This is a transcription of the Miss Harriet Patience Dame biography from New Hampshire Women: A Collection of Portraits and Biographical Sketches of Daughters and Residents of the Granite State, Who are Worthy Representatives of their Sex in the Various Walks and Conditions of Life, The New Hampshire Publishing Co., Concord, NH, 1895, page 83.
Harriet Patience Dame
MISS HARRIET PATIENCE DAME, the Florence Nightingale of New Hampshire, was born in North Barnstead, January 5, 1815. She was the youngest of the six children of James Chadbourne and Phebe (Ayers) Dame. Her father was a farmer and teacher, and of her mother Miss Dame writes, “She was the grandest woman in the world.” The future heroine of the Civil War early showed a self-reliant and helpful spirit, and after receiving a good education she engaged in various occupations in New England and the West. She was living in Concord at the time the war broke out. Miss Abbott in the New England Magazine for June, 1895, pays this tribute to her distinguished career: “Perhaps Concord’s most valuable contribution to the Civil War was Miss Harriet P. Dame, an army nurse, whose record is without a parallel. For four years and eight months, from April, 1861, to Christmas, 1865, Miss Dame cared for the soldiers, most of the time as field nurse for the Second New Hampshire Volunteers. She endured all the privations of the troops, marched and camped with them, being oftentimes the only woman among a thousand men. She has nursed her ‘boys’ through small-pox, she has worked all night on the field caring for the wounded, and she has buried the dead. In her eighty-first year she is still at her post in the Treasury Department at Washington, where she has been for the last quarter of a century. A woman absolutely free from self-seeking, she has earned the gratitude of all who know her, and she cares little for any other reward.”
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