The Testament of Elizabeth Taber

The trains to Plymouth ran packed on a Tuesday morning in May 1889.

Men wore flags in their hats, women pinned them to their dresses, and Clark Howland, Tabor Academy’s first principal, carried a large one in his hand.

The Evening Standard, a New Bedford daily, noted that onlookers wondered if the flags marked some sort of picnic excursion. They did not. The flag bearers, all from Marion, were bound for the county courthouse, where the will of Elizabeth Taber—the woman who had transformed their struggling seaside town into a place of promise—was under attack.

“Marion was in full force in Plymouth,” the newspaper proclaimed.

In the courtroom, John Foster, Elizabeth’s first cousin, sat rigid, nursing wounded pride and dashed financial expectations. For years, he had ferried his elderly cousin from New Bedford to Marion as she orchestrated the town’s renewal—running errands, tending to her business, even assisting with the construction of her academy.

Yet her will named no bequest for Foster. She had left generous provisions for other relatives, friends—including Howland—former students, domestic employees, and the many causes she had championed throughout her life.

Foster was contesting the will on the grounds that it was not duly executed and that Elizabeth was not of sound mind when she signed it in 1883 at the age of 92. He pointed to a codicil she added in 1885, which eliminated tuition for Tabor’s Marion students and allowed for the reduction of it for all others, as further proof of her declining faculties.

If the will was broken, the press reported, Foster stood to receive $50,000, according to the Evening Standard’s article from May 16, 1889, as one of six first cousins and heirs-at-law. He submitted an itemized list of services to the court with thinly veiled resentment. Among them: transporting Elizabeth “back to my house then carting her about the city in all directions collecting rents and checks and seeing her old women friends.”

But as testimony unfolded and Elizabeth’s letters were reviewed by the court, a different portrait emerged—not the dotty old widow Foster implied, but a sharp-minded businesswoman, firm in judgment and unhesitating in generosity.

“The executors were well prepared to show a jury that Mrs. Tabor was a woman of good mental poise, to the last,” the Evening Standard reported, using the spelling Elizabeth increasingly favored after her husband’s death. “It could also be proved that all her gifts to the academy, the Congregational church and other institutions in Marion were entirely the result of her own free will. She did not tolerate beggars, but her mind was active in planning measures for the benefit of her native town; plans for buildings were carefully examined and revised by her.”  

When the gavel fell, Foster received a settlement of approximately $5,000 against his list of provided services, but did not succeed in breaking the will. The trustees of Tabor Academy—clergy appointed by Elizabeth in her will—did not protest. “John Foster took his money and left the courtroom and the history of the school he had helped to build,” Tabor historian Joseph Smart later wrote in The School and the Sea. “Elizabeth Taber, however, remains.”

The Testament of a Life

Much about Elizabeth Taber’s life remains difficult to document. Her 1883 will offers one of the clearest windows into her convictions. While she likely had earlier versions, a brush with illness the previous year may have prompted this final accounting.

“Mrs. Elizabeth Taber has been quite ill for some time, and her recovery is considered quite doubtful,” the Evening Standard reported in August 1882. When her health returned a month later, she was ready to receive callers—and, apparently, put her affairs in order.

The document that would survive Foster’s challenge reveals a benevolence that extended far beyond the institutions that made her famous. Yes, she left a bequest of $60,000 to establish Tabor Academy’s endowment and $12,000 for the Marion Library. But tucked among these were dozens of smaller bequests that told a more intimate story.

Among others, Elizabeth left gifts to Frances B. Pitcher—her niece and best friend—two former domestic employees, a daughter of one of these employees named Elizabeth Taber Woods, and a great-grand nephew who served as a New York State judge. Elizabeth also used her will to ensure that Marion’s librarian, Mary Allen, could keep her post as long as she was interested and able to discharge her duties, with a guaranteed salary of no less than $50 per year.

The charitable organizations Elizabeth supported painted a clear picture of her priorities: the Ladies’ City Tract and Missionary Society of New Bedford, the Association for the Relief of Aged Women, the American Home Missionary Society, the Women’s Board of Missions, the Sewing Societies of the Congregational Churches, and many others. Her bequests flowed to Trinitarian churches in New Bedford, Marion, and Acushnet—congregations that formed the bedrock of her spiritual life, her moral compass, and her sense of Christian duty.

