Lucy Stone Marker HomeBack What’s New
This marker was erected by the Quaboag Historical Society.
The Commonwealth has designated March 8th as Lucy Stone Day.
Lucy Stone was born and lived on the Coy Hill Road family farm in West Brookfield, MA.
She was the eighth child in a family of nine children, two of whom had died young. She was born with an exceptional level of intelligence, a rebellious spirit and a stubbornness that later in life helped her persevere in her defiance of the rigid attitudes and customs of the times. Her temperament was possibly inherited from her paternal grandfather, Francis Stone, who fought in the Revolution and was a leader of the ‘Shays’ Rebellion’ in 1786/87. In 1834 when she was sixteen, she began teaching at local schools. Her father disapproved of educating women, but insisted that she work to bring in money to help support the family.
He took most of the money she earned to “assist with the farm debt and with her brothers’ college costs”. After stringent saving for nine years, she managed to scrape together enough money to pay for her first semester’s tuition. She left the Brookfields in August, 1843, the month she turned twenty-five, to attend Oberlin College in Ohio. At that time, Oberlin was the only college in the country to admit women, as well as African-American students desiring to study for an advanced degree. Lucy Stone was one of the first women from Massachusetts to earn a four year college graduate degree. After finishing Oberlin College, she returned to Massachusetts to become a lecturer for Abolitionist and Equal Rights groups. She often experienced the jeers, heckling, and physical violence of hostile audiences, but she was resolute and unwavering in maintaining the goals she had set for herself. On January 8, 1870 she became the founder and editor of ‘The Woman’s Journal’ newspaper; a publication focusing on the interests of Woman, her educational, industrial, legal, and political equality”.
Source: an excerpt from a press release submitted by Marguerite Geis, corresponding secretary of the Quaboag Historical Society.
More about – Lucy Stone
Photograph by Rebecca Chickering
Copyright 2001 West Brookfield Historical Commission Last Modified: 08/01/2011
