Milo Adams Townsend
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Milo Adams Townsend (June 20, 1816-August 14,
1877) was the oldest son of Quaker parents, Talbot Townsend and
Edith Ware Townsend of New Brighton, Pennsylvania. Milo was at
various times a schoolmaster, a printer, and a bookseller and
stationer.
In 1841 he married Elizabeth Updograph Walker. They had two children,
Lemuel Garrison and Charles Walker.
William Lloyd Garrison in a letter to his wife, Helen E. Garrison,
August 16, 1847, pronounced Milo to be one of America's truest
reformers whose reformatory pen was potent. He stated that Milo
appeared to have given attention to every branch of reform
As Garrison wrote, Milo was involved in almost every social movement
of the time: antislavery, temperance, prison reform, woman's rights
(including suffrage), education, experimental communities, the
needs of the poor, improved labor conditions.
The antislavery movement was, however, probably his greatest concern
from the 1840s through the early 1860s and must have been the
basis for his initial contact with many abolitionists. Milo also
provided a safe-house for fugitives. For a while he was editor
of the Anti-Slavery Bugle in Lisbon, Ohio.