Hometown of Eliza Suggs

About 6 miles west of where the Hennepin Canal Trail passes by Tiskilwa, Illinois, is the small, unincorporated community of Providence. There, in December 1876, Malinda and James Suggs welcomed Eliza, their eighth child, into the world. Both Malinda and James were born enslaved, but after the Civil War they settled in Bureau County, Illinois, near Providence, where James became a Christian minister. For the first three weeks after Eliza was born, the couple did not notice anything concerning about their new infant’s physical health—but by the time she was a month old, she had broken two bones. No matter how careful they were with their daughter, her brittle bones fractured and caused her pain.

Doctors diagnosed Eliza Suggs with rickets, an illness in which a vitamin D deficiency causes a loss of bone density that leads to bone fractures. However, she more likely suffered from Osteogenesis Imperfecta, a group of genetic disorders where a lack of collagen production leads to brittle bones.

During her time as a toddler and young child, Suggs experienced a range of health issues, including often being unable to sit up, which confined her to her home. Upon reaching just under 3 feet, Sugg’s body stopped growing.

Suggs was an avid learner; During this time, her sisters taught her to read and spell, and by her early teens she felt well enough to begin attending school in Orleans, Nebraska, where her family had moved.

Each day, Suggs’ family would wheel her to the Orleans Seminary and carry her to the schoolroom, where she spent the day absorbing lessons. When she was 16, one of her teachers trained Suggs and a few other students in public speaking, specifically to recite famous speeches by leaders in the temperance movement. Suggs entered a Demorest Medal contest—an oratorical competition sponsored by philanthropist W. Jennings Demorest—and was awarded the second-place prize of a silver medal. (An example is here, from the collection of the Harvard University Medical Library.)

Suggs remained committed to the cause, and to her Christian faith, for the remainder of her life; she spent her 20s helping her father in his ministry and serving as the secretary for various religious organizations.

In 1906, she wrote a book she titled “Shadows and Sunshine,” which was a hybrid of family history, memoir and poetry. (The book is available online here. For the chapter on her life, she began with a quote from Madame Guyon, a 17th century French mystic:

My cage confines me round;
Abroad I cannot fly;
But though my wing is closely bound,
My heart’s at liberty.
My prison walls cannot control
The flight, the freedom, of the soul.

Without this record of her parents’ lives, her childhood and her education, Suggs’ remarkable story would likely have been confined to the years of her lifetime—she died in 1908, at age 32—but she lives on in historical memory.