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Something you may not know:
There's just one degree of separation between Dartmouth College and the push to establish Thanksgiving as a national holiday, thanks to a brother and sister from Newport, N.H., today about a 35-minute drive south of Hanover.
Born on Oct. 24, 1788, Sarah Josepha Hale was not able to attend college. The History of American Women website writes of Sarah:
Her parents strongly believed in equal education for both sexes and Sarah was educated by her mother and her brother Horatio, who taught her what he had learned at Dartmouth each day when he returned from school. Dartmouth awarded a diploma to Horatio and he awarded a diploma to Sarah and declared she had earned her degree in the Arts, Summa Cum Laude.
Aided by her shadow Dartmouth education, Sarah Josepha Hale went on to become a well-respected author and editor, perhaps best-known today for writing the nursery rhyme, "Mary Had a Little Lamb."
One of the causes Hale held dear later in life was that Thanksgiving should be a national holiday. To that end, she fired off letters to Presidents Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan before a missive she wrote at age 75 hit home with Abraham Lincoln. Not long after her latest letter reached Washington, D.C., Lincoln established the last Thursday of November to be Thanksgiving. His Oct. 3, 1863 proclamation included this:
The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God.
And . . .
“I do, therefore, invite my fellow-citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a Day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.
