Cabinet Card portrait of Laura Smith Haviland

Chicago, Illinois: C. D. Mosher, National Historical Photographer to Posterity, 125 State Street, 1885. Albumen photograph on printed “Memorial Portrait” cabinet mount, approximately 4 ¼ x 6 ½ inches. The elaborate printed verso advertisement promotes Mosher’s ambitious Centennial-era “Memorial Portraits” project and bears contemporary manuscript identifications reading “Laura Smith Haviland” and noting her authorship of A Woman’s Life Work. Very good condition with light surface wear.. A late-life portrait of the celebrated abolitionist and Underground Railroad conductor Laura Smith Haviland (1808–1898), one of the most courageous white allies of the antislavery movement in the Old Northwest. Born into a Quaker family in Ontario and raised in Michigan, Haviland devoted her life to reform causes including abolition, women’s rights, prison reform, and temperance. With her husband Charles she founded the Raisin Institute near Adrian, Michigan, one of the earliest racially integrated schools in the United States. Haviland became deeply involved in the Underground Railroad during the 1840s and 1850s, assisting hundreds of freedom seekers to escape through Michigan to Canada. At considerable personal risk she also traveled repeatedly into slave states, including Kentucky and Tennessee, to aid formerly enslaved families and to challenge slaveholders directly. During the Civil War she continued relief work among freedpeople in the South and remained active in reform movements well into old age.

The portrait was produced by Chicago photographer Charles D. Mosher (1829–1897) as part of his Centennial-era “Memorial Portraits” project, an ambitious attempt to assemble thousands of photographic likenesses of notable Americans to be preserved for future generations. Mosher exhibited hundreds of such portraits at the 1876 Centennial Exposition and later sealed many of them within a “Memorial Safe” intended to be opened at the American Bicentennial in 1976. The project sought to memorialize politicians, military leaders, reformers, entrepreneurs, and other public figures; known participants included leading African American figures such as Frederick Douglass and Mifflin Wistar Gibbs, along with prominent Chicago politicians and civic leaders.

An evocative photographic likeness of one of the most fearless women associated with the Underground Railroad, preserved within one of the most unusual commemorative photographic projects of the nineteenth century.