GUEST: All of them are from the personal collection of Connecticut State Heroine Prudence Crandall. They're all inscribed by her, and one of them has the inscription of the Prudence Crandall school.
APPRAISER: She was born in 1803, an educated person. She went to Connecticut to start a school for young women, a boarding school. And she had mostly wealthy students who were mostly white. But a woman named Sarah Harris came and wanted to be educated. She was Black, and so she welcomed her to the school in 1831 in Canterbury, and the town was not pleased. The parents of the white students took them out of school, and so at that point, Prudence Crandall had a pivot moment and decided that she would just have a school that was only catering to, to Black female students. She met uh William Lloyd Garrison. She visited some other integrated and Black educators, and she decided to put an ad in a newspaper called The Liberator that was edited by Garrison, and within a few months, she had about 20 boarding students, but the town was still not happy. She was jailed. The merchants in town wouldn't sell them any supplies. She was banned from church with her students. She did start something very important, having the first integrated American classroom. The signatures that I have seen look just like this signature. If we examine them, we can see that boards are detached. This one is actually the board from another book. They're not fancy books. May I ask what you paid for the books?
GUEST: I paid between $500 and $800 per book.
APPRAISER: Hm.
GUEST: Which I knew was probably more than they were worth. But it was uh my goal to amass the collection, keep them together.
APPRAISER: I would keep them as a group. At auction. I would say - probably say $1,000 to $2,000 for the group, so...
GUEST: Wonderful, thank you very much!
APPRAISER: ...I congratulate you, yes.
