a billion dollars worth of cleanup after the spill improved the condition of the river considerably, but a significant amount of unrecoverable oil still remains. West of Battle Creek, areas of the river long ago contaminated with PCBs remain as well. Ongoing mitigation efforts at those sites have been severely hampered recently by a botched dam drawdown in 2021 that released hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of sludge and sediment, smothering fish spawning habitats and creating massive mudflats. The river suffers still.

How many times, one wonders, must Truth and her comrades have crossed that river unspoiled, planning for justice? Even more terribly, perhaps, the route taken by that same pipeline as it traverses the state on its way to petrochemical refineries in Ontario uncannily follows the pathway to freedom taken by hundreds of the formerly enslaved, seeking refuge, not toxins, on the other side of the border. Underground transport today portends ecocide and planetary destruction rather than freedom. Which is to say that now, as much as then, we need Sojourner Truth’s expansive vision of justice. We also need more of the courage she displayed in pursuit of it.

Jeffrey Insko is Professor of English at Oakland University in Michigan, where he teaches courses in nineteenth-century US literary history and culture and the Environmental Humanities. He is the author of History, Abolition, and the Ever-Present Now in Antebellum American Writing (Oxford, 2018) and the editor of the Norton Library edition of Moby-Dick (2023). He is currently writing a book about the Kalamazoo River oil spill.

Photo by Tom Deater.

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Lovejoy State Memorial
Alton, IL

By Evan Allen Wood

Elijah Parish Lovejoy was shot by members of a mob and succumbed to his wounds on the evening of November 7, 1837, in Alton, Illinois. Decades later, the community erected a 110-foot-tall monument honoring him. The monument has a central granite column with a winged statue of Victory cast in bronze on top. Looking at the monument from the eponymous Monument Ave. it appears neatly framed by the stone retaining wall and staircase leading into the cemetery. Beside it are two smaller columns with a curved whispering wall wrapping around behind.

Lovejoy had been publishing The Alton Observer, an anti-slavery newspaper, for the better part of three years, and on the day he died a mob formed—not for the first time—intent on destroying the Presbyterian minister’s press. Lovejoy’s editorials were written in a straightforward voice, and he often invoked his Christian faith. In a characteristic example from September 8, 1837, he wrote: “It is the duty of us all to unite our hearty and zealous efforts to effect the speedy and entire emancipation of that portion of our fellow-men in bondage.” Although his friends rallied to his side, an exchange of gunfire left the 34-year-old editor dead. Nobody was prosecuted in the weeks that followed, and Lovejoy’s body had to be buried in a secret location lest the citizens who’d participated in his killing decide to press their harassment beyond the grave.

It’s hard to look past the irony of a community tacitly allowing a mob to kill one of its citizens then several decades later erecting a grand monument heralding the same man as a defender of the free press and superior moral convictions. The cynical view might hold that the monument constitutes an attempt for the river town to paper over the reality of its past. But allowing Lovejoy to rest in an anonymous grave is an even less preferable course. It would not be unreasonable to ask how a community could best practice restorative justice for a killing that was, by that time, sixty years gone.

Abolitionist organizing wasn’t a safe proposition anywhere in the United States in the 1830s. Mobs tarred and feathered or otherwise chased away abolitionist speakers, editors, and groups from Nashville to New York. It’s fair to posit that the consequences tended to be more dire in states where slavery was legal like Missouri, but abolition, which entailed immediate emancipation of all people kept as slaves (as opposed to gradualism which called for a slower end to the practice), was still a fringe view among anti-slavery advocates in the US at this point.

Elijah Lovejoy knew he was risking his life by continuing to publish his paper, originally called The St. Louis Observer. He moved upriver from St. Louis to Alton to avoid mob justice on the western banks of the Mississippi, where his paper’s offices had been raided and his press destroyed. Alton, despite being in a free state, was not a safe haven for Lovejoy. His press was again destroyed and tossed into the river after it had been shipped to its new home, and mobs would harass Lovejoy and his Observer multiple times before his death.

Each new instance of peril seemed only to strengthen Lovejoy’s resolve. He spoke out on his own behalf at community meetings and walked the streets, damn the consequences. That his life was in danger was something he often acknowledged in editorials and addresses, but he was unwilling to abandon his cause. In his final recorded remarks, apparently from a public meeting of Alton citizens, he remarked that “if I die, I have determined to make my grave in Alton.” Lovejoy’s determination in the face of mortal danger was commendable; perhaps the monument is a fitting tribute.

But one can’t help but think of the thousands of lynching victims across the nation who gave no act of provocation at all, let alone publishing inflammatory editorials. As the National Lynching Memorial has demonstrated, these victims of racial violence are worthy of monuments, as grand as can be built.

Monuments can’t undo the pain caused by the deaths they commemorate any more than they can pardon the communities complicit in them. But a society with a clear sense of its own history is one that properly remembers its heroes and villains. A tour of public statues and monuments across the US at present reveals our ideas about our past are sometimes misguided if not outright delusional. During the time it was erected, Lovejoy’s monument would have stood in contrast to the statues of Confederate generals going up around the country as part of the burgeoning Lost Cause movement. Correcting the historical record in statues could be looked on as a comparatively low-cost act of civic maintenance as opposed to an activist victory, but it should be done all the same.

Lovejoy’s death accomplished more for the abolitionist movement than he could have dreamed of with his paper. The incident made headlines across the country and generated increased sympathy for the abolitionist cause. In an 1857 letter Abraham Lincoln described Lovejoy’s death as “the most important single event that ever happened in the new world.” The moral implications of that statement go beyond the scope of this essay, but it is true that his sacrifice advanced the cause of abolition. The monument at Alton tells us he gave everything he could for a cause that was urgent and just. Let’s hope it stands another hundred years.

Evan Allen Wood’s writing has appeared in The Riverfront Times, Backpacker, Feast, and elsewhere. He is an MFA candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he writes short stories about people losing their minds and planting trees. Find him on Twitter at @HorseEagle9000.

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