Scarborough women
Elizabeth Scarborough was a mother of two in the Yorkshire area of England, whose husband John became increasingly abusive. Anxious to escape the marriage, she worked at a furniture factory to save up money to immigrate to America. Given the laws at the time, she was afraid that John would keep the children if she left, so she spirited them away and with relief threw her wedding ring in the ocean as she sailed from Liverpool on the Underwriter in 1861 with eight year old Annie. Elizabeth visited with her older brother who had previously immigrated to New York, and his wife tried to dissuade the Scarboroughs from traveling further west. Motivated by her religious beliefs, however, Elizabeth continued on to Nebraska, where she joined an ox team company heading west. Once in Utah, she remarried and then settled in Idaho, where she ran a boardinghouse and grew a proper English garden. She became revered as a community religious leader.
Annie was ill for the entire journey to Utah. As a teenager, she studied Morse code and telegraphy and became a pioneer telegrapher, one of the first and youngest females to do such a job in Idaho. She continued to operate the telegraph in her home from 1870-1911. She married Lorenzo Lafayette Hatch (son of fellow immigrant Sylvia Eastman), and they raised nine children. Annie enjoyed travel in her later years as she went back east to Pennsylvania, visited the Lewis & Clark Exposition in Portland, Oregon, and went to California in the 1920s.