Scoville Family Papers

Reverend Samuel Scoville, Sr. was a clergyman married to Harriet Eliza Beecher, daughter of Reverend Henry Ward Beecher and Eunice White (Bullard) Beecher. Henry Ward Beecher was a clergyman known for his leadership and support of women’s suffrage and the abolition of slavery, and was the brother of author and suffragist Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Samuel Scoville, Jr. (1872-1950, Yale 1893), son of Samuel Scoville, Sr. and Harriet Eliza Beecher, graduated from Yale College and earned a law degree from the University of the State of New York in 1895, subsequently becoming an attorney, novelist, ornithologist, and author of a Boy Scout series of chapter books for young readers. He married Katharine Gallaudet, the grand-daughter of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet.

The Gallaudet family included Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet (1787-1851, Yale 1805), founder and head of the American School for the Deaf in West Hartford, Connecticut, 1817-1830, and an early figure in deaf mute instruction in America. He and his wife Sophia Fowler Gallaudet had eight children, which included Alice Cogswell (Gallaudet) Trumbull (1833-1891), named in honor of the student who inspired him to establish the school for the deaf.

Alice Cogswell Gallaudet married Henry Clay Trumbull (1830-1903), a clergyman and author, an advocate for Sunday School education, and one of ten children to Gurdon Trumbull, Sr. and Sarah Swan Trumbull. His siblings included James Hammond Trumbull, philologist, and Gurdon Trumbull, Jr., ornithologist and illustrator. The children of Henry Clay Trumbull and Alice Gallaudet were descendants of Elder William Brewster, who was a founder of the Plymouth Colony in 1620, as well as Reverend Thomas Hooker, who is recognized as one of the founders of Connecticut.

Samuel and Katharine Scoville’s children included Alice Trumbull (Scoville) Barry (1911-2012), an author and educator. She graduated from Vassar College in 1933 and shortly thereafter married Stuyvesant Peter Barry. Later in life, she wrote a local newspaper column in Pennsylvania, taught remedial reading, and wrote a biography of her great-grandfather, Henry Ward Beecher.

Genealogical information was sourced mainly from society applications filled in by Alice Gallaudet (Trumbull) Sparhawk, daughter of Henry Clay and Alice Cogswell (Gallaudet) Trumbull, as well as other research notes in the Scoville Family Papers.