Ellen Palmer Allerton

Ellen Palmer Allerton (October 17, 1835 – August 31, 1893) was an American poet whose inspiration probably came from her life on farms in rural New York, Wisconsin, and Kansas. She is best remembered for the poems Beautiful Things, The Trail of Forty-Nine and Walls of Corn.

Life Ellen Palmer was born in Centerville, New York, the youngest and only daughter among a family of eight children raised by William Palmer and his second wife, Eleanor Knickerbocker. Her father, a farmer, was born in East Guilford, Vermont on November 1, 1786, and her mother, a descendant of Dutch pioneers, on July 10, 1792, at Salisbury, Connecticut. Before she could read or write, Allerton was said to have had the ability to compose poems in her head and later recite them from memory.

Allerton received her higher education at an academy in Hamilton, New York before becoming a school teacher at around eighteen in Centerville. In 1862, she traveled to Wisconsin where she met and married Alpheus Burton Allerton, a single father of a daughter and son. Her husband, born February 18, 1831, was native of Cuyahoga County, Ohio and a descendant of Isaac Allerton who, along with his wife and children, had made passage aboard the Mayflower on its maiden voyage to Plymouth Rock.

Death Allerton died on the last day of August 1893 and was laid to rest in the small graveyard at Hamlin in a bed of her favorite white flowers provided by her close friends. Her husband died at age 81 on November 9, 1912, and was interred at Hamlin. Chiseled on the back of Allerton’s gravestone are the last seven lines from her poem, Beautiful Things.

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