Sarah Josepha Hale

Sarah Josepha Buell was born on October 24, 1788, in Newport, New Hampshire. Educated at home by her mother and elder brother, she developed an intellectual passion that sustained her when her lawyer husband David Hale died in 1822, leaving her with five young children. Turning to literature to support her family, her 1827 anti-slavery novel 'Northwood: Life North and South' won national acclaim and led to her appointment as editor of the Ladies' Magazine in Boston.

In 1830, Hale published her poetry collection 'Poems for Our Children', which included the immortal verse 'Mary's Lamb'—later famous worldwide as 'Mary Had a Little Lamb'. In 1837, Louis Godey appointed her editor of 'Godey’s Lady’s Book' in Philadelphia. Over her forty-year editorship, Hale built the magazine into the most widely read periodical in pre-Civil War America with 150,000 subscribers, publishing masterpieces by Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Harriet Beecher Stowe while fiercely championing higher education for women and co-founding Vassar College.

Recognized as 'The Mother of Thanksgiving', Hale launched a national crusade in 1846 to unite an increasingly fractured United States around a shared harvest feast. For seventeen continuous years, she published impassioned editorials and lobbied five American presidents. Finally, in October 1863 amidst the horrors of the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln responded to Hale’s petition by issuing the historic presidential proclamation establishing the fourth Thursday in November as an official annual national Thanksgiving holiday. She passed away in Philadelphia on April 30, 1879, at age ninety.