Sarah Rogers Haight

Sarah Rogers was born in New York City and received a good education.[2]

Sarah Rogers married Richard Kip Haight, also born and raised in New York City, becoming Sarah Rogers Haight.[2] They were married on December 12, 1826, at the Setauket Presbyterian Church in Setauket, New York.[3] Richard, born about 1797,[1] was a wealthy international merchant. Haight was a "famous beauty and socialite".[4]

The couple took a Grand Tour of Europe from 1835 to 1839 with a daughter, age 5, and a baby born in Geneva. Haight was pregnant on the journey to Europe. Haight and her husband went on an extended excursion throughout Europe, the Middle East, and Turkey over three years, leaving their baby and daughter in Paris with nannies, at great stress and anguish to Haight.[5]

A portrait was made of the Haight family of six, a gouache attributed to Nicholino Calyo.[4] Their children in 1842 were Lydia, Richard, David, and Frances.[1] The family lived at 4 Lafayette Place in Manhattan,[6] a fashionable neighborhood of row houses and parks laid out in 1826 by John Jacob Astor.[7] About 1849, they moved to 5th Avenue and 15th Street into a new, refined Italianate mansion, its architecture of the "best buildings in Italy".[1][8][lower-alpha 1] Among their art collection was Flora, sculpted by Thomas Crawford. In 1860, the Haights intended to donate the work to Central Park so that people of all classes could enjoy it.[9]

Richard was a partner in a hat merchant business, first with his brother Henry,[10] and by 1859, he was a partner of the importers Haight, Halsey & Company.[11] He died on November 2, 1862, and was buried at the New York Marble Cemetery.[12][13] Haight died in 1881, before August 3.[14]

Haight descended from the Puritan immigrant Nathaniel Rogers and his great-grandfather, English martyr John Rogers, who was burned at the stake in 1555 at Smithfield, London, England.[2] On her mother's side of the family, she descended from Richard Smith, for whom Smithtown, New York was named.[2]

Haight wrote letters to a friend, who saved them,[15] and they were shared in her book, Woman's Record, Or, Sketches of All Distinguished Women: From the Creation to A.D. 1854 : Arranged in Four Eras : with Selections from Female Writers of Every Age (From the Old World). Published in two volumes in 1840, it told of the learned men that she met, her friends and associates, and the places she explored, like museums and libraries.[2] Her experiences traveling the Mediterranean were published by newspapers.[1]

Haight is considered to be one of sixteen women who wrote about Europe and the Near East between 1832 and 1859 with historical significance.[17] Mary Suzanne Schriber wrote a book about 19th-century American women who wrote about their travel abroad, "Telling Travels: Selected Writings by Nineteenth-Century American Women Abroad". It was a means for women to provide their opinions on international issues. The book Annali d'italianistica states that the 16 women that Schriber selected for her book, there is a commonality, "an attitude of delight in being away, an almost mischievous sense of freedom from the ordinary, the expected."[18] During that time, Holy Land travel books had become popular, and as a woman, Haight was able to visit and write about places not accessible to men, like harems.[19]

Haight wrote of her travels,

To Tartary's desert plains, from fertile Gallic lands,

From Norway's rocky coasts, to Nubia's burning sands,

We've wandered.

On Briton's Druid stones, Scythia's mounds on eastern plains,

Odin's temples in the North, o'er Memnon's cavern'd fanes

We've ponder'd.

The Gaul, Goth, and Saxon, Scandinavian and Hun,

Greek, Turcoman, Arab, and Nubia's swarthy son,

We've confronted.

Sarah Rogers Haight, From the Old World [2]

In the 1830s, Haight traveled to the Middle East.[20][lower-alpha 2] She said of the Holy Land, "actually treading on the soil of Palestine... all my historical recollections, sacred and profane, came fresh to my memory.[17] She also said that she saw "in every face a patriarch, and in every ... chieftain an apostle."[21] Like other American visitors, she had an idealized view of the Holy Land and was dismayed by the poverty, cruelty towards women, and lackluster architecture. Haight expressed that the Middle East region would do well to model itself after the United States and utilize missionaries, teachers, statesmen, and engineers to improve the "heathen land".[22][lower-alpha 3] Haight believed that Jews would establish a homeland in Palestine and would rebuild and worship in ancient temples.[20]

Richard first traveled to European countries in 1821, before he was married. He was particularly interested in ancient Egypt and he collected items that added to the understanding of the monuments along the Nile and Egypt.[1] Ippolito Rosellini was a leader of the Franco-Tuscan expedition in 1828. Richard acquired one of three publications of I Monument dell'Egitto e della Nubia that Rosellini wrote about the expedition. He collected items from other countries, like vases from Greece.[1]

Richard sponsored lectures by George R. Gliddon, who had been an American consular agent in Cairo, to spread knowledge about ancient Egypt in cities along the east coast of the United States.[1] He also supported Gliddon as he studied with Egyptoligists in Europe.[24] Richard joined the Egyptian Society of Cairo after informed about it by Gliddon.[1]