Sarah Thompson, Countess Rumford
Sarah Thompson, Countess Rumford, (18 October 1774 – 2 December 1852) was a philanthropist. She is the first American to be known as a Countess. Early life. 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". Adult life. Around 1796, at her father's request, Sarah Thompson traveled to London to  be with him, since four years earlier her mother had died. In 1797, the Elector of Bavaria accepted Thompson as a Countess of the Holy Roman Empire. In recognition of her father's military services to Bavaria, she was to be given one half of his pension of 2000 florins upon his death, with the right to live in any country she wished. When her father died in 1814 she became "Countess Rumford". Thompson spent her time between her homes in Brompton, London, and Concord, New Hampshire, with other trips in-between. She often would travel to Paris and lived  there for two and three years. Later life. From 1845, Thompson lived primarily at her home in Concord, New Hampshire. She lived there in luxury with an adopted daughter until her death in 1852. Thompson established the Rolfe and Rumford Asylums in Concord, New Hampshire. She provided assistance to and bequeathed large sums of money to charitable societies in Concord and Boston for needy children, motherless girls, widows, and the mentally ill. The United Way in 1984 founded the Rumford Society in honor of the charitable donations given by Thompson. Her gravestone monument reads,