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 Elleanor Eldridge (1785-1862)
Businesswoman stood up to injustice

  By KAREN LEE ZINER
Journal-Bulletin Staff Writer

Elleanor Eldridge, a part black, part Narragansett Indian woman who went to work as a servant at age 10, etched a distinguished note in history.

She established two businesses, investing her profits in real estate that was valued at $4,800 at her death in 1862.

Although uneducated, she successfully defended her brother in an assault case, and later battled on her own behalf to regain property taken away by whites. She took a high sheriff to court for perjury, and eventually won.

Eldridge was born in Warwick in 1785, the last of seven daughters born to Hannah Prophet, daughter of an Indian mother, and Robin Eldridge, son of an African who had been brought to the United States on a slave ship.

Her mother died when Eldridge was 10 and her father sent her to be a servant for the Bakers in Warwick, for whom her mother had worked as a laundress. By age 14, Eldridge was an accomplished weaver.

In her late teens and early 20s, working as a dairy woman for Captain Benjamin Greene and his family at Warwick Neck, she made great supplies of highly acclaimed cheeses.

At 27, she started a soap-boiling business that drew in enough cash to buy her first house, in Warwick. Three years later, she moved to Providence and started a whitewashing, painting and wallpapering business.

In 1822, Eldridge bought land in Providence and built a house. Five years later, she bought two more lots and another house in Warwick.

In 1831, disaster struck.

Having already suffered one bout of typhus, Eldridge now suffered another. She recuperated, but on her way to visit relatives in Massachusetts, she relapsed. As the story goes, a Providence traveler overheard a conversation at an inn where Eldridge stayed. Word garbled as it wended its way through the grapevine, and in Providence, people believed that Eldridge had died.

Much to their surprise, she returned quite alive in the spring of 1832. Much to her surprise, one of her properties was for sale. Quick negotiations with the mortgage holder halted the sale.

Then her brother George was charged with stabbing a man. Eldridge raised $500 bail and later represented him in court. Eventually he was acquitted.

As if that weren't enough, a cholera epidemic raged in Providence during the summer of 1832, and those who could moved temporarily to the country to escape the disease.

Eldridge went to Pomfret, Conn., working as a nurse for a sick child. She paid the interest on her debt, but fell behind on the principal. When she returned that fall, her property had been sold and her tenants evicted. But she could find no evidence that the sale had been advertised.

On the advice of the state attorney general, she sued the buyer. The sheriff insisted he had advertised the sale and she lost the case, but then hired two detectives to find anyone who might have seen the supposed advertisements. When they could not, she sued the sheriff for perjury.

When the buyer agreed to sell the property back to her for $2,100 ($600 more than she paid for it), Eldridge dropped the suit.

"No MAN would have been treated so," wrote Frances McDougall in The Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge, "and if a WHITE WOMAN had ever been the subject of such wrongs . . . the whole country would have been indignant."

Sources: " 'An ornament and honor to her sex': New England Women from Valley Forge to Fenway Park," a history curriculum researched and written by Jane Lancaster; "Women of All Trades and Amateur Lawyer," taken from Negro Heritage Library: Profiles of Negro Womanhood Vol. 1, Sylvia G.L. Dannett.

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