Page:Woman of the Century.djvu/749

744 She went to the Pacific coast with her parents ten years later, and has since lived in California. She inherited her poetic talent from her father, the late Josiah E. Stevens, a man of gentle, imaginative

temperament, who was at one time a leading Mason and prominent politician of California. Carrie is the oldest of six children, and at an early age showed her leaning toward literary pursuits. She was carefully educated in the Oakland Seminary, and at eighteen years of age was the valedictorian of the first graduating class of that institution. Many of her verses had already found their way into leading periodicals of the coast. She soon achieved a popularity that was unique, even in that period of exaggerated personality in California's social circles. Some years ago she entered the communion of the Roman Catholic Church. Her maternal love has found expression in numerous poems of exquisite tenderness. It is this sympathetic appreciation of children that has made Mrs. Walter one of California's most successful teachers. Several years ago she laid aside her school-work, in which she had labored for twenty years, and has since devoted to literature all the time and strength she could spare from the care of her four children. In 1886 her "Santa Barbara Idyl" was published in book form. She has done and is now doing much newspaper and magazine work. In her prose productions her descriptions of California scenery are inimitable. Her present home is in Santa Clara county.

WALTON, Mrs. Electa Noble Lincoln, educator, lecturer and woman suffragist, born in Watertown, N. Y., 12th May, 1824. She was the youngest daughter of Martin and Susan Freeman Lincoln, with whom at the age of two she removed to Lancaster, Mass. She resided afterwards in Roxbury. and later in Boston Under the pastoral care of Dr. Nathaniel Thayer, of Lancaster, and Dr. George Putnam, of Roxbury, she early assented to the doctrines of Unitarianism.

During the ministration of Rev. J. T. Sargent and under the impulse occasioned by the preaching of Rev. Theodore Parker, she devoted herself to religious work. Her first and principal teacher was her father. In her seventeenth year she entered the State Normal School in Lexington, Mass., and was graduated. She was immediately elected assistant in the Franklin school, Boston. After teaching there a few weeks, she was appointed assistant in her alma mater, to which she returned and taught successively under Mr. May, Mr. Peirce and Mr. Eben S. Steams. In the interregnum between the resignation of Mr. Peirce and the accession of Mr. Stearns, she served as principal of the school. It was the expressed wish of Mr. Peirce that Miss Lincoln should be his successor, but such a radical innovation was not entertained with favor by the authorities, and she continued as assistant until she became the wife of George A. Walton, of Lawrence, Mass., in August, 1850. She has had five children, of whom three are living, Harriet Peirce, wife of Judge James R. Dunbar, of the Massachusetts superior court. Dr. George L. Walton, neurologist, Boston, and Alice Walton, Ph.D., at present, 1892, a student in Germany. After her marriage Mrs. Walton devoted her spare time to benevolent and philanthropic enterprises, and was always a leader in church and charitable work. She defended the Sanitary Commission when it was aspersed, turning the sympathies of the Lawrence people towards it and organizing the whole community into a body of co-laborers with the army in the field. She received thorough instruction in vocal culture from Professor James E. Murdock and William Russell. She was employed for years as a teacher of reading and vocal training in the teachers' institutes of Massachusetts. She has taught in the State Normal Institute of Virginia, and for five successive years, by invitation