Chapter 30

The Belle of New Haven

Her birth name was Sarah Lockwood Pardee. She was the fifth of seven children born to Leonard Pardee and Sarah Burns. There are no existing records or any other form of factual information to establish Sarah’s date of birth—even the year remains unknown. * The scarce information that survives from the historical record indicates her birth must have occurred somewhere between 1835 and 1845.

At the time of Sarah’s birth, the Pardee’s were a respectable, upper middle class New Haven family. Her father Leonard was a joiner by trade whose shrewd sense of business found him moving up the ladder of polite society as a successful carriage manufacturer. Later, during the Civil War, he made a fortune supplying ambulances to the Union Army.*

Young Sarah’s most distinguishing characteristic was that she was everything but ordinary. Like Francis Bacon, she was a child prodigy. Moreover, by all accounts, she was also considered to be quite beautiful. By the age of twelve, Sarah was already fluent in the Latin, French, Spanish, and Italian languages. Furthermore, her knowledge of the classics (most notably Homer and Shakespeare) along with a remarkable talent as a musician was well noticed.* It is no wonder that New Haven Society would eventually dub her “The Belle of New Haven.” *

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