We needed help finding the historic marker for Susan B. Anthony in Lily Dale Assembly, New York, the "World's Largest Center for the Religion of Spiritualism.” I drove up and down narrow streets in the compact hamlet past brightly painted Victorian cottages with angels, cherubs, wind chimes on display in small flower
gardens.
It was off-season, so when we finally came upon three women, two young-appearing and one elderly, standing up on an embankment, I quickly stopped the car.
A welcoming young woman bounded down to our car. Her name was Stacy, and, yes, she knew exactly where the marker was. Better yet, she said, Michele was about to set out in their golf cart to take the elderly woman to her house. We could follow Michele, and then she would lead us to Susan’s marker. Great idea!
We followed the golf cart and waited as Michele walked the woman to her front door. Instead of going back in her golf cart Michele came over to our car and leaned in Linda’s opened window: Just to check in, we thought because she had appeared to be taciturn. We were wrong.
Twenty or more minutes later, with our car and the golf cart stopped in the middle of the road we were still talking and learning about Michele and Stacy.
They were from Wisconsin. That afternoon, they were closing on the house where we had met them. They were the new owners of the Sacred Grounds Coffee House. Stacy is a registered medium who mediates communication between spirits of the dead and living human beings.
Michele led us to an unpaved parking lot by the auditorium that was on a hill. The marker to Susan is up there, she said.
We scrambled up an incline and found the marker in a small park behind the auditorium, where on August 15-16, 1891, thousands of people from “far and wide, fully three thousand” came to hear Susan and Anna Howard Shaw speak. (The quote is from a letter Susan wrote that was published in two Nebraska newspapers. A reporter for a Buffalo newspaper claimed that there were five thousand people in attendance.)
As we stood taking in the experience, we were startled to see Stacy zooming up the incline in the golf cart, skidding to a stop, and excitedly saying—“I googled you! Corpses, Coffins, and Crypts—I have it! It’s my favorite book! Is that really you?”
“It is,” I replied, not sure of what more to do or to say.
“Will you come for breakfast? We’ll open the Sacred Bean Coffee House for you!”
Breakfast would be on the day we planned to drive home and returning to Lily Dale would add two hours to an already long drive. Nevertheless, we did return and had a superb breakfast and a marvelous time with our new a friends!
Note: Modern Spiritualism emerged near the location of and shortly before the 1848 Woman's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York. Spiritualists believe in gender equality and personal autonomy. Many mediums were women who used their platform to advocate for equal rights and political equality. It’s been said that not all suffragists were spiritualist, but all spiritualists, including the men, were suffragists. Although Susan B. Anthony did not subscribe to spiritualism, she was familiar with the beliefs and practices, including that the dead communicated by loud raps. An account published in a Buffalo, New York, newspaper, reported this playful exchange with her audience: “Susan B. Anthony created something of a sensation in the auditorium on Sunday morning by rising to her feet, rapping loudly with hr lead pencil upon a post, and requesting Miss Gaule, the public clairvoyant, to ‘have the spirits come over herself and Miss. Shaw.’” (Buffalo Weekly Express, August 20, 1891. p. 4.)
Images:
Top: The marker was erected by the William C. Pomeroy Foundation in 2022. It reads: VOTES FOR WOMEN/SPEECHES ON WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE/ BY SUSAN B. ANTHONY/ANNA HOWARD SHAW DREW LARGE/CROWD TO AUDITORIUM DURING/‘WOMAN’S DAY IN
AUGUST 1891. (They spoke on Saturday and Sunday, the 15th and 16th of August.) Photo by Linda Hickson
Left: Front to back: Stacy and Michele at the Sacred Ground Coffee House.
Right: Celeste, a second-generation medium and reverend, joined us for breakfast. She was instrumental in getting the Susan B. Anthony/Anna Howard Shaw marker erected.
Left: Prior to their appearance at Lily Dale, Susan B. Anthony and Anna Howard Shaw spoke on July 25, 1891, at Chautauqua Institution, the nearby cultural and educational
organization. The image is a newspaper account of the event:"It Was Woman's Day,"Pittsburgh Dispatch, July 16, 1891, p. 5. “This was a great day here . . . .the women came here in thousands from all points of the compass . . . Everybody wore yellow ribbon and the speaker’s platform was as yellow as a sunflower. . . the yellow is intended to represent the ‘Sunflower State,’ for Kansas was the first state to give women municipal suffrage.”
Zerelda Wallace, the former First Lady of Indiana, was one of the speaker. I wrote about her conversion to suffragism in my book The Vote: Women’s Fierce Fight.
“In 1875, a legislator converted Zerelda G. Wallace to the cause. The former First Lade of the state and president of the WCTU, Wallace had addressed the legislature about the effects on a family when men abuse alcohol, and presented a petition signed by thousands of women.
Legislators reacted rudely, ridiculing and denouncing the idea of temperance. Her petition, one senator told her 'might as well have been signed by 10,000 mice.' Shaking his had, Zerelda Wallace thanked him for making her a suffragist.”
Left: Stacy had the soft-cover edition of Corpses, Coffins, and Crypts: A History of Burial
Right: I sent her an autographed copy of the hard cover edition Both photos by Penny Colman
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