Ellen Goodnow and Maria Felt were early settlers sponsored by antislavery groups who wanted Kansas Territory to be admitted to the Union as a free state. Both of these women sent encouraging reports back east about their journeys to Kansas Territory and the new settlements there. Goodnow's husband Isaac was a co-founder of the town of Boston (later Manhattan), K. T. Goodnow quotes her husband as stating, "advise those young men who brought such doleful reports about Kansas, not to leave the sight of their father & mothers dwelling again." Maria Felt, who traveled to Lawrence, K. T. in 1858 to teach school, writes " it seems or would if it were a little cleaner, very much like New England."