Sophronia Grubb

GRUBB, Mrs. Sophronia Farrington Naylor, temperance worker, born in Woodsfield, Ohio, 28th November, 1834. Her father and mother were persons of force, character and intellect. Her educational training was directly under the care of her father. When seventeen years old, she was graduated from the Illinois Conference College, in Jacksonville, and at nineteen she was put in charge of the woman's department of Chaddock College, Quincy, Ill. In 1856 she became the wife of Armstead Otey Grubb, of St. Louis, Mo. In the home they made she was engrossed until 1861, the beginning of the Civil War, when she and her family returned to Quincy. In the emergencies of wartime began to be manifest the ability, energy and enthusiasm that have distinguished her through life.  Devoted to her country and humanity, she served them for four years, as those who, without compensation, gave time and strength in loving help in hospital, camp and field. At times she helped bring up the sick and wounded from southern swamps and fields. Again, surgeons and nurses being scarce, she was one of the women of nerve in requisition for surgical operations. Meanwhile the needs of the colored people were forced on her attention. Many of them, as refugees, went to Mr. Grubb's office, asking assistance, and were sent by him on to his home, with directions that their wants were to be supplied. The work became so heavy a drain on time, strength and sympathy, that Mrs. Grubb called a public meeting, and with her sister, Mrs. Shields, and with others, organized a Freedman's Aid Society. In the three years following they cared and provided for over three-thousand destitute negroes. At the close of the war Mr. and Mrs. Grubb returned to St. Louis. When her sons grew to manhood, the dangers surrounding them growing out of the liquor traffic led Mrs. Grubb to a deep interest in the struggle of the home against the saloon. She saw there a conflict as great, and needs as pressing as in the Civil War, and she gradually concentrated upon it all her powers. In 1882 she was elected national superintendent of the work among foreigners, one of the most onerous of the forty departments of the national organization of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. By her effort and interest she has brought that department up to be thoroughly organized, wide-reaching and flourishing. She publishes leaflets and tracts on all the phases, economic, moral, social and evangelistic, of the temperance question in seventeen languages, at the rate of fifty editions of ten-thousand each per year. These are distributed all over the United States. She established a missionary department in Castle Garden, New York City, through which instructions in the duties and obligations of American citizenship are afforded to immigrants in their own tongues as they land. She has also recently been made president of the Kansas Woman's Christian Temperance Union. Her home is now in Lawrence, Kan. (Source: American Women by Frances Elizabeth Willard, Mary Ashton Rice Livermore, Vol. 1, 1897. Transcribed by Marla Snow)