From HUNGER MOUNTAIN, Spring 2005: "In My Present Heaven: Achsa Sprague (1827-1862)," by Sara Rath.
"During her lifetime she became one of the best known women in eastern America. Boston, Providence, New York, Philadelphia and Hartford all issued frequent demands for her appearance. 'Notes by the Wayside,' her newspaper column, steadfastly supported equal rights for women and prison reform. She advocated the abolition of slavery and her lyrical poems, signed 'Solitarie,' appeared in leading publications. But Achsa Sprague was best known as an improvistrice, as she referred to her gift, a medium who delivered messages of hope and comfort from the spirit world while in a state of trance, and her reveleations endeared her to followers of Modern Spiritualism, a loosely organized mvoement that began in America shortly before 1850. Prior to the Civil War she traveled alone by railroad, stagecoach and steamboat throughout New England and as far west as Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Louis, where newspapers carried accounts of her lectures before audiences of thousands....Often away from home, she always kept her room in her mother's house in Plymouth Notch, Vermont, where she died, July 6, 1862, at the age of thirty-four..."