Most tellingly, Tabor’s initial Board of Trustees that she named in her will were all “duly ordained” pastors serving at the time of her death, primarily from surrounding Congregational churches, including Reverend Matthew Julien of New Bedford’s Fourth Street Trinitarian Church. An oft-quoted passage in her will implored the trustees to guide the school so it could evolve with the times and best prepare students for the challenges ahead.

In 1963, an editorial in The Log reflected on the material fortune Elizabeth left Tabor: “An even more enduring gift, however, is the belief Mrs. Taber had that her school should grow, change, and improve as years passed. Her sense of the future, expressed in very precise words in her will, is, thus, her greatest bequest to the school she had founded.”

A Life Shaped by Loss

Elizabeth, or “Betsy” as she was known in childhood, was born in 1791, the third of Sarah and Theophilus Pitcher’s seven children. Tragedy marked her early years. Her baby sister, Mary, died when Elizabeth was just three, and her older brother, Sprague, died abroad when she was 13.

At 14, having grown up in a family that valued books and reading, Elizabeth began teaching—not uncommon for educated young women of her era. By 1819, when she was 28, she was running her own schoolhouse in Marion, built for her by her older brother Captain John Pitcher.

“Her old pupils,” town librarian Mary Allen recounted years later, “told of stern punishments and inflexible government, but they always confessed to the value of her teaching. She urged them into the courts of the strenuous life, and sealed her character on men and women who went forth to the day’s work prepared to do it worthily.”

In 1822, she moved to nearby Acushnet, where she continued teaching and met Stephen Taber, a skilled clockmaker and merchant. Stephen came from old New England stock—the first Taber had arrived in Plymouth in 1640.

Little is recorded about Stephen, but a historical sketch of old Acushnet, published in 1904, described him as “somewhat peculiar, reticent and laborious.”

They married in 1824. Over the next six years, Elizabeth gave birth to three children, all of whom died before reaching their fifth birthdays. The couple endured these heartbreaking losses with the stoic faith of a generation all-too-familiar with infant mortality, but her experience with teaching and her years of motherhood forged a care and concern for children that would shape the remainder of Elizabeth’s long life.

In 1838, they purchased a house on County Street in New Bedford during the height of the whaling boom. As the city prospered, Stephen became more active in mercantile affairs and shipping investments. When he died in 1862, his will revealed both the size of his fortune and his respect for his wife’s independence. He specifically noted that Elizabeth owned “two shares of stock of the Western Rail Road given to her by her friends, with which I have never designed to interfere.”

Having no children or grandchildren, Stephen left Elizabeth “all the rest and residue of my property real, personal, and mixed” and appointed her “sole Executrix of this Will.” At 71, Elizabeth found herself a woman of considerable means and complete autonomy—a rare combination in nineteenth-century America.

Faith as Foundation

During her New Bedford years, Elizabeth was actively involved in the Trinitarian Congregational Church and its network of charitable organizations. An “E. Taber” appears in 1858 records as one of the directors of the Ladies Mission Society of New Bedford, suggesting her commitment to the church’s outreach work among the city’s growing population of immigrants and poor families. She was also an original organizer of the New Bedford Dorcas Society, a multi-denominational group that worked to provide food and clothing to those in need, including children so they may attend school.

Elizabeth’s faith was firmly rooted in the theological currents of the Second and Third Great Awakenings, religious movements that emphasized personal conversion, social reform, and missionary work. The churches and charitable organizations she supported focused intensively on alleviating the daily suffering of poverty—providing food, clothing, and shelter—with particular attention to children and families.

For Elizabeth, who had experienced profound personal loss but also accumulated significant wealth, these organizations provided a framework for understanding both suffering and stewardship.

“God has given me the means to do this,” she wrote in a letter donating Union Hall to Marion’s Congregational Church for use by its women’s groups. “And according to the judgment he has given me I have acted, as I think, with a sincere desire that it should be conducive to good.”

