Hoar, Elizabeth Hallett Prichard, 1822-1917

1822-1917; nicknamed Lizzie, Lissie, Liz, and Lis) was the only one of the five Prichard children to produce a child and was also the longest-lived of her generation. These circumstances explain the passage of this collection of Prichard family papers down through her descendants before its donation to the Concord Free Public Library.

Lizzie Prichard attended Concord Academy and George Barrell Emerson’s school for girls in Boston. Over time, she acquired knowledge of Latin, Greek, French, German, and Italian, earning a reputation as a learned woman. In this she resembled her good friend and sister-in-law, Elizabeth Sherman Hoar. Like Elizabeth Hoar (and, in Jane Prichard’s opinion, incited by Elizabeth Hoar), Lizzie Prichard was an ardent abolitionist—seemingly the most radical in her family. Elizabeth Prichard worked as a teacher. She taught in Baltimore (where she socialized with the recently married Caroline Healey Dall), New York, and Brooklyn. Her career and her penchant for travel took her away from Concord for long periods of time.

On October 6, 1858, she sailed for Liverpool on the Niagara with Elizabeth Hoar and Elizabeth’s brother Edward Sherman Hoar, another Concord Academy schoolmate and a companion of Henry David Thoreau. The three took what Elizabeth Maxfield Miller (editor of the letters of Elizabeth Hoar) described as “a grand tour of Europe, with a winter and early spring in Italy in the middle of it.” On December 28, 1858, Elizabeth Hallett Prichard married Edward Sherman Hoar at the American consulate in Florence. Through the winter and spring, the couple lived with Elizabeth Hoar in an apartment in Rome and associated with the Anglo-American community there.

On August 27, 1859, the three travelers returned to Boston on the Europa, arriving on September 9. Elizabeth Sherman Hoar resumed residence in her family’s Concord home (now 158 Main Street). In 1860, shortly after the birth in Concord on January 23 of their daughter Florence (an only child), the Edward Hoars purchased a farm in nearby Lincoln (the Hayden Farm on the Old Concord Road, later known as the Snelling Farm; the house burned in 1928). Thoreau surveyed their property in March of 1860; his draft survey is among the Henry David Thoreau papers in the Concord Free Public Library.

Lizzie, Edward, and Florence Hoar moved into Elizabeth Hoar’s Concord household some time after the death in 1866 of Sarah Sherman Hoar (Edward’s and Elizabeth’s mother). They sold their Lincoln property in 1871. In December of that year, Lizzie Prichard Hoar, Edward, Florence, Carrie Hoar (daughter of Ebenezer Rockwood and Caroline Downes Brooks Hoar), and Hoar cousins Helen Pierce Van Vost and Augusta Pierce sailed to Italy and settled in Arinella (Palermo, Sicily) in search of a better climate for Edward’s health. They remained abroad for two years. Elizabeth Hoar wintered with them in 1872-1873.

After Elizabeth Sherman Hoar’s death in 1878, Edward and Elizabeth Prichard Hoar remained in the Hoar family homestead on Main Street. Edward Hoar died in 1893. Elizabeth died in 1917 in her childhood home (140 Main Street). Both are buried in Concord’s Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.