Page:The part taken by women in American history.djvu/703

662 Ann Custis Doan, her mother being of the Virginia Custis family. In early youth, religious truths made a deep impression on her mind and heart, and at sixteen she was converted and became an active member of the Methodist Episcopal Church. She improved every opportunity for study in the public schools and prepared herself in the Normal School of Prof. Holbrook in Lebanon, Ohio, for teaching. She taught in a graded school in Fayette County, Ohio, for some time before her marriage with George Henry La Fetra, of Warren County, Ohio. Three sons were born to them, the youngest dying in infancy.

Mrs. La Fetra was a charter member of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, of the District of Columbia, was the treasurer for some time, and from 1885 served as president for eight years. She was one of the founders of the Florence Crittendon Hope and Help Mission in Washington. All local missionary work has had her sympathetic support. She presided for years over a temperance hotel in the heart of the nation's Capital, and not only did she make it attractive but successful financially.

She is connected with the Metropolitan Memorial Methodist Episcopal Church. She has at various times been president of the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society and of the Ladies' Association. She is the vice-president of the Washington District, Association for Foreign Missions. A recent honor has been conferred on her by the Baltimore branch of the Woman's Foreign Society in voting to erect a building at Bidar, India, to be called "The Sarah D. La Fetra Memorial," in recognition of her effective labors in that society.

Mrs. La Fetra possesses a warm heart and generous public spirit, so that it has been said of her "every woman's work is made lighter by coming in touch with her." She is an intensely patriotic woman and the historic Metropolitan Methodist Church, so well known as the church of Grant, Logan and McKinley, is supplied with beautiful flags largely through her efforts.

Mrs. Beauchamp, reformer and lecturer, was born in Madison County, Kentucky, in the home of her paternal ancestor, General Samuel Estill, and was of the fifth generation born on the old farm which was taken up from the Commonwealth of Virginia by his progenitors. She was an only child, of a highly imaginative temperament and spent her childhood in dreamland. Trees, flowers and animals became sentient beings with a vivid personality, among which she moved and conversed. Hours were daily given to this imaginative existence and but for the fact that her parents were intensely practical and insisted on regular habits and a systematic performance of the tasks assigned, she would probably have gone through life a visionary, and not the highly sensitive, keenly responsive, and eminently practical woman that her mature years have given to her day and generation. She attended a private school in Richmond, Kentucky, until her ninth year and established herself at the head of her classes, being prominently expert in mathematics. She was devoted to her teacher, the Reverend R. L. Breck, and was deeply grieved when her parents removed her from this school to Science Hill, Shelbyville, Kentucky. Her education covered the English branches,