Mary Dyer Statue in Earlham College, Indiana

Outside the Stout Meeting House in Earlham College campus lies the seated statue of Mary Dyer, a Quaker who fought for religious freedom and was hanged on Boson Commons in 1660 because of that.

Mary Dyer insisted on practicing Quakerism in the days when the Massachusetts Colony had forbidden it. She was banished several times from the colony but stood by the right to religious freedom and returned. On the fourth time she returned, she was sentenced to death. Her death stopped the persecution of Quakers and influenced the legalization of religious freedom.

In 1959, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts dedicated a statue of Dyer, created by the Quaker sculptress Sylvia Shaw Judson, outside the Massachusetts State House; several years later, Earlham College, a Quaker college, dedicated this statue, a replica of the Boston statue. Another copy of the sculpture stands in Philadelphia.