Augusta Cooper Bristol of Croydon, NH

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Source: 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 67

AUGTUSTA COOPER BRISTOL, poet and lecturer, the youngest of ten children of Col. Otis 
and Hannah (Powers) Cooper, was born Croydon April 17, 1835. Her poetical taste was 
manifest in childhood, her first verses being written when she was eight years of age. 
She excelled in mathematics and early manifested an aptitude for logical and philosophical 
reasoning. Educated in the public schools and Canaan and Kimball Union Academies, she 
began teaching at fifteen, andwas thus employed until her marriage at twenty-two, with 
G. F. Kimball, from whom she was divorced five years later. In 1866 she married Louis 
Bristol, a lawyer of New Haven, Conn., removing to Illinois. In 1869 she published a 
volume of poems, and, the same year, gave her first public lecture, which circumstance 
seems to have changed the course of her intellectual career. In 1872 she removed to 
Vineland, N. J., her present home, whence she has been frequentlycalled before the public 
as a speaker. She was four years president of the Ladies' Social Science class in Vineland. 
In 1880 she gave a course of lectures before the New York PositivistSociety on "The 
Evolution of Character," and another before the Woman's Social Science Club. In June 
following, she went to Europe and Spent several months studying the equitable association 
of labor and capital at the Familistere, founded by M. Godin in France, also representing 
the New York Positivist Society in an international convention of liberal thinkers in 
Brussels, before which body she gave a lecture upon the "Scientific Basis of Morality."  
Returning home she published the "Rules and Statutes" of the association in Guise. In 1881 
she was chosen lecturer of the New Jersey State Grange and was employed on a national lecture 
bureau of the Patrons of Husbandry. Since her husband's death in 1882, she has seldom 
appeared on the platform, but was one of the speakers in the Congress of Representative 
Women at the World's Fair in Chicago.