The town Elizabeth turned her energy and generosity to in the early 1870s bore little resemblance to the bustling seaport of her youth. The Civil War had claimed many of Marion’s young men, and the decline of shipping left the harbor quiet and economically adrift.

Of her may it be truthfully said that she yet lives and will ever live in the lives and work of young men and women now in the active walks of life, and others yet to go out into life, doing work which, but for her, they could never have done.

The Evening Standard

The Education of a Community

Entering her eighth decade, Elizabeth embarked on the most ambitious phase of her life. She purchased property from retired sea captain Henry Allen and began building the town library—a handsome two-story Italianate building with Corinthian columns. The Natural History Museum occupied the second floor, reflecting her belief that education should embrace both books and the natural world.

She founded Tabor Academy in 1876 at the age of 85. Decades of wisdom and experience had honed her vision for the school. The 19th Psalm was read at the opening ceremony, underscoring Elizabeth’s conviction that all learning should acknowledge divine wisdom.

Her generosity did not go unnoticed. “Among the former residents who are coming back, one has shown a remarkable and very commendable interest in the welfare of the town,” the Boston Globe wrote in 1885. “Everything that the academy needs, she promptly provides.”

When a student expressed interest in surveying, Elizabeth purchased a $200 theodolite to support his studies. Known for her personal frugality—after her death, the entire contents of her bedroom were valued at $15—her readiness to invest freely in students’ learning was all the more remarkable.

While the academy was her crown jewel, it was hardly her only gift to benefit the town. In 1884, she gave $1,600 for a new organ for Marion’s Congregational Church, followed the next year by $4,000 for a new chapel. She funded sidewalks and planted trees beside the village cemetery, beautifying spaces where the community gathered in both celebration and mourning.

“The total of her donations for the public welfare of Marion must reach $40,000,” the Globe speculated. Many details about her wealth and business dealings remained a matter of conjecture—perhaps because she managed them so carefully. As the Globe observed, “Mrs. Taber has adopted the wise course of being the superintendent of her benefactions, instead of leaving them to executors.”

A Legacy Beyond Buildings

Elizabeth Taber died on October 3, 1888 at the remarkable age of 97, having witnessed nearly a century of American life. In her final years, she kept an apartment on the second floor of what came to be known as Tabor Hall, where she could monitor the daily life of her beloved school. She read newspapers, scanned stock quotations, and frequently ordered sales and reinvestments. As Elizabeth’s health and sight declined, the children of Marion visited often, filling her afternoons with costumed entertainments, readings, and “living pictures.”

“All that year the boys and girls were trying to make her last days happy,” Alice Ryder, Class of 1890, wrote in her 1934 book Lands of Sippican on Buzzards Bay. As the children knelt before “the grand old lady,” she placed “her hands on their cheeks and smiles into their eyes.”

Her contested will would stand as proof not only of her business acumen, but of the breadth of her compassion and the depth of her faith.

The trains that carried Marion’s citizens to Plymouth that spring day in 1889 brought them home with something more valuable than money: the public acknowledgment that their benefactor was exactly who they believed her to be—not the absent-minded elderly woman John Foster implied, but a sharp-eyed, big-hearted force whose faith and moral conviction enriched the present and shaped the future of the town she loved.

Her obituary in the Evening Standard listed the buildings she had given to Marion. “These material gifts, however, have been only a feeble expression of her deep interest in all that was helpful and elevating. Those who have known her best, have realized more than others ever can, how constantly she planned to do good to the youth of Marion. It seemed to be her chief, almost her only desire, that the boys and girls of Marion should have better advantages for education than she had enjoyed, and hence the Academy.”

Reverend Julien presided over her funeral, an overflowing celebration of life attended by many whose own lives had been touched by her generosity. The procession included six carriages drawn by handsome black horses. Among the numerous floral tributes was a pillow inscribed with the words, “Though dead, yet speaking.” 

Elizabeth was buried in Acushnet, alongside her husband and children. The Evening Standard captured her legacy with words that still resonate today:

“Of her may it be truthfully said that she yet lives and will ever live in the lives and work of young men and women now in the active walks of life, and others yet to go out into life, doing work which, but for her, they could never have done.”