Author: Lard, Rebecca
Biography:
Lard, Rebecca (1772-1855: ancestry.com)
The eldest of the ten children of Priscilla (Delano) and Jabez Hammond, she was born in New Bedford MA and moved with the family to Woodstock VT when she was ten. Without formal schooling herself, she began teaching school at the age of fourteen and was a teacher off and on for the rest of her life. In 1801 she married Samuel Lard; the couple had four children. When her husband went to settle as a farmer in Indiana about 1807, however, she refused to join him, staying instead with their children in Vermont. When she finally agreed to go in 1819, the arrangement did not last long. In 1823, she left Montgomery Township IN to teach school in Vernon, Jennings County IN; five years later, Samuel Lard was granted a divorce. Rebecca Lard eventually moved on to Coffee Creek IN, where she died; she is buried in the Baptist Cemetery there. According to the Advertisement in The Banks of the Ohio, the poem had come second in a contest sponsored by the Philomathick Society of Cincinnati College; there is now an annual Rebecca Lard Award offered by the literary journal Poetry Quarterly. (ancestry.com 10 Sept. 2019; "Rebecca Hammond Lard," Wikipedia 10 Sept. 2019)
Other Names:
- Mrs. Lard