page_title: Sarah Thompson, Countess Rumford
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Sarah Thompson, Countess Rumford / Early life
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait of Benjamin Thompson (1753-1814)
context_page_description: Sarah Thompson, Countess Rumford, was a philanthropist. She is the first American to be known as a Countess.
context_section_description: Thompson was the daughter of the Anglo-American physicist and inventor Benjamin Thompson and of Sarah Rolfe, a rich and well-connected heiress, who was thirteen years older than her husband. Both were born and brought up in the American colonies and married there in 1772.
  During the American Revolutionary War of 1775 to 1783, Benjamin Thompson took the side of the British, and at the end of the war he moved to London. He was knighted in 1784. In 1785, when Sarah Thompson was eleven years old, her father moved to Bavaria to become an aide-de-camp to the Prince-elector Charles Theodore. She, however, remained in New England with her mother.
  In 1792, Sir Benjamin Thompson was created a Count of the Holy Roman Empire. He took the name "Rumford" for Rumford, New Hampshire, which was an older name for the town of Concord, where he had been married, becoming "Count Rumford".
caption: Sarah's father, Benjamin Thompson
exif: {}