Sarah Scott Hopkins
Wife of Stephen Hopkins – Signer of the Declaration of Independence
1707 – 1753 A.D.

Stephen Hopkins, alternately Governor and Chief Justice of the Province of Rhode Island for many years before his palsied hand wrote its tremulous signature to the Declaration of Independence, married Sarah Scott, daughter of Silvanus and Joanna Jenckes Scott, as his first wife, in 1726. Both were Quaker stock and both of them barely turned twenty years of age. Sarah Scott was a great-granddaughter of Richard Scott, said to be the first Rhode Island man to embrace the Quaker faith. Richard Scott’s wife, Sarah Scott’s great-grandmother, was Catharine Marbury, sister of Ann Hutchinson, who was driven from Boston during the outbreak of religious intolerance that characterized some of the the earlier years of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and Catharine Marbury, herself, was whipped in Boston gaol for her religious contumacy.

We know but little of Sarah Scott Hopkins except that it is recorded that she was “a kindly, industrious, and frugal woman, a good mother and an affectionate wife.” She was the mother of seven children, only five of whom arrived at maturity. Sarah Scott Hopkins died in 1753, in the twenty-eighth year of her married life.

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Reference: The Pioneer Mothers of America: A Record of the More Notable Women of the Early Days of the Country, and Particularly of the Colonial and Revolutionary Periods by Harry Clinton Green and Mary Wolcott Green, A.B. Third Volume, Published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons.