Woman of the Century/Martha Wintermute

WINTERMUTE, Mrs. Martha, poet, born in Berkshire, Ohio, in 1842. Her maiden name was Martha Vandermark. She is descended from a patriotic soldier ancestry. Her grandfather, Benjamin Hitchcock, of Connecticut, entered the Revolutionary army at the age of seventeen years and served to the close of the war. He was the father of Samuel Hitchcock, the philanthropist, and of the late Benjamin Hitchcock, for many years an author and the editor of the New Haven "Palladium." His oldest daughter became the wife of a son of Elbridge Gerry, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and also a vice-president of the United States. Another daughter was the mother of Orvil Hitchcock Platt, one of the present United States Senators from Connecticut. Roswell Dwight Hitchcock, the theologian, and Allen Hitchcock, the soldier and author, and Edward Hitchcock, the geologist, were of the same ancestors. Mrs. Wintermute's father was a descendant of the Symmeses, of Holland, who at an early period settled upon the Island of Barbadoes, and acquired title to a large portion of it. She wrote verses at the age of ten. MARTHA WINTERMUTE. At the age of sixteen she wrote a poem entitled "The Song of Delaware," which she brought before the public by reading it on her graduation from the Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware, Ohio. That poem was soon followed by others, which were received with favor by the public. She became the wife, at the age of nineteen, of Dr. Alfred Wintermute, of Newark, Ohio, and for a number of years thereafter she did not offer any poetry to the public. In 1888 she began the revision and publication of her writings. In 1890 she brought out in a volume a prose story in the interest of temperance, closing the volume with about one-hundred pages of her poetry, revised and corrected. Since the publication of that volume, she has published in the newspapers much miscellaneous verse. She resides in Newark, Ohio.