Sarah Knowles Bolton

Sarah Knowles Bolton, born in Farmington, Con., 15th September, 1841.At the age of seventeen she became a member of the family of her uncle, Colonel H. L. Miller, a lawyer of Hartford, whose extensive library was a delight, and whose house was a center for those who loved scholarship and refinement. The aunt was a person of wide reading, exquisite taste and social prominence. There the young girl met Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lydia H. Sigourney, and others like them, whose lies to her were a constant inspiration. She became an excellent scholar and graduated from the seminary founded by Catherine Beecher. Her first published poem appeard in the "Waferly Magazine," when she was fifteen years old. Soon after graduation she published a small volume, "Orlean Lamar and Other Poems" (New York, 1863), and a serial was accepted by a New England paper. Later she was married to Charles E.Bolton, a graduate of Amherst College, an able, and cultivated man, and they removed to Cleveland, Ohio. She became the first secretary of the Woman's Christian Association of that city, using much of her time in visiting the poor. When, in 1874 the temperance crusade began in Hillsbourough, Ohio, she was one of the first to take up the work and aid it with voice and pen. [She later] passed tow years abroad, Partly in travel and partly in study, that being her second visit to Europe. She made a special study of woman's higher education in te universities of Cambridge, Oxford, and elsewhere, preparing for magazines several articles on that subject, as well as on woman's philanthropic and intellectual work, and on what was being done for the mental and moral help for laboring people by their employers.

American Women: fifteen hundred biographies, with over 1,400 photos: a comprehensive encyclopedia of the lives and achievements of American women during the nineteenth century (Rev. ed.) by Frances E. Willard and Mary A Livermore (New York/Chicago/Springfield, OH: Mast, Crowell & Kirkpatrick, 1897