Sturgis-Tappan family.

Caroline Sturgis Tappan (1819-1888) and her sister, Ellen Sturgis Hooper (1812-1848), were born in Boston to wealthy merchant, William Sturgis and Elizabeth Marston Davis. Ellen married Dr. Robert William Hooper in 1837. Caroline married William Aspinwall Tappan in 1847 and they had two daughters, Ellen Sturgis Tappan (1849- ) and Mary Aspinwall Tappan (1851- ). The Sturgis sisters were minor Transcendentalist poets whose work was occasionally published in The Dial. They counted among their acquaintances Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Ellery Channing, Henry David Thoreau, and Sophia and Nathaniel Hawthorne. The sisters, especially Caroline, were also friendly with Margaret Fuller and regularly attended her celebrated "conversations," begun in 1839. The Tappans lived in Boston and summered in the Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote much of his novel, The House of the Seven Gables, at the family's summer home, "Tanglewood," which was donated to the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1936.