Degree Recipient

Life Experience

Robert Gaston Elliott was born in Indiana after his parents left South Carolina because of their religious antipathy to slavery. He came to IU from College Corner, Ohio. He was the younger brother of Samuel Steele Elliott, who graduated from IU in 1850 (died in May 1863). After graduating from IU in 1850, Elliott taught at Princeton Seminary for one year before moving to Stone’s River Academy in Tennessee.During the two years he taught there, he was asked to censor his abolitionist writing to avoid offending the surrounding Southern sentiment. This spurred him to do something about the “Kansas question” of slavery firsthand so he went to live in the Kansas Territory.

Elliott was there during the time of the great “Bleeding Kansas” conflict between slaveholders and abolitionists. He edited and owned the Kansas Free Press in association with Judge Josiah Miller (IU class of 1852). Tensions were so high that border ruffians destroyed the anti-slavery paper press Elliott owned. He was later elected to the territorial legislature,became railroad commissioner of tree culture, superintendent of public printing, and a member of the Kansas State University Board of Trustees.

From 1867 to 1869, Elliott served on the Kansas Board of Agriculture. He retired from public life after this, and spent the remaining half-century of his life involved with his church and family. At age eighty-eight, the IU Alumni Quarterly reported, he still walked three miles round trip each Sunday to church and followed the daily news.

Marriage and Family

Elliott married Hattie Anderson in 1867. They had four children.After retirement, their son, Samuel, (named after Elliott’s deceased brother)volunteered at the University of Kansas as “houseparent” at the Sunflower Army Ammunition Plant and the Spooner-Thayer Museum, as custodian at Fraser Hall, and warden of Danforth Chapel.

Interesting Anecdote

During the summer of 1863, Elliott was taken prisoner during the Quantrill raid on Lawrence, Kansas. He escaped and joined a posse to pursue the raiders.

References

1. Wylie
2. Findagrave.com
3. accessgenealogy.com/Indiana/
4. etext.ku.edu/ksrl.kc.elliotfamily
5. KSHS.org (Kansas Historical Society) (numerous websites)
6. Martin, George W. (ed.) (1908) Transactions of the Kansas State Historical Society 1907-1908 (Topeka, KS: State Printing Office)
7. Stormont, Gil R. (1914) History of Gibson County, Indiana: Her People, Industries, and Institutions
8. The Kansas Historical Quarterly Autumn 1977 (Vol. 43 #3) pp. 282-296