Author: Sproat, Granville Temple
Biography:
SPROAT, Granville Temple (1809-87: ancestry.com)
He was born in Middleborough MA, the son of Lt. James Sproat and his wife Lucy Clarke. As the title-page of his one and only volume of verse indicates, he attended Brown University, but only for two years, 1828-30. He did not graduate; instead he went to teach school--first locally, then in Chicago, then in Wisconsin, where he was appointed as a Presbyterian teacher and "assistant missionary" on the Indian mission at La Pointe in 1835. He took a few months' leave to have some medical training and to marry in 1838, back in Middleborough, and returned with his wife to La Pointe, where both served as teachers until the mission closed in 1845. His intrepid wife Florantha (1811-83) was the daughter of the painter Cephas Thompson and his wife Olive Leonard. The Sproats had two daughters. They left Middleborough again in 1854, this time for Gold Rush California, where Sproat preached and contributed poems and stories to local periodicals. They settled in San Francisco in 1856, but Sproat left his wife and children about 1858. Early in 1863 he went back east, eventually joining a communal, celibate Shaker sect in upper New York State. He died in New Lebanon NY; a death notice describes him as having been a Shaker for over twenty years. His wife Florantha chose to stay in California, where she ran a boarding house and then, with her daughter and son-in-law (and with the latter and her grandchildren after the parents separated), a hotel in the Yosemite Valley. (ancestry.com 15 Oct. 2020; findmypast.com 15 Oct. 2020; New York Tribune 5 Feb. 1887)