The Silk Weaver of Pendleton: Sarah Ann Ridgway

In Issue 5 of Volume 4 of the Star of the West, dated the fifth of June, 1913, Edward Theodore Hall — an English Bahá'í writing from Manchester — submitted a brief notice for the magazine's In Remembrance column. Sarah Ann Ridgway had died in Manchester on the eleventh of May. She was approximately sixty years old. Her funeral, by the standards of the wider city, would have been unremarkable.

But the Star of the West — published in Chicago and read by believers across America — felt that the Bahá'í community required a record of such a woman.

Sarah Ridgway had worked all her adult life as a silk weaver in the mills of Pendleton, then a working-class district on the western edge of Manchester. She had received the Bahá'í message in middle age. From the moment of her acceptance she had considered herself, in the simple phrase Hall used in the notice, a worker for the Cause.

She worked many years for it in Pendleton — quietly but steadily.

The phrase was Hall's gift to her memory. She had not been a prominent speaker. She had not traveled. Her name had not, before her death, been printed in the Star of the West. But she had been, in the only place that her life would ever reach, a faithful worker — meeting friends in her small rooms, talking to her fellow weavers across the looms, attending the modest gatherings of the Manchester believers in spite of the long hours of her work.

Hall's obituary was, by any literary standard, brief. But it carried a small editorial weight that the readers of the magazine would have recognized. The Star of the West, in printing it, was making a point: the Bahá'í community of the early twentieth century was not built only by the visiting Master, by the Hands of the Cause, or by the great American teachers. It was also, and perhaps chiefly, built by silk weavers in Pendleton, by schoolteachers in Cincinnati, by maid-servants in Tehran, by shoemakers in Hamadán — people whose names would be lost within two generations to everyone except the Concourse on High and the small obituary columns of a magazine that, in 1913, made room for their faithful obscurity.

Sarah Ann Ridgway sleeps in a Manchester churchyard. Her name is preserved here.

Source: Star of the West, Volume 4, Issue 5 (June 5, 1913), obituary by Edward Theodore Hall. Public domain text from bahai-library.com.

Editors, S. O. T. W.. (1913). *Star of the West*. Bahai News Service. https://bahai-library.com/star_of_the_west_volume_1