Charlotta Gordon Pyles
Former slave and celebrated abolitionist, Charlotta Pyles was an outspoken critic of slavery. She was born a slave in Kentucky in 1804. Her father was a mixture of German and African American while her mother was a full-blooded Seminole Indian. She married Harry MacHenry Pyles and they had ten children, including a daughter of Charlotta’s from a previous marriage.
Upon the death of her master, Hugh Gordon, Charlotta, and her children became the property of his daughter Frances who had promised her father on his deathbed that she would free them. In order to do this, Frances had to flee Kentucky where pro-slavery sentiments were extremely strong. In early fall of 1853, Frances loaded her possessions as well as those of the Pyles family into a covered wagon and headed North with 17 members of Charlotta’s extended family. After many hardships, the group crossed the Des Moines River and settled in Keokuk where Harry got a job as a harness maker while a son hauled freight from Keokuk to Des Moines.
With money always in short supply, Charlotta decided to go on a speaking tour to raise money to free her two sons-in-law left behind in Kentucky. It was a difficult task for a poor woman who had never had a day’s schooling to travel thousands of miles in a strange country and stand up night after night before crowds of men and women. So well did she plead, that in 6 months she raised $3000 to free her sons-in-law and returned them to their families in Keokuk.
Charlotta’s abolition activities did not stop there. Many slaves coming from the South found at the gateway to Iowa an enthusiastic member of their own race who received them into her home and arranged for them to continue their way to Canada. She numbered among her friends, abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who visited Keokuk in 1866 and 1869, and suffragist Susan B. Anthony.
Charlotta died on January 19, 1880, in Burlington, IA. Her remains were brought back to Keokuk and after a funeral service held in the First Baptist Church, they were interred in Keokuk’s Oakland Cemetery.