Lydia Mott (1806 – 1875) [Section 49 Lot 3]
Women’s rights advocate, leader of the anti-slavery movement and Conductor of the Underground Railroad.
Lydia Mott was born in 1806 to a Long Island Quaker family. By the 1820s, several members, including Lydia, had settled in Albany. Having taught school here for a time, Lydia spent several years teaching at a Quaker boarding school in Philadelphia where she formed a very significant friendship that would last until her death; Susan B. Anthony.
Lydia moved back to Albany where, with the assistance of her sisters, Jane and Abigail, she became the proprietor of a shop on Broadway which sold men’s linens, gloves, hats, and other related articles. The shop later moved to Maiden Lane. In the 1850s, however, she opened a boarding house at 715 Broadway (near Spencer Street) which she would operate until 1870. She moved from the family’s Chapel Street residence to a house of her own at 103 Columbia Street just below Eagle and that home – and Lydia herself - would become a focal point of the early women’s suffrage and abolition movements in Albany.
Beginning in the 1830s, Lydia had begun to work for both causes along with other notable women’s rights advocates such as Lucretia Mott (a cousin by marriage), Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the Grimke sisters. In 1852, Lydia and Susan B. Anthony were barred from attending an all-male temperance convention in Albany and it was this incident that (with strong encouragement from Lydia) that led to Susan’s commitment to women’s rights. Lydia worked tireless for suffrage, constantly organizing lobbying efforts and conventions, as well as maintaining a steady correspondence with her contemporaries in the movements. When Susan B. Anthony’s suffrage activities (and her 1873 indictment) brought her back to Albany, she would make her home at the Columbia Street townhouse.
At the same time, Lydia Mott also became a leader in the anti-slavery movement. She was an active member of the Albany Vigilance committee and a known local conductor of the Underground Railroad. Her sister, Abigail, taught Frederick Douglass how to read and write and he left his oldest daughter, Rosetta, in Abigail’s care at Albany for five years. Lydia also helped to care for an orphaned boy named James C. Matthews who would eventually become the first elected African-American judge in the United States.
As with the women’s rights movement, Lydia Mott’s home was ever open to the likes of such prominent abolitionists as Gerrit Smith and William Lloyd Garrison. Her work was not confined to the Albany area; in 1858, she was vice-president of the American Anti-Slavery Society and her name regularly appeared in national newspapers alongside those of Garrison, Douglass, and other famed abolitionists.
By 1875, Lydia was suffering from tuberculosis. When Susan B. Anthony learned of her condition, she set aside her work and came to Albany to stay with her and nurse her through the fatal illness. Lydia died at her Columbia Street home on August 20, 1875 at the age of 67.
Susan B. Anthony wrote of Lydia’s death, stating:
“There has passed out of my life today, the one, next to my own family, who has been the nearest and dearest friend to me for over thirty years.”
Lydia Mott was buried along with other members of her family in the Quaker plot in the Church Grounds (Lot 3, Section 49). Her simple marble headstone, which she shares with her sister Abigail, reads, “He giveth His beloved sleep.”