Samuel Hoar - Hoar Family

Hoar Family

Samuel Hoar had five surviving children (of six offspring); several led influential or prominent lives.

• Elizabeth Sherman Hoar (July 14, 1814-April 7, 1878) was engaged to Charles Chauncy Emerson (1808–1836), youngest brother of Ralph Waldo Emerson and young law partner of Samuel Hoar; Charles died of tuberculosis before they could marry, and she never married. She was an intimate of the Emerson, Hawthorne and Thoreau families. R.W. Emerson invited Elizabeth into the Transcendentalist community, and she aided in producing their journal, The Dial.

• Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar (1816–1895) (Harvard class of 1835) was Associate Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, and US Attorney General for President Ulysses Grant; later nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court by Grant, but the nomination was not approved by the Senate; he married Caroline Brooks of Concord.

• Sarah Sherman Hoar (1817–1907) married Robert Boyd Storer (1796–1870), a Boston, Massachusetts importer trading with Russia, and Russian Consul at Boston.

• Samuel Johnson Hoar (February 4, 1820 – Jan 10, 1821) died in infancy.

• Edward Sherman Hoar (1823–1892), (Harvard class of 1844), married childhood neighbor Elizabeth Hallet Prichard of Concord, and was an intimate of Henry David Thoreau (the Thoreau family lived across Main street from the Hoars, in several different houses over the years). Edward with H.D. Thoreau accidentally allowed a cooking fire to get out of control, and caused more than a 100 acres (400,000 m2) of forest to burn on April 30, 1844, along the Sudbury River in the Fairhaven Bay section of Concord. Edward accompanied Thoreau on some of Thoreau's hiking and canoeing excursions. Edward Sherman was a California state district attorney for the fourth Judicial district in 1850. He returned to Massachusetts in 1857.

• George Frisbie Hoar (1826–1904) (Harvard class of 1845) moved to Worcester, Massachusetts as a young adult, and became a prominent U.S. Senator representing Massachusetts for 27 years, from 1877 until his death.