Susan B. Anthony Mocks Men Who Are “so afraid of women’s rights”

Thinking of her family, she states, “I want my brother's name perpetuated as well as my grandfather’s and father’s”.  This famous letter was acquired directly from the descendants of the recipient and is offered for sale here for the first time.

Susan B. Anthony’s father Daniel built a cotton mill in Adams, Massachusetts, and made it into a success. Teenage girls worked at the mill, and half of them boarded in the Anthony house, which was bustling with activity. “An almost ceaseless round of work – sewing, cleaning, hauling water, preparing three meals a day for as many as sixteen people, and washing up again once they had finished eating,” as biographers Geoffrey Ward and Ken Burns described the Anthony house in the book Women of Achievement: Susan B. Anthony. In 1826 Daniel was offered an opportunity to partner in running similar mills in Battenville, NY, and he and his wife Lucy packed up their four children and moved to Battenville. Susan was 6 years old at the time.

The family initially stayed with Daniel’s business partner, Judge John Mc Lean, but that changed. “Business boomed, and in 1832-33 Anthony built a late Federal-style brick house for his family…in Battenville,” according to historian Sandra McClellan. The house was very large – 15 rooms, with space for a store and schoolroom. Susan had just turned thirteen when they moved in, and lived there until the time she was 19 years old, when the Anthonys moved to Center Falls. So Battenville was where she grew up.

David and Phoebe Walsh lived in Battenville, and founded the Methodist Episcopal Church there. Their son John D. Walsh became a minister, and was author of book, The Educational Work of the Methodist Episcopal Church in the South. His older sisters were the same age as Susan, and were her childhood friends in that small town.

Anthony found the above photograph and described it in some detail in this letter.  This remarkable letter was published by Rev. Walsh.

Typed letter signed, on her National American Woman Suffrage Association letterhead, Rochester, NY, December 7, 1905, to Rev. J.D. Walsh. “I have just returned home after an absence of over a month and find your letter saying that you had been to Battenville and had found the two volumes of my Life and Work edited by Ida Husted Harper. Yes, indeed, I remember your father and mother and sisters very well, for the children used to be my playmates. Your father tended the sawmill and your mother cared for all that family of children. They were very faithful workers in those times. Five years ago, when I was in Battenville with my sister Mary and my brothers D.R. and J.M. Anthony, I saw Mrs. Hobbie and her husband, and again when I was in Battenville last May I saw Mr. Hobbie and learned that he was president the Cemetery Association. You probably heard that the visit of myself and nephew D.R. Jr. and his wife was to see about the placing of a monument in memory of my grandfather Read. You probably do not remember him. He and my grandmother Richardson-Read came to our house and lived the last three or four years of their lives and then were buried in the old cemetery by the church, and my brother D.R. could not bear to have my grandfather and grandmother laid their away from all their friends without something to mark the place, so he ordered the monument and it was sent just after he passed on to the other side. Now if I live until spring, I mean to go back there and see that it is inscribed on the other side of the stone, Erected by D.R. Anthony, born in Adams, Mass. August 22, 1824 – Died in Leavenworth, Kansas Nov. 12, 1904”, for I want my brother's name perpetuated as well as my grandfather’s and father’s.” Her grandfather, Daniel Read, was a soldier of the Revolution.

"I want my brother's name perpetuated as well as my grandfather’s and father’s."

She continues, “My father built the brick house at Battenville, which the husband of Elijah Hyatt’s niece has bought and lived in, I believe, and the old brick factory at Battenville and the brick store were built by him, both of which are now burned down. We lived in the old house at the corner of the road opposite the blacksmith’s shop, as you turn down to the bridge. The satinette mill at Hardscrabble, or Center Falls, as my father named it, and the old house at the same place, in the front of which you will remember the old watering trough, was built in 1810, so it will soon be 100 years old. When I wrote my book I tried very hard to find a picture of the old house, with the piazza across it. You will remember it had pillars in the front and the piazza was a two-story one. It was a very imposing looking house for those times.

"I think that Mr. Bulkley will either be converted to woman suffrage in this sphere or he will after he gets to the other side of the Big River. "

“I am glad you are writing your reminiscence of your childhood. It would be very funny indeed to get Susan B. Anthony in the New York Advocate. My uncle Joshua Read of Palatine Bridge, Montgomery County, New York, used to take that paper, and it was so afraid of women's rights, and the Rev. Mr. Bulkley is still opposed to woman suffrage, so that paper can truly be said to be on the conservative side of the question, but I think that Mr. Bulkley will either be converted to woman suffrage in this sphere or he will after he gets to the other side of the Big River. The picturesqueness of the Batten Kiln River and all its surroundings never struck me so forcefully as last spring when I was riding up from Union Village to Battenville. It is a beautiful river. I am glad you look back upon the scenery about that place and love it as I do. If I had been at home I should have sent you the Life and Work and made you a present of it, but since you have paid for it and the money is in the bank, it will be very easy to keep it. I thank you very much. I would gladly have put my autograph on the flyleaf had I been at home. I am sorry that your good wife has gone over the Big River before you. I am glad your son is in the Berlin University, and am glad that the son and grandson of David Walsh are going forward so nicely in their studies. I hope you will send me a copy of your reminiscences. I should very much like to see them.”

She then adds in her own hand, “Should you not like to have a set of the History of Woman Suffrage? If so, I shall be very happy to present the four huge volumes to you. Is your son studying for the ministry – or what profession?” This famous letter was acquired directly from the descendants of the recipient and is offered for sale here for the first time.  It was published the recipient.  When this letter was prepared for publication, marking was placed below the signature and the signature was strengthened.

This is an extraordinary personal letter filled with her family and life reminiscences and revealing insights, and is a great rarity besides. A search of public sale records going back 40 years fails to turn up even one letter of Susan B. Anthony relating to any member of her family or her time in Battenville.  It was acquired by us directly from the descendants of the recipient and is offered for sale here for the first time.