E. C. D. CLARK,

SUCCESSOR TO

Office of CLARK & CRAWFORD,

General Insurance and Real Estate Agents,

115 Griswold Street,

Detroit, Mich., Oct. 4^th 1876

Dear Father,

I have come down to the office and find your letter. I know you would gladly furnish me with the money if you could and I wish you far more for your own sake than for mine that you had money enough for your own comfort through life. I hope at some future day to be able by my own efforts to be in better circumstances. I had hoped to leave for home before this time and have been waiting for a Pass which I hoped to get—if it comes this PM I shall start tomorrow morning or to night. If I start to night I shall reach home in the morning if I start in the morning. I shall stop over night in Buffalo—so reach home some time on friday. I don't know when the girls are coming. Charley has called at Mrs. Harris—Mrs. EnsworthEnsworth, Mrs.

is in Washington and Mrs. Sallie was some time

since in Philadelphia, some gentleman called on Mrs. Norris to see if she wished to send Mrs. Sallie. She asked where she was and he said he "was not at liberty to give her address." Love to all—In great haste

LizzieSprague, Rosetta Douglass

Rosetta Douglass Sprague (1839–1906), the first child of Anna and Frederick Douglass, was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, on 24 June 1839. In her childhood, Rosetta wrote and read letters for her mother, whom she assisted with housework and with piecework for the shoe factories in Lynn, Massachusetts. Her father sent Rosetta to school at age seven in Albany, New York, where she lived with Abigail and Lydia Mott. When the Douglass family moved to Rochester, Rosetta began attending the Seward Seminary, where her presence offended the parents of one of the white students and led to her segregation from the other pupils. Her father, in a fury, removed Rosetta from the school and hired a private tutor for his daughter. Rosetta, along with her three brothers, then led other students in the efforts to desegregate Rochester’s public school system. From 1854 to 1855, Rosetta attended Oberlin College preparatory school, one of the first institutions of higher education to accept African Americans and women. She became a teacher in Philadelphia and Salem, Massachusetts, until her marriage in 1863 to Nathan Sprague, with whom she had seven children. Before her death in 1906, she wrote a memoir of her mother that remains one of the most complete documents of Anna Murray Douglass’s life. Rosetta Douglass Sprague, My Mother as I Recall Her: A Paper Read before the Anna Murray Douglass Union, W.C.T.U., May 10, 1900 (1900; Washington, D.C., 1923); Dorothy Sterling, ed., We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1984), 132–45; Ellen N. Lawson and Marlene Merrill, “The Antebellum ‘Talented Thousandth’: Black College Students at Oberlin before the Civil War,” Journal of Negro Education, 52: 145 (Spring 1983); Miriam DeCosta-Willis, “Smoothing the Tucks in Father’s Linen: The Women of Cedar Hill,” Sage, 4: 30–33 (Fall 1987); Sylvia Lyons Render, “Afro-American Women: The Outstanding and the Obscure,” Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress, 32: 306–10 (October 1975), 307–10.