Harriet Livermore

Harriet Livermore (April 14, 1788-1868), is best known as a preacher, becoming one of the most well-known female preachers in America in the 19th century. She is referred to in John Greenleaf Whittier's poem Snow-Bound. She travelled widely throughout America and four times to the Holy Land.

Harriet Livermore was born on April 14, 1788, in Concord, New Hampshire, the daughter of Edward St. Loe Livermore, best known as a United States Representative from Massachusetts; and granddaughter of Samuel Livermore, a United States Senator for New Hampshire. Her mother died when she was five and at eight her father placed her in a boarding school in Haverhill, Massachusetts, later sending her to Byfield Female Seminary in Byfield, Massachusetts and Atkinson Academy in New Hampshire.

Livermore was raised a Congregationalist but showed little interest in religion until the year 1811 when she was twenty-three. She reflected later that:

It was in September, A.D. 1811, that tired of the vain, thoughtless life I had led, sick of the world, disappointed in all my hopes of sublunary bliss, I drew up a resolution in my mind to commence a religious life-to become a religious person....Neither fears of hell, nor desires for Heaven influenced the motion. I fled to the name and form of religion, as a present sanctuary from the sorrows of life.

By 1821, Livermore had decided she was called to be a preacher. "I felt under the most solemn obligations to dedicate the whole of my time to...God". A year later she had begun preaching in Christian Connection and Freewill Baptist congregations in New Hampshire.

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