Described by the “Father of American Botany,” Asa Gray, as the best botanist in the surrounding country, Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley (1793-1867) was a self-educated classical scholar versed in languages and the sciences. Reputedly “one of the most learned women of the nineteenth century,” she raised seven children while running a boarding school with her Unitarian minister husband to prepare boys for Harvard College. A contemporary of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Amos Bronson Alcott and his daughter, Louisa May Alcott, Ripley and her husband retired to the “Old Manse,” his family home in Concord, Massachusetts, where she lived for just over twenty years. She is buried in the Emerson family plot in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.