Sarah Thompson, Countess Rumford

Sarah Thompson, Countess Rumford, (18 October 1774 – 2 December 1852) was a philanthropist.

Biography In 1774, Sarah was born. Sarah never married, and she never had children.

Sarah has an older half-brother Paul Rolfe, through her mother’s first marriage, and Sarah lived with Paul's wife Elizabeth in Concord, NH for a time after Paul's death in 1819.

Parents Both her parents were born and brought up in the American colonies and married there in 1772. Thompson abandoned his American wife, Sarah, at the outbreak of the American Revolution; she died in 1792. During the American Revolutionary War of 1775 to 1783, her father Benjamin Thompson took the side of the British, and at the end of the war he moved to London. He was knighted in 1784.

Her mother was a rich and well-connected widow, an heiress named Sarah (née Walker) Rolfe, whose father was a minister, and whose late husband left her property at Rumford, Province of New Hampshire, which is today in the modern city of Concord, New Hampshire. They moved to the-now Portsmouth, New Hampshire.