Piatt Family Papers

John James Piatt, the son of John Bear Piatt, was born in Milton, Indiana, on March 1, 1835. John J. Piatt was educated at public schools continuously until he was fourteen and intermittently afterwards. He attended Ohio State University and Kenyon College at times. Moving with his family to Illinois, Piatt submitted one of his poems to a journal and it was published. Soon after, he published a volume entitled, Poems of Two Friends, with William D. Howells. Between 1861 and 1867, he was clerk for the U.S. treasury department. In 1871, he became librarian for the U.S. House of Representatives and in 1882, U.S. consul to Cork, Ireland, where he stayed for a decade. Throughout his life, he published poetry in journals and books. He was married to Sarah Morgan Bryan, also a poet, on June 18, 1861.

Sarah Morgan Bryan was born on August 11, 1836, in Lexington, Kentucky to Talbot Nelson Bryan and Mary Spiers. She was educated at the Henry Female College in New Castle, Kentucky. From an early age she loved English poetry, and in her youth she began to write verses herself under the influence of those of Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Samuel Coleridge, and Percy Shelley. Her first published poem appeared in the Galveston (Texas) News. A short time later her poems began appearing regularly in the Louisville (Kentucky) Journal and then in the New York Ledger. Bryan was widely known as a poet by the time of her marriage in 1861 to John L. Piatt, a journalist, poet, and coauthor with William Dean Howells of Poems of Two Friends (1860). Sarah Piatt produced several volumes of poetry over the next 20 years, including The Nests at Washington and Other Poems (1864; with her husband), A Woman’s Poems (1871), A Voyage to the Fortunate Isles and Other Poems (1874), and Dramatic Persons and Moods (1880).

The couple had at least four children, including Cecil Piatt, a banker who was also appointed to be U.S. consul to Cork. John J. Piatt died February 16, 1917.