Page:Sketches of representative women of New England.djvu/328

Rh Mrs. Collins has lived to see her five children occupy positions of influence and honor. She has recently gone to make her home with her daughter Florence, Mrs. Porter, in South Pasadena. At seventy-six years of age she is in possession of active mental faculties, with the prospect of continued long life in the land of sunshine.

Mrs. Porter was graduated from the public schools of Caribou, and has always taken an interest in educational matters. Elected as a member of the School Committee of Caribou in 1882, she served in that capacity one year, being one of the first women in the State of Maine to hold such a position. After the death of her husband, the Rev. Charles William Porter, in 1894, she served for four years as Superintendent of the schools of Caribou, and for a year was editor and proprietor of the Aroostook Republican. The paper was a financial success, and proved to be the entrance into a larger field of journalism. Mrs. Porter's maternal uncle, Wallace L. Hardison, having purchased the Los Angeles Herald, offered her a lucrative and important position on the editorial staff of that paper. Accordingly, in October, 1900, Mrs. Porter transferred her interests from Maine to the Pacific coast.

Mrs. Porter has always been active in matters that pertain to woman^s work and advancement. When but a girl in her teens, she drove ten miles to hear the first woman speaker that ever came into that part of the country m which she lived. Temperance work early attracted her attention, and for four years she was the national secretary of the Non-partisan Woman's Christian Temperance Union, whose headquarters were at Cleveland, Ohio.

From 1896 to 1898 Mrs. Porter was vice-president of the Maine Federation of Women's Clubs and from 1898 to 1900 the president. When she went to Los Angeles, the Federation showed its appreciation of her services by creating the office of honorary president, and giving her that title. In Los Angeles she is a member of the Friday Morning Club and of the Ebell, and an honorary member of the Ruskin Art Club. At the tune of the biennial meeting of 1902 she edited an illustrated souvenir edition of the Los Angeles Herald that attracted wide attention, and drew forth many compliments because of the accuracy of the biographical sketches of club women and the artistic quality of the work. She conducts a weekly column. She is in demand by clubs and child-study circles for short addresses on topics relating to Women's work.

Florence Collins was married to the Rev. Charles William Porter, November 3, 1873. Mr. Porter was born in Houlton, Me. Ordained as a Congregational clergyman, he served as pastor of the churches of Caribou, Oldtown, and Winthrop. He died in Caribou, July 17, 1894. Three children survive their father, namely: Helen Louise, born in Caribou, July 28, 1876; Florence S., born in Caribou, September 1, 1885; and Charles Winthrop Porter, born in Winthrop, Me., January 14, 1891. Helen Louise was married in October, 1900, to Mr. John Gregg Utterback, of Rochester, N.Y. The two younger children are living with their mother in their new home, the "Inglenook," recently built at South Pasadena.

LECTA NOBLES LINCOLN WALTON, wife of George A. Walton and co-author with her husband of Walton's Arithmetics, was born in Watertown, N.Y., May 12, 1824, the youngest child of Martin and Susan W. (Freeman) Lincoln. On the paternal side she is a descendant of Samuel* Lincoln, who settled at Hingham, Mass., in 1637, and of his son Mordecai,^ who was born in Hingham in 1657. These two ancestors of Mrs. Walton were also ancestors of the martyred President, Abraham Lincoln, who was of the same generation that she is — the seventh. Mrs. Walton's great-great-grandfather, Jacob' Lincoln, born in 1711, son of Mordecai' by his second wife, was half-brother to President Lincoln's great-great-grandfather, Mordecai Lincoln, born in 1686, who removed from Hingham, Mass., to New Jersey and thence to Pennsylvania. And Mrs. Walton's great-great-grandfather on her grandmother Chloe's side, namely, Isaac' Lincoln, born in 1691, was own brother to President Lincoln's great-great-grandfather, Mordecai,' both being sons of Mordecai^ by his first wife, Sarah Jones.