Who was Sojourner Truth?

Sojourner Truth came to Northampton in 1843 to live at the Northampton Association of Education and Industry, a utopian community in Florence. Born a slave in upstate New York in approximately 1797, she labored for a succession of five masters until the Fourth of July, 1827, when slavery was finally abolished in New York State. Then Isabella - as she had been named at birth - became legally free. Sojourner's house as it appears today


After prevailing in a courageous court action demanding the return of her youngest son Peter, who had been illegally sold away from her to a slave owner in Alabama, Isabella moved to New York City. There she worked as a housekeeper and became deeply involved in religion. Isabella had always been very spiritual, and soon after being emancipated, had a vision which affected her profoundly, leading her - as she later described it - to develop a “perfect trust in God and prayer.

1899 photo of Abbott family house mentioned by Arthur G. Hill in 1912 as previously the home of Sojourner Truth (photo courtesy of Historic Northampton).


After fifteen years in New York, Isabella felt a call to become a travelling preacher. She took her new name - Sojourner Truth - and with little more than the clothes on her back, began walking through Long Island and Connecticut, speaking to people in the countryside about her life and her relationship with God. She was a powerful speaker and singer. When she rose to speak, wrote one observer, her commanding figure and dignified manner hushed every trifler to silence.Audiences were melted into tears by her touching stories. Picture of rafters from a previous story-and-a-half house inside the current structure. The 1879 "birds-eye view" map of Florence shows the house as a story-and-a-half structure

After several months of traveling, Truth was encouraged by friends to go to the Northampton Association, which had been founded in 1841 as a cooperative community dedicated to abolitionism, pacifism, equality and the betterment of human life. There, she met progressive thinkers like William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass and David Ruggles, and the local abolitionists Samuel Hill, George Benson and Olive Gilbert. Douglass described her at the time as “a strange compound of wit and w