Mrs. Alice Coale Simpers was born in the old brick mansion known as
"Traveler's Repose," a short distance south of Harrisville, in the Sixth
district of Cecil county, on the first day of December, 1843.
The Coale family of which Mrs. Simpers is a member, trace their descent
from Sir Philip Blodgett, a distinguished Englishman, who settled in
Baltimore shortly after its foundation, and are related to the Matthews,
Worthingtons, Jewetts, and other leading families of Harford county. On
her mother's side she is related to the Jacksons, Puseys, and other
well-known Friends of Chester county, Pennsylvania, and Wilmington,
Delaware.
Mrs. Simpers' early education was received at Waring's Friends' School,
near the village of Colora, which was kept up by a few families of
Friends in the neighborhood. She also attended the State Normal School
in Baltimore, and qualified herself for teaching in the public schools
of the State, in which she taught for about ten years in Cecil county,
and also in Dorchester county. She also taught school in the State of
Illinois with great acceptability and success.
When Mrs. Simpers was quite young her father removed his family to the
banks of the romantic Octoraro, near Rowlandville, and within less than
two miles of the birth-place of the two poetic Ewings and the late John
Cooley, and the romantic spot where Mrs. Hall lived when she wrote the
poems which are published in this volume. The soul-inspiring beauty of
this romantic region seems to have had the same effect upon her mind as
it had upon the other persons composing the illustrious quintette, of
which she is a distinguished member, and when only seventeen years of
age she began to write poetry. At the solicitation of her friend, E.E.
Ewing, she sent the first poem she published to him, who gave it a place
in _The Cecil Whig_, of which he was the editor and proprietor.
In 1875 Mrs. Simpers began to write for the New York _Mercury_, which
then numbered among its contributors Ned Buntline, Harriet Prescott,
George Marshall, George Arnold, Bayard Taylor, W. Scott Way, and many
other distinguished writers with whom she ranked as an equal in many
respects, and many of whom she excelled as a brilliant satirist and
pathetic painter of the quaint and the beautiful.
For ten years she continued to contribute letters, essays, stories and
poems to the _Mercury_, and to advocate the claims of her sex to the
right of suffrage, in which she still continues to be a firm believer.
Mrs. Simpers has also contributed largely to the _Woman's Journal_ and
other periodicals.
Though possessed of a brilliant poetic genius, Mrs