Frances Dana Barker Gage was a reformer and author. She wrote and spoke on temperance, slavery, and woman’s rights.
Background
Frances Dana Barker Gage was born on October 12, 1808, in Marietta, Ohio, where her father, Col. Joseph Barker, a native of New Hampshire, was among the original settlers.
Her mother, Elizabeth Dana, was connected with the Dana and Bancroft families of Massachusetts.
Education
Frances secured such an education as the little frontier community afforded.
Career
In 1853, the family moved to St. Louis. Here Mrs. Gage’s anti-slavery proclivities promptly branded her an Abolitionist, her articles were excluded from the press, and she herself was socially ostracized and threatened with violence. While in St. Louis the family suffered three disastrous fires, possibly the work of incendiaries, and James Gage failed in business and in health.
Mrs. Gage thereupon took the post of assistant editor of an agricultural paper in Columbus, Ohio, which she held until the Civil War destroyed the circulation of the paper. On the outbreak of the war, four of her sons joined the Union armies, and in 1862 she went to Port Royal, Beaufort, and Paris Island, South Carolina, and Fernandina, Florida, where for thirteen months, with the aid of her daughter Mary, she ministered to the freedmen of the soldiers.
She then returned North to lecture and arouse others to the needs of the freedmen and the armies. Later she served as an unsalaried agent of the Western Sanitary Commission in Memphis, Vicksburg, and Natchez. In September of 1864, however, her active war work was ended when she was thrown from her carriage in Galesburg, Illinois, and crippled for a year.
Following the war, she lectured widely on temperance. In August 1867, a stroke of paralysis brought her public life to an end, but she continued her writing, and, as “Aunt Fanny, ” became well known for her children’s stories, sketches of social life, and poems.
She died in Greenwich, Connecticut.
Achievements
Religion
Frances did not practice her religion all her life.
Personality
Frances Dana Barker was large and vigorous, with a kindly face, easy manners, and a rich fund of conversation. An excellent extemporaneous speaker who never failed to interest her audiences, she was much in demand and rendered valuable aid to the various causes in which she became interested.
Connections
On January 1, 1829, when not yet twenty-one, Frances Dana Barker married James L. Gage, a lawyer of McConnelsville, Ohio.