Not your children's Thanksgiving tale

From Massachusetts

Perhaps it is not surprising that a woman started America’s great celebration of family, abundance and unity. The Pilgrims? Forget about ’em. She brought them to the table. We can thank Sarah Josepha Buell Hale for Thanksgiving. The story of her founding this national holiday is better than the one we learned in elementary school.

Born in 1788, home-schooled by her mother and brother, Sarah taught school in Newport, New Hampshire, until she married David Hale, a young lawyer, who died just before the birth of their fifth child. Widowed in her early 30s, she turned to one of the few ways a woman could earn a living – writing. She published “Northwood: Life North and South,” one of the first American novels to address slavery. One chapter described in elaborate detail a New England Thanksgiving, championing a nationwide celebration to help unify an increasingly divided country.

The 1827 book caught the attention of John Blake, an Episcopal minister, who invited Hale to become America’s first woman magazine editor. Eight years later, Louis Godey folded that foundering magazine into Lady’s Book, which the two turned into the dominant monthly of the day and a national platform for Sarah Hale.

Read more here:

http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/11/26/4356508/not-your-childrens-thanksgiving.html?sp=/99/108/#storylink=cpy