philanthropy | ETERNALLY PLANTED

SARAH HOFFMAN.

September 25, 2024April 4, 2024Tammy M CardwellLeave a comment

Still to a stricken brother turn.
Whittier.

In the act of incorporation of the Widow’s Society established in the city of New York, in 1797, with the name of Mrs. Graham, is associated that of Mrs. Sarah Hoffman. This lady was the daughter of David Ogden, one of the judges of the Supreme Court of New Jersey, before the elevation of the provinces into states. She was born at Newark, on the eighth of September, 1742; and married Nicholas Hoffman, in 1762. She early took delight in doing good, being thus prompted by deep religious principle. Cautious and discriminating, her charities were bestowed judiciously, and she was able to do much good without the largest means. In her benevolent operations, however, she usually acted in an associated capacity.

As already intimated, she was a member of the society formed “for the relief of poor widows with small children.” That this institution prospered under the control of such women as Mrs. Hoffman and Mrs. Graham, may be inferred from their report made in April, 1803. “Ninety-eight widows and two hundred and twenty-three children,” this document states, “were brought through the severity of the winter with a considerable degree of comfort.”

Mrs. Hoffman, Mrs. Graham and their associates, often perambulated the districts of poverty and disease, from morning till night, entering the huts of want and desolation, and carrying comfort and consolation to many a despairing heart. They clambered to the highest and meanest garrets, and descended to the lowest, darkest and dankest cellars, to administer to the wants of the destitute, the sick, and the dying. They took with them medicine as well as food; and were accustomed to administer Christian counsel or consolation, as the case required, to the infirm in body and the wretched in heart. They even taught many poor creatures, who seemed to doubt the existence of an overruling Providence, to pray to Him whose laws they had broken and thereby rendered themselves miserable.*

In Mrs. Hoffman’s character, to tenderness of feeling were added great firmness, strength of mind, and moral courage. She was often seen in the midst of contagion and suffering where the cheek of the warrior would blanch with fear. She exposed her own life, however, not like the warrior, to destroy, but to save; and hundreds were saved by her humane efforts, combined with those of her co-workers. Her life beautifully exemplified the truth of what Crabbe says of woman:

            —In extremes of cold and heat,
               Where wandering man may trace his kind;
            Wherever grief and want retreat,
               In woman they compassion find.

And if, as the poet Grainger asserts,

The height of virtue is to serve mankind,

Mrs. Hoffman reached a point towards which many aspire, but above which few ascend.

• Knapp’s Female Biography.

______

Excerpted from Noble Deeds of American Women
(Patriotic Series for Boys and Girls)
Edited by J. Clement
——
With an Introduction by Mrs. L. H. Sigourney
Illustrated
BOSTON: Lee and Shepard, Publishers
Entered by Act of Congress, in the year of 1851,
by E. H. Derby and Co., in the Clerk’s Office of the Northern District of New York

A MODERN DORCAS.

September 18, 2024April 4, 2024Tammy M CardwellLeave a comment

‘Tis truth divine, exhibited on earth,
Gives charity her being.
Cowper

Isabella, the wife of Dr. John Graham, was born in Scotland, on the twenty-ninth of July, 1742. At the age of seventeen she became a member of the church in Paisley of which the Rev. Dr. Witherspoon, afterwards President of Princeton college, was the pastor. Dr. Graham was a physician of the same town. Her marriage took place in 1765. The next year Dr. Graham was ordered to join his regiment then stationed in Canada. After spending a few months at Montreal, he removed to Fort Niagara, where he remained in the garrison four years.

Just before the Revolutionary war the sixteenth regiment of Royal Americans was ordered to the island of Antigua. Thither Dr. Graham removed with his family, and there he died in 1774. Mrs. Graham then returned to her native land.

In 1789 she came to this country, and permanently settled in the city of New York. She there opened a school for young ladies, and gained a high reputation in her profession. She united with the Presbyterian church of which John Mason, D. D., was pastor, and was noted, through all the latter years of her life, for the depth of her piety and her Christian benevolence. She made it a rule to give a tenth part of her earnings to religious and charitable purposes. In 1795 she received, at one time, an advance of a thousand pounds on the sale of a lease which she held on some building lots: and not being used to such large profits, she said, on receiving the money, “Quick, quick, let me appropriate the tenth before my heart grows hard.”

