Abigail Arthur
American, 1759 - 1820
Abigail Arthur and her daughter Elizabeth Breese Hazard were closely connected to the family of artist Samuel Finley Breese Morse (b. 1791); this relationship likely explains their residence in New Haven in the years 1820-1822. Abigail Arthur's half-sister Elizabeth Anderson (1743-1832) married the artist's grandfather; Abigail was thus an aunt by marriage to the artist's mother, Elizabeth Ann Breese (1766-1828). The latter's husband, Rev. Jedediah Morse (1761-1826), served as pastor of the First Church of Charlestown, Mass., from 1789-1820; they then retired to New Haven. Abigail's daughter, Elizabeth Breese Hazard married a Boston lawyer, Ebenezer Rockwood, and lived in Charlestown. According to Breese family history, Elizabeth and Jedediah Morse and Elizabeth and Ebenezer Rockwood were part of the same social circle in Charlestown (see Edward Elbridge Salisbury, Family Memorials . . . on the families of . . . Breese . . ., 1885). The Morse's removal to New Haven may have prompted the widowed Elizabeth Breese Hazard Rockwood to move her young family there as well. CHS museum records state that she "lived in New Haven, where she ran some kind of a boarding house after her first husband [Rockwood] died [1814]." I
See A.G. Vermilye, Magazine of American History, Feb. 1885 for biography of Ebenezer Hazard, written by his grandson. The Index of American Paintings records the survival of a portrait of Ebenezer Hazard, painted by Samuel Finley Breese Morse.
Person TypeIndividual
American, 1791 - 1872