Liberty's Birds #7: Wild Fruit in a Family Tree

 

Liberty's Birds #7: Wild Fruit in a Family Tree

by Becky Collis

In the introduction to her book praising Kansas's advantages Sara Robinson mentioned the wild fruit.

Paw-paws grow on trees here.

Sara herself was a somewhat wild fruit in her family tree, a family of which she was quite proud.

Wild Fruit in a Family Tree

by Denniele Bohannon and Elsie Ridgley

Always careful to style her name Sara T.D. Robinson, she had been given two middle names. Today we might call her Sara Lawrence Robinson using her maiden name and married name but in her time women tended to drop their maiden names and use their middle initials and married names---when they weren't just Mrs. Charles Robinson.

Her D.A.R. file highlighting her revolutionary maternal grandfather Henry Dwight 

Wild Fruit in a Family Tree

by Barbara Brackman

Sara's name honored Sara Tappan Raboteau Doolittle (1817-1881), good friend to her mother and wife  of her father's law mentor Mark Doolittle (Sara's older brother got Mark Doolittle's full name.) Sara Robinson was the main source for Blackmar's The Life of Charles Robinson, which has this to say about Sara Doolittle and Clarissa Lawrence.

Sara was raised in a circle of antislavery thinkers and activists.

When she was 18 her father Myron Lawrence declared his opposition to the annexation of slave-state Texas.

From The Liberator in 1845

Belchertown, Massachusetts, 1847

A 1960 history of their hometown tells us:

"One of the most famous people of the early town was Myron Lawrence. His home once stood where the Clapp Memorial Library now stands. Mr. Lawrence studied law in the office of Mark Doolittle in Belchertown. At the age of 27, he was a member of the Massachusetts General Court and served in the Senate for many years....His daughter Sarah (sic) Lawrence married Dr. Charles Robinson who became the first governor of the territory of Kansas. The family frowned upon this marriage because they felt Mr. Robinson would never amount to anything."

Myron died soon after Sara's rebellious marriage. Above an obituary that told us of his "great corpulency."

Sara's husband became Kansas's first state governor and she herself amounted to something as shown in a 1908 edition of Who's Who in America.

Both are given coverage in Lamb's 1903 Biographical Dictionary of the United States:

Wild Fruit in a Family Tree

by Susannah Pangelinan

Mandrakes---we call them May Apples and we

don't eat them as they are poisonous.

The Block