Elizabeth Buffum Chace - Central Falls, Rhode Island
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N 41° 53.761 W 071° 23.300
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Elizabeth Buffum Chace and her former Broad Street home are noted on an historical marker in Central Falls, RI. Though it no longer exists, this stone house, called "The Homestead" by the Chace family, was an Underground Railroad station.
Waymark Code: WM167TT
Location: Rhode Island, United States
Date Posted: 05/28/2022
Views: 1
Elizabeth Buffum Chace (1806-1899) and her former Broad Street home are noted on an historical marker in Central Falls, Rhode Island. A civil rights leader and abolitionist, she was inducted to the Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame in 2002. The metal marker mounted to a pole along the western sidewalk reads:
Mayor James A. Diossa
ELIZABETH BUFFUM CHACE (1806-1899)
Here stood the home of Elizabeth Buffum Chace. Known as the "Conscience of Rhode Island" she was an abolitionist, suffragist, and social reformer. Active in the anti-slavery societies of both Massachusetts and Rhode Island her home was a station on the Underground Railroad. A co-founder of the Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Association in 1868, she served as its president from 1870 until her death in 1899. She was also an advocate for mill workers, especially women and children, as well as prison reform. At her home, notable American reformers visited, including Susan B. Anthony, Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison.
Sponsored by Heritage Harbor Foundation
Though the house no longer exists, a photo from the New York Public Library Digital Collections shows an 1898 street view of the house, once a station of the Underground Railroad:
Buffum Chace and her husband, Samuel Chace, moved from Fall River, Massachusetts, and settled in Valley Falls -- now Cumberland -- Rhode Island in 1840. They moved to this larger, stone house the called "The Homestead", in 1857. Less than half a mile north from this spot and on the other side of the Blackstone River, that other house was also an Underground Railroad station.
Related website:
EnCompass: A Digital Sourcebook of Rhode Island History; Elizabeth Buffum Chace and the Underground Railroad in Rhode Island by Elizabeth C. Stevens.