Abbie was the daughter of Rev. Adin Ballou, the founder of the Hopedale Community, a utopian experiment in the Blackstone Valley. Based on the principles of Christian non-resistance, its members supported such causes as abolitionism, temperance, and rights for women. She was raised in the community and prepared to be a teacher at the Normal School located in West Newton. As a young graduate, she taught at and helped run the Hopedale commune’s village school. There she attracted attention for her progressive teaching skills. In 1851, Abbie married William Heywood, who had settled in Hopedale to train for the ministry under the direction of her father. Together they assumed the leadership of the Hopedale Home School, where they put their liberal teaching methods into practice and attracted students from outside the community. One of their pupils was the son of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. The couple left Hopedale in 1864 after William received a Unitarian fellowship and thereafter lived in a number of communities in Massachusetts, including Dorchester. They celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary at their home on Park Street in 1901. Abbie continued to embrace her father’s reform efforts and served as Vice President of the Universal Peace Union in Dorchester.
One of Abbie’s most significant contributions to the body of literature concerning American utopias was the chapter she wrote for Hopedale Reminiscences. This was a collection of memories composed by members of the Hopedale Ladies Sewing Society to describe their childhoods growing up in the community. Abbie focused on the principles upon which the settlement was founded and how the early members worked to build their village.
In addition, she described how they found amusement in song and rhyme and attended lectures and discussions on a variety of topics including science, philosophy, and phrenology (a now discredited theory of how the shape and size of an individual’s head can reveal intelligence and character). She signed her section Abbie Ballou Heywood, Dorchester, Massachusetts. Abbie later moved to New York to live with her daughter and died in New Rochelle in 1918.
