Page:Sketches of representative women of New England.djvu/60

Rh Mountain Club. She is also a proprietor of the Boston Athenaeum and a subscriber to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

UGUSTA HALE GIFFORD, historical writer, was born in Turner, Androscoggin County, Me., and brought up through girlhood on one of the old Maine farms. Her father and mother, James Sullivan Hale and his wife, Betsey Stai)les, had settled on the family estate, which had been redeemed from the rocks and briers by Mrs. Gifford's grandparents, David Hale and his wife, Sally Kingsbury, in the early years of the nineteenth century.

David Hale, Mrs. Clifford's paternal grand-father, was a native of Harvard, Mass., born in 1772, and a lineal descendant in the sixth generation of Thomas^ Hale, the immigrant progenitor of this branch of the Hale family in New England, who settled at Newbury, Massachusetts Bay Colony, about 1637. David Hale married Sally Kingsbury, of Ellington, Conn., daughter of Simon Kingsbury, and livecl in Rutland, Mass., until their removal to Turner, Oxford County, Me., in 1802. They made the voyage of three weeks from Boston to Falmouth (Portland) in the winter season, in a sailing-vessel, and were obliged to leave their two children in Falmouth until summer, since it was not practicable earlier to take them forty miles through the woods.

The Kingsburys were a remarkable family intellectually, and Sally Kingsbury Hale brought to these wilds a well-developed and well-stored mind. Although living to be an octogenarian, she still retained her excellent memory; and to the delight of her grandchildren, the elder children of her son Sullivan, she whiled away the long winter evenings, passed before the huge open fireplace, with vivid accounts of battles of the Revolution, including that of Monmouth, in which her brother, Dr. Joseph Kingsbury, was wounded, and with thrilling stories of Indian captivities and other adventures in far-off colonial times. These stories she told as she had heard them in her girlhood from the lips of Ephraim Kingsbury, of Haverhill — "Uncle Ephraim," she used to call him—stories partly of his own experience and partly, perhaps, relating to the Ephraim Kingsbury who is on record in Chase's History of Haverhill, Mass., as having been killed by Indians in 1676.

Sullivan and Betsey (Staples) Hale were the parents of five children, namely: Eugene, United States Senator; Hortense, who with her husband. Dr. Cushing, a retired physician, now lives on the old homestead in Turner, Me.; Frederick (deceased); Augusta (Mrs. Gifford); and Clarence, of Portland, Me., Judge of the United States Court.

Augusta Hale was fitted for college in the high school of Turner, in the companionship of a beloved brother, Frederick, with whom she shared every sport, overcame every difficulty, and was {permitted to accomplish every task. They even studied their lessons from the same book, going to and from school together. His death in 1868 was her first affliction, and it marked the beginning of her literary aspiration. In 1859, at the age of seventeen, she entered Oberlin, then almost the only fully equipped college (with a complete classical curriculum) in the country open to both sexes. Her voice was often heard' in the college and the college society parts, delivered in the large church then, as now, connected therewith. But her student life at Oberlin was only the beginning of the self-culture which must necessarily supplement the early education of men and women who accomplish anything worth while for the world.

After graduation she settled in Portland, and in 1869 was married to the Hon. George Gifford, originally a lawyer, afterward a journalist, and finally for many years as at present in the consular service. Mrs. Gifford shared with her husband different fields of foreign labor, and this residence abroad has continued for her somewhat intermittently for more than a quarter of a century, their home being at intervals in London. Paris, various parts of France, and for several years in Basle, Switzerland. She became the mother of three children — Katherine, Clarence Hale, and Marguerite. The younger daughter was born during a long residence of the family in Nantes, France. Many interesting and amusing incidents occurred in Mrs. Gifford's early trips across the Atlantic