She was born on May 10, 1800 in Chillicothe, Ohio, United States, the daughter of Thomas and Eleanor (Van Swearingen) Worthington. Thomas Worthington was a member of an old Virginia family who freed his slaves and started life anew in Chillicothe and Adina, Ohio, where he prospered as a lawyer, and became a political leader.
She was schooled in Frankfort, Kentucky, and in a private institution near Baltimore, receiving instruction chiefly in the social usages becoming a girl of her position and beauty.
After marriage she became an ardent worker in the local Episcopal Church, which she helped to found in 1820, and maintained a cultivated salon on the frontier where she entertained among others Karl Bernhard, Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, who recorded his impressions of the family in his Travels through North America during the Years 1825 and 1826. In 1825, she accompanied her father to New Orleans, where she was honored as one of Lafayette's hostesses.
Moving to Cincinnati in 1831, she and her husband became prominent in social life, aided in founding the Cincinnati School of Law, and assisted in the establishment of the Protestant Orphan Aslyum. In 1836, her husband died and his widow moved to Cambridge, Massachussets, where her sons were attending Harvard College. Welcomed by social leaders because of her family connections in New York and Maine, she spent her time in the service of Christ Church and in mastering French, German, and Italian.
With her elder son settled in Cincinnati as a lawyer and the younger in the Philadelphia commercial house of his kinsman, Richard Alsop, she felt free to follow her own bent, and in October 1844 she married William Peter. The Peters became favorites in social and intellectual circles, and their home was noted for its collections of bronzes, prints, and paintings.
On the death of her husband, she returned to Cincinnati, where her home became a rendezvous for artists and musicians. She soon brought together a group of women interested in the fine arts with whose assistance she founded a small art museum, for which she collected masterpieces and worthy copies on her frequent European journeys. By 1876, this group had grown into the Woman's Museum Association, which later fostered the Cincinnati Academy of Fine Arts. As a result of her sympathetic observations in European Catholic countries, especially in 1854 when she met the American prelates who had gone to Rome for the definition of the Immaculate Conception, she developed an interest in Catholicism. In 1855 she was received into the church at Rome by the picturesque Monsignor Bedini.
In 1857, she brought the Sisters of the Good Shepherd under Mother Mary Ward from Louisville to Cincinnati and later assisted them in establishing houses in Newport, Kentucky, Cleveland, and Columbus. She urged successfully that they be given care of a prison exclusively for women such as she had seen in Paris. She secured a colony of Sisters of Mercy from Kinsale, Ireland, who developed into a strong community and during the Civil War rendered able service as nurses under the leadership of nuns who had served with Florence Nightingale in the Crimea. In 1858 she brought out the Franciscan Sisters from Cologne for work among the Germans. To this community she gave her home and much of her substance, founding hospitals in Cincinnati (1859) and Covington, Kentucky. (1861).
During the Civil War, she joined the Sisters of St. Francis at Pittsburg Landing as a nurse, criticized the inefficiency or corruption of the United States Sanitary Commission, and subsequently, despite bitter criticism from Northern partisans, spent herself in the care of prisoners in Cincinnati. As a result of another trip abroad she induced the Sisters of the Poor from France to join the Cincinnati diocese, where in 1869 they established a refuge for impoverished old people. On a journey to Europe in 1869-70, she was well received by Pius IX and the American bishops at the Vatican Council.
Among her manifold interests she was active to the end; her last efforts were in connection with art exhibits at the Centennial Exhibition. She died in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States.
Sarah Peter was known as the patron of the arts. She organized the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, promoted an association for the advancement of tailoresses, and materially aided the Quakers in the erection of the Rosina House for Magdalens. She established the Ladies' Academy of Fine Arts. Besides, the foundations of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, the Sisters of Mercy, the Little Sisters of the Poor in Cincinnati and other institutions owed much to her generosity.
In 1816, she married Edward King, son of Rufus King of New York, who had completed the course at the Litchfield Law School and settled in Chillicothe to practise his profession. He died in 1836.
In October 1844 she married William Peter, British consul in Philadelphia. He was an Oxford scholar, a translator of German poetry, and an essayist, and had served as a Whig member of Parliament. He died on February 6, 1853.