Two years afterwards, a society was organized and chartered, for the relief of poor widows; and Mrs. Graham was appointed first directress. Each of the managers had a separate district, and she had the superintendence of the whole. A house was purchased by the society, where work was received for the employment of the widows; and a school was opened for the instruction of their children. “Besides establishing this school, Mrs. Graham selected some of the widows, best qualified for the task, and engaged them, for a small compensation, to open day schools for the instruction of the children of widows, in distant parts of the city: she also established two Sabbath schools, one of which she superintended herself, and the other she placed under the care of her daughter. Wherever she met with Christians sick and in poverty, she visited and comforted them; and in some instances opened small subscription lists to provide for their support. She attended occasionally for some years at the Alms House for the instruction of the children there, in religious knowledge: in this work she was much assisted by a humble and pious female friend, who was seldom absent from it on the Lord’s day.

“It was often her custom to leave home after breakfast, to take with her a few rolls of bread, and return in the evening about eight o’clock. Her only dinner on such days was her bread, and perhaps some soup at the Soup House, established by the Humane Society for the poor, over which one of her widows had been, at her recommendation, appointed.” *

In the winter of 1804-5, before a Tract or Bible Society had been formed in New York, she visited between two and three hundred of the poorer families, and supplied them with a Bible where they were destitute. She also distributed tracts which were written, at her request, by a friend, “and lest it might be said it was cheap to give advice, she usually gave a small sum of money along with the tracts.”

On the fifteenth of March, 1806, a society was organized in New York for providing an Asylum for Orphan Children; and Mrs. Graham occupied the chair on the occasion. Her sympathies were strongly enlisted in this organization, and she was one of the trustees at the time of her death.

“In the winter of 1807-8, when the suspension of commerce by the embargo, rendered the situation of the poor more destitute than ever, Mis Graham adopted a plan best calculated in her view to detect the idle applicant for charity, and at the same time to furnish employment for the more worthy amongst the female poor. She purchased flax, and lent wheels where applicants had none. Such as were industrious took the work with thankful-ness, and were paid for it; those who were beggars by profession, never kept their word to return for the flax or the wheel. The flax thus spun was afterwards woven, bleached, and made into table-cloths and towels for family use.”*

When the Magdalen Society was established by some gentlemen, in 1811, a board of ladies was elected for the purpose of superintending the internal management of the house; and Mrs. Graham was chosen President. This office she continued to hold till her death. The next year the trustees of the Lancasterian School solicited the services of several women to instruct the pupils in the catechism. Mrs. Graham cheerfully assisted in this task, instruction being given one afternoon in each week.

“In the spring of 1814 she was requested to unite with some ladies, in forming a Society for the Promotion of Industry amongst the poor. The Corporation of the city having returned a favorable answer to their petition for assistance, and provided a house, a meeting of the Society was held, and Mrs. Graham once more was called to the chair. It was the last time she was to preside at the formation of a new society. Her articulation, once strong and clear, was now observed to have become more feeble. The ladies present listened to her with affectionate attention; her voice broke upon the ear as a pleasant sound that was passing away. She consented to have her name inserted in the list of managers, to give what assistance her age would permit in forwarding so beneficent a work. Although it pleased God to make her cease from her labors, before the House of Industry was opened, yet the work was carried on by others, and prospered. Between four and five hundred women were employed and paid during the following winter. The Corporation declared in strong terms their approbation of the result, and enlarged their donation, with a view to promote the same undertaking for the succeeding winter.”

Mrs. Graham died on the twenty-seventh of July, 1814. Of no woman of the age may it be said with more propriety, as it was of Dorcas: “This woman was full of good works and alms-deeds, which she did.” Yet few women are more humble than was Mrs. Graham, or think less of their benevolent deeds. Her daughter, Mrs. Bethune, writing of her decease, says that she departed in peace, not trusting in her wisdom or virtue, like the philosophers of Greece and Rome; not even, like Addison, calling on the profligate to see a good man die; but, like Howard, afraid that her good works might have a wrong place in the estimate of her hope, her chief glory was that of a “sinner saved by grace.”

• Mrs Bethune’s Life of Mrs. Graham, abridged,

• Mrs. Bethune

______

Excerpted from Noble Deeds of American Women
(Patriotic Series for Boys and Girls)
Edited by J. Clement
——
With an Introduction by Mrs. L. H. Sigourney
Illustrated
BOSTON: Lee and Shepard, Publishers
Entered by Act of Congress, in the year of 1851,
by E. H. Derby and Co., in the Clerk’s Office of the Northern District of New York
______

A BENEVOLENT QUAKERESS.*

March 20, 2024April 4, 2024Tammy M CardwellLeave a comment

How few, like thee, inquire the wretched out,
And court the offices of soft humanity!
Rowe

Charity Rodman was born in Newport, Rhode Island in the year 1765. Her father was a sea-captain, and died at Honduras while she was in infancy. She married Thomas Rotch, of Nantucket, Massachusetts, on the sixth of June, 1790. Soon afterwards the Rotch family removed to New Bedford, where they have since distinguished themselves by their energy and uprightness of character, and their success in the mercantile business, being extensively engaged in the whale-fishery. Of some of them, as traffickers, it may be said, as it was of the merchants of Tyre in the days of her glory: “they are among the honorable of the earth.”

About the year 1801, Mrs. Rotch removed with her husband to Hartford, Connecticut, where she remained till 1811. She then, in a feeble state of health, and for its improvement, accompanied her husband on a journey through Ohio, and other parts of the West. The mildness of the winter was favorable to her constitution, and, restored to comfortable health, she returned to Hartford in the early part of the next summer. The following November she removed to Kendol, in Stark county, Ohio, near the site of the present village of Massillon.

There the mind of Mrs. Rotch, coöperating with the long cherished wishes of her heart, originated and matured plans for the establishment of a “school for orphan and destitute children.” Having traveled much, she had made extensive observations; and with an eye always open to the condition and wants of human kind, she early and often felt the force of a remark once made to her by an English friend: “That there were a great many children wasted in this country” -a painful truth, but no less applicable to Great Britain than to the United States.

Her husband died in 1823, and bequeathed to her, during life, his large and entire estate. His personal property was left in her hands to be disposed of as her philanthropic heart might dictate. This formed the basis of the school-fund which she left, and which, four or five years after her death, which occurred on the sixth of August, 1824, amounted to twenty thousand dollars. The interest of this sum has since purchased a farm of one hundred and eighty-five acres, one and a half miles from the village of Massillon, and erected, at a cost of five thousand dollars, a large brick edifice for educational and dwelling purposes which has been open seven years and which sustains forty pupils. The real and personal estate of the institution, is now estimated at thirty-five thousand dollars.

A class of ten pupils enter annually and remain four years. The school is established on the manual labor plan; and the boys are thoroughly instructed in the art of husbandry, and the girls in culinary duties and the manufacture of their own wearing apparel. Children enter between the ages of ten and fourteen, hence the youngest leave as advanced in life as their fifteenth year, a period when their habits of industry and their moral principles usually become too well established to be easily changed.

This school, founded by the benevolence of a single individual – a devout, yet modest and quiet member of the Society of Friends – is destined to become a source of inestimable blessings. Every half century, five hundred otherwise neglected plants in the garden of humanity, will there be pruned and nurtured, and strengthened for the storms of life; and many of them will doubtless be fitted to bear fruit here to the glory of God, and be finally transplanted to bloom in eternal youth in the gardens above.

The offspring of Christian philanthropy, the school will stand as a lasting memorial of woman’s worth. The highest ambition of its founder was to be a blessing to those who should come after her; and it may be said that while she did not live in vain, neither did she die in vain. Her death threw a legacy into the lap of orphanage, the benignant influence of which will long be felt.

The grave of Mrs. Rotch is overlooked by the monument of her munificence, but no marble nor enduring object marks the spot. Virtues like hers neither crave nor need chiseled words of praise; they are engraved on the hearts of the succored, to be remembered while those hearts continue to beat; and the feet of befriended children will keep a path open to the grave of their foster-mother, for ages.

* Some of the facts embodied in this article were gathered by the author while on a visit to Massillon, Ohio, in the summer of 1847, and were communicated to the public at that time through the columns of the Western Literary Messenger; others were lately and very obligingly furnished by Dr. William Bowen, of that place.