Woman of the Century/Sarah Knowles Bolton

BOLTON, Mrs. Sarah Knowles, author, born in Fannington, Conn., 15th September, 1841. She is a daughter of John Segar Knowles, descended from Henry Knowles, who moved to Portsmouth, R. I., from London, England, in 1635. Her grandmother, Mary Carpenter, was descended from Elizabeth Jenckes, sister of Joseph Jenckes, Governor of Rhode Island. Mrs. Bolton comes on her mother's side from Nathaniel Stanley, of Hartford, Conn., Lieutenant Colonel of First Regiment in 1739; Assistant Treasurer, 1725-49; Treasurer, 1749-55, and from Colonel William Pynchon, one of the twenty-six incorporators of Massachusetts Bay Colony, and the founder of Springfield, Mass. 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 lives to her were a constant inspiration. She became an excellent scholar and graduated from the seminary founded by Catherine Beecher. Her first published poem appeared in the "Waverly Magazine," when she was fifteen years old. Soon after her graduation she published a small volume, "Orlean Lamar and Other Poems " 'New York, 1863), and a serial was SARAH KNOWLES BOLTON. 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 Hillsborough, Ohio, she was one of the first to take up the work and aid it with voice and pen. She was soon appointed assistant corresponding secretary of the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and as such, says Miss Willard, "She kept articles, paragraphs and enlightening excerpts before the public, which did more toward setting our new methods before the people than any single agency had ever compassed up to that time." At the request of the temperance women of the country. Mrs Bolton prepared a history of the crusade for the Centennial temperance volume, and of the Cleveland work for Mrs. Wittenmver's general history. At that time she published her temperance story entitled "The Present Problem" (New York, 1874). Invited to Boston to become one of the editors of the "Congregationalist," a most useful and responsible position, she proved herself an able journalist she passed two 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 the 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 of laboring people by their employers, reading a paper on that subject at a meeting of the American Social Science Association held in Saratoga in 1883. Mrs. Bolton's additional published works are How Success is Won" (Boston, 1884); "Lives of Poor Boy's who Became Famous" (New York, (1885); "Girls who Became Famous" (New York, 1886); "Stories from Life" (New York, 1886); "Social Studies in England" (Boston, 18861; "From Heart and Nature, Poems" (New York. 1887); "Famous American Authors" (New York, 1887); "Famous American Statesmen" (New York, 1888); "Some Successful Women" (Boston, 1888); "Famous Men of Science" (New York, 1889); "Famous European Artists" (New York, 1890); "English Authors of the Nineteenth Century" (New York. 1890); English Statesmen of Queen Victoria's Reign" (New York, 1891); "Famous Types of Womanhood" (New York, Several of these books have been reprinted in England. Mrs. Bolton's home is an ideal one for the lover of art and literature. Her husband is a man of wide travel and reading, and has given thirteen-hundred lectures during the past nine seasons They have but one child, a son, Charles Knowles Bolton, graduated from Harvard College in 1890, and an assistant now in the Harvard University Library.