Representative women of New England/Elisabeth S. M. Gosse
ELISABETH SOPHIA MERRITT GOSSE was born in Salem, Mass., being the daughter of Henry and Elisabeth (Hood) Merritt. Her father, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Merritt, at the breaking out of the war of the Rebellion was on the staff of General Joseph Andrews, in command at Fort Warren, later going to the front, where, at the head of his regiment, the Twenty-third Massachusetts, he was killed at the battle of Newbern, N.C.
Mrs. Gosse's mother was the daughter of the Rev. Jacob Hood, a well-known Congregational clergyman. Mrs. Gosse is descended from Robert Moulton, an Admiral in the British navy; also from Governor Bradstreet, Roger Conant, and other notables of colonial days.
It is a curious coincidence that her great-great-grandfather. Captain Samuel Flint, killed in the battle of Saratoga in 1777, was the highest officer from Essex County who gave his life for his country in the war of the Revolution; and the same is true of her father, Colonel Merritt, in the war of the sixties. Another ancestor, Colonel Philip Gardner, was killed in the French and Indian wars, in colonial days. It is said that no woman in Massachusetts has a longer record of military ancestry than Mrs. Gosse.
Elisabeth S. Merritt (to use the name she bore in her student days) was educated in public and private schools of Salem, the Chelsea High School, Salem Normal School, and the Rockford Woman's College, at Rockford, 111. She married Mr. Charles Harrison Gosse, of an old Salem family. For a few years Mr. and Mrs. Gosse resided in Salem, but later removed to Boston, where Mrs. Gosse's literary ability soon attracted attention, and she received requests for her work from three of the leading Boston journals.
In 1888 .she went to Bar Harbor as a society correspondent for the Transcript and other Boston papers. The excellence of her work caused it to be copied by other society editors in every part of the United States. She was especially fortunate in having as personal friends Mrs. William Morris Hunt, the first Mrs. William C. Whitney, and Colonel Elliott F. Shepard, who had been a close friend of her father.
Returning to Boston in the fall of that year, she was sent to Lenox by the Boston Herald, with which paper she has since been prominently connected, having held staff positions in five different departments, giving her prob-ably a more varied career than that of any other newspaper woman in New England and one with many picturesque experiences. From the society department of the Herald she passed into the department of special writers, where she received exceptional training in political and editorial work. Later the special and city departments of the Herald were consolidated, and for three years Mrs. Gosse gained invaluable experience in reportorial work. Especially notable feats in this line accomplished by her were the reporting of the great costume ball of the Boston Artists' Association, given in the Art Museum several years ago, on which occasion four men reporters and several artists worked under her direction; the reporting of a convention in Tremont Temple, for which she received from the Herald a check for one hundred and two dollars, at that time said to be the largest check ever paid to a woman journalist in New England for a single week's work, and the reporting of the evolutions of the North Atlantic Squadron off the coast of Maine, when she was the guest of Admiral Gherardi and the only passenger allowed by the Secretary of the Navy on board the flagship "Philadelphia."
Mrs. Gosse has travelled hundreds of miles in the service of the Herald, accompanying President Harrison, President Cleveland, and the late Secretary Blaine upon long journeys. Upon the occasion of the latter's resignation from the Harrison cabinet she went to Wash- ington, and, returning to Boston with Secretary and Mrs. Blaine, remained with them at the Brunswick for three days, while awaiting the returns from the Minneapolis convention, the only woman in a small army of representatives of all the prominent dailies in the country. She was present when Mr. Blaine received and read the despatch announcing the nomination of Mr. Harrison and the death-blow of his own hopes. "I knew," she said at the time, " that I was looking on while his- tory was being made." That night she accompanied Mr. and Mrs. Blaine to Bar Harbor. A week later the death of Emmons Blaine, in Chicago, entailed uppn her another long journey.
Mrs. Gosse also achieved great success as a special correspondent, her work always being of intense interest. Her interviews with Cardinal Gibbons were copied into nearly every Catholic publication in the country. She interviewed Presidents Cleveland and Harrison and many members of their Cabinets.
Especially notable service was rendered the Herald by Mrs. Gosse when she carried the news of the death of James Russell Lowell from Bar Harbor to President Eliot at his summer residence at Seal Harbor, and later that of George William Curtis. In each instance she rode twenty-two miles at midnight over the roads of Mount Desert, to telegraph his tributes to those great men to her paper. During one Presidential campaign she remained in Maine until after the State election, reporting the speeches of many prominent political orators.
Mrs. Gosse was among the first to discern the importance and phenomenal development of the woman's club movement. She established the department "Among the Women's Clubs" in the Sunday Herald, which she still conducts, and also that known as "Colonial and Patriotic," a record of the happenings among the hereditary patriotic societies.
In addition to her work for the Herald, Mrs. Gosse has done much special work for the New York Mail and Express and the New York Herald, also for such publications as the North American Review, the New England Magazine, Harper's Bazar, Wide Awake, and Lippincott's. Mrs. Gosse has been prominently identified with the New England Woman's Press Association from the beginning. For several years she was chairman of the programme committee, preparing some of the most successful entertainments in the history of the club, and she was its president in 1898. Upon retiring from the presidency she was made honorary vice-president for life.
She was founder and is vice-president of the Boston Woman's Press Club, has been four times elected president of the Boston Business League, and is also president for life of the Boston Floral Emblem Society. She has been much interested in reform work, being a prominent promoter of the movement to secure police matrons. She was also for a time press superintendent of the W. C. T. U. Deeply interested in music and a fine musician herself, she has been an active worker in the Easter Music and Flower Mission to Hospitals.
Mrs. Gosse has been an enthusiastic organizer of women's clubs, .several of prominence in various parts of New England o,wing their existence to her efforts. She has several times as a delegate attendetl the biennial convention of the General Federation of W'omen's Clubs. The family of Mrs. Gosse were among the leading anti-slavery leaders in Essex County, and enjoyed the friendship of John Greenleaf Whittier, William Lloyd Garrison, and many others prominent at that time. It was well known that the poet Whittier, although a fiery abolitionist, deprecated war. On one occasion early in 1861 he escaped from Newburyport to avoid a military demonstration, only to meet at dinner, at the friend's home in the country where he sought refuge, the father of Mrs. Gosse, Lieutenant Colonel Merritt, in full uniform. The two became fast friends, and Mr. Whittier was a sincere mourner because of the tragic death of Lieutenant Colonel Merritt.
In recent years Mrs. Gosse has been prominent in the list of woman lecturers, her services being especially sought by clubs and classes in current events. A lecture on "The World and the Newspaper" and various ethical and educational subjects have been among her successes.
Mrs. Gosse is a sincere home lover, and enjoys most of all her cosey home in Roxbury, where she is surrounded by colonial furniture, a profusion of plants and flowers, and several interesting household pets.