Sophia Smith was an American philanthropist from Massachusetts.
Background
Sophia was born on August 27, 1796 in Hatfield, Massachussets, United States, a descendant of Samuel Smith who emigrated from England in 1634, and a niece of Oliver Smith. She was the fourth of the seven children of Joseph and Lois (White) Smith. Her family was substantial, though not conspicuous except for excessive thrift.
After the death of her mother, the care of the household became the sole responsibility of her sister Harriet. After Harriet's death she relied on her eldest brother Austin.
Education
Sophia Smith's education had been elementary, though she indulged a taste for reading, especially after she became deaf.
Career
A sudden death of her brother Austin in 1861, whose parsimony and success in speculation enabled him to amass a fortune, made Sophia a sole heir of all his funds.
Accustomed always to depend on others, she laid her problems before her young pastor, John Morton Greene. Hoping to give her introspective nature opportunity for expression, he advised her to keep a journal. Later, unable to interest her in his own college, Amherst, or in Mount Holyoke Seminary, founded by Sophia Smith's distant cousin, Mary Lyon, Greene proposed an academy and woman's college, or a deaf-mute institution.
In 1862 she made a will omitting the woman's college but providing for a library, an academy, and an institution for the deaf at Hatfield. The foundation of the Clarke School for the Deaf in Northampton anticipated the latter provision, and Greene again (1868) urged her to endow a woman's college. At her request, he prepared a "Plan for a Woman's College, " which was embodied in a new will providing for a college. The location of the college, originally planned for Hatfield, was changed in her fifth and final will in 1870 to Northampton. The bequest amounted to nearly half a million dollars by 1875, when the college was opened.
She died on June 12, 1870 in Massachusetts, United States.
Personality
She lived a quiet life enlivened by occasional trips to watering places and once to Washington, and by visits to and from friends. One of the few luxuries she allowed herself was the building of a fashionable but ugly mansard-roofed mansion, in which she spent her last three years.
Quotes from others about the person
According to Hanscom and Greene, "her life is no tale of a stout-hearted, singleminded woman, fired by great ambition, evolving a great ideal".