page_title: Sarah Josepha Hale
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Sarah Josepha Hale / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: September 1863 letter from editor Sarah Josepha Hale to President Abraham Lincoln discussing the need for a national Thanksgiving holiday.
context_page_description: Sarah Josepha Buell Hale was an American writer, activist, and an influential editor. She was the author of the nursery rhyme "Mary Had a Little Lamb". Hale famously campaigned for the creation of the American holiday known as Thanksgiving, and for the completion of the Bunker Hill Monument.
context_section_description: According to Mary Benson, American intellectuals considered Hale to be well within the bounds of propriety and certainly not a troublemaker. She appeared as a conservative who emphasized convention and promoted special and separate roles for women. Her opposition to suffrage alienated active feminists. She wanted to open up the professions, advising Vassar College to hire women instructors and administrators. Her success in publishing works by so many women enhanced the visibility of women authors. Benson says her editorial policy probably did more for the moral tone of her readers and for their literary judgment."
  Hale may be the individual most responsible for making Thanksgiving a national holiday in the United States; it had previously been celebrated mostly in New England. Each state scheduled its own holiday, some as early as October and others as late as January; it was largely unknown in the American South. Her advocacy for the national holiday began in 1846 and lasted 17 years before it was successful. In support of the proposed national holiday, Hale wrote presidents Taylor, Fillmore, Pierce, Buchanan, and Lincoln. Her initial letters failed to persuade, but the letter she wrote to Lincoln convinced him to support legislation establishing a national holiday of Thanksgiving in 1863. The new national holiday was considered a unifying day after the stress of the Civil War. Before Thanksgiving's addition, the only national holidays celebrated in the United States were Washington's Birthday and Independence Day.
  Hale also worked to preserve George Washington's Mount Vernon plantation, as a symbol of patriotism that both the Northern and Southern United States could all support.
  Hale raised $30,000 in Boston for the completion of the Bunker Hill Monument.  When construction stalled, Hale asked her readers to donate a dollar each and also organized a week-long craft fair at Quincy Market. Described as "'Oprah and Martha Stewart combined,'" Hale's organization of the giant craft fair at Quincy Market "was much more than a 'bake sale'"—"refreshments were sold ... but they brought in only a fraction of the profit." The fair sold handmade jewelry, quilts, baskets, jams, jellies, cakes, pies, and autographed letters from Washington, James Madison, and the Marquis de Lafayette.  Hale "made sure the 221-foot obelisk that commemorates the battle of Bunker Hill got built."
  Liberty Ship #1538 (1943–1972) was named in Hale's honor, as was a New York City Board of Education vocational high school on the corner of Dean St. and 4th Avenue in Brooklyn, New York. However, the school closed in June 2001.
  A prestigious literary prize, the Sarah Josepha Hale Award, is named for her. Notable winners of the Hale Award include Robert Frost in 1956, Ogden Nash in 1964, Elizabeth Yates in 1970, Arthur Miller in 1990, and Julia Alvarez in 2017.
  Hale was further honored as the fourth in a series of historical bobblehead dolls created by the New Hampshire Historical Society and sold in their museum store in Concord, New Hampshire. She is featured on a New Hampshire historical marker (number 6) along New Hampshire Route 103 in Newport.
  Hale is honored with a feast day on the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church (USA) on April 30. She is commemorated on the Boston Women's Heritage Trail.
  A box of her correspondence, containing 28 folders, is in the collections of the Athenaeum of Philadelphia.
caption: 1863 letter from Hale to President Lincoln  discussing Thanksgiving
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