"The first house for public entertainment was a two-story frame built and run by F. Bloodgood in 1871. After running the house about seven years,
it was sold to Josiah Carr, who kept it only two years, and it was again sold to H. C. Hitchen, and is now known as the Cape Cod House, under the management of J. M. Lufkin."
http://www.kancoll.org/books/cutler/elk/elk-co-p5.html
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http://www.combs-families.org/combs/records/ks/elk.htm
1880 Elk County Census: Elk Falls
Freeman Bloodgood age 48 Retired Hotel Keeper
Ophelia Bloodgood age 37 Milliner
Elsworth Bloodgood (son) age 17 At Home
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Prudence Crandall (September 3, 1803 – January 27, 1890) was an American schoolteacher and activist.
Crandall is remembered, and is the state heroine of Connecticut, for setting up the first school for black girls ("young Ladies and little Misses of color") in the country.
This resulted in her arrest; then violence from townspeople forced her to close the school, and she left Connecticut.
When Crandall admitted Sarah Harris, a 20-year-old African-American female student in 1832 to her school, she had what is considered to be the first integrated classroom in the United States. Parents of the white children began to withdraw them.
Prudence was a "very obstinate girl", according to her brother Reuben. Rather than ask the African-American student to leave, she decided that if white girls would not attend with the blacks, she would educate black girls. She was arrested and spent a night in jail.
Soon the violence of the townspeople forced her to close the school and leave. Much later the Connecticut legislature, with pressure from Mark Twain, a resident of Hartford, passed a resolution honoring Crandall and providing her with a pension. Twain offered to buy her former Canterbury home for her retirement, but she declined.
She died a few years later, in 1890"
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The following marker is at Osage Street and Highway 190, Elk Falls, Kansas:
In 1831, Prudence Crandall, educator, emancipator, and human rights advocate, established a school which in 1833 became the first Black female academy in New England at Canterbury, Connecticut. This later action resulted in her arrest and imprisonment for violating the "Black Law."
Although she was later released on a technicality, the school was forced to close after being harassed and attacked by a mob. She moved with her husband Reverend Calvin Philleo to Illinois.
After her husband died in 1874, she and her brother moved to a farm near Elk Falls.
Prudence taught throughout her long life and was an outspoken champion for equality of education and the rights of women.
In 1886, supported by Mark Twain and others, an annuity was granted to her by the Connecticut Legislature. She purchased a house in Elk Falls where she died January 27, 1890.
Over a hundred years later, legal arguments used by her 1834 trial attorneys were submitted to the Supreme Court during their consideration of the historic civil rights case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas
"After the death of her husband, Crandall relocated with her brother Hezekiah to Elk Falls, Kansas around 1877, and] it was there that her brother eventually died in 1881.A visitor of 1886, who described her as "of almost national renown," with "a host of good books in her house", quoted her as follows:
My whole life has been one of opposition.
I never could find anyone near me to agree with me.
Even my husband opposed me, more than anyone.
He would not let me read the books
that he himself read, but I did read them.
I read all sides, and searched for the truth
whether it was in science, religion, or humanity.
I sometimes think I would like to live somewhere else.
Here, in Elk Falls, there is nothing for my soul to feed upon.
Nothing, unless it comes from abroad
in the shape of books, newspapers, and so on.
*There is no public library, and there are but one or two persons
in the place that I can converse with profitably for any length of time.* (Just my great grandfather and grandmother's Tavern/Hotel)
No one visits me, and I begin to think they are afraid of me.
I think the ministers are afraid I shall upset their religious beliefs,
and advise the members of their congregation
not to call on me, but I don't care.
I speak on spiritualism sometimes, but more on temperance,
and am a self-appointed member of the International Arbitration League.
I don't want to die yet.
I want to live long enough to see some of these reforms consummated.
* *
In 1886, the state of Connecticut honored Prudence Crandall with an act by the legislature, prominently supported by the writer Mark Twain, providing her with a $400 annual pension (equivalent to $11,400 in 2019)
Prudence Crandall died in Kansas on January 28, 1890, at the age of 86. She and her brother Hezekiah are buried in Elk Falls Cemetery."
***
Crandall was the subject of a Walt Disney/NBC television movie entitled
She Stood Alone (1991), in which she was portrayed by actress Mare Winningham.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mare_Winningham
"(In 1984, she starred as Helen Keller in Helen Keller: The Miracle Continues.
Winningham achieved greater fame co-starring in St. Elmo's Fire (1985), alongside the other original "brat pack" alumni. Despite the film's success, she failed to cash in on her teen idol status, and returned to television in the Hallmark Hall of Fame movie, Love Is Never Silent, for which she received an Emmy nomination. Another well-known and well-received performance was as a homeless young mother in the television movie God Bless the Child. Winningham finished the 1980s with two Hollywood films: the nuclear disaster drama, Miracle Mile (1988), for which she received an Independent Spirit Award nomination in 1989, and the Tom Hanks vehicle Turner & Hooch in 1989. In 1988, Winningham also starred in the Los Angeles stage production of Hurlyburly with Sean Penn and Danny Aiello.
In the early 1990s, she returned to film for 1994's all-star Wyatt Earp and the family drama The War, both starring Kevin Costner."
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*My note: Apparently, Winningham or Disney doesn't want the film viewed on Youtube or mentioned on *Wikipedia.
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"Prudence Crandall's chance to help people of color came in the fall of 1832. Sarah Harris, the daughter of a free African-American farmer near Canterbury asked to be accepted to the school to prepare for teaching other African Americans.
Although Crandall was uncertain about whether to admit Harris, whom she liked, she consulted her Bible, which, as she told it, came open to Ecclesiastes 4:1:
So I returned, and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun:
and behold the tears of such as were oppressed, and they had no comforter;
and on the side of their oppressors there was power; but they had no comforter.
[11]:169 [King James translation]
She then admitted the girl, establishing the first integrated school in the United States"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prudence_Crandall
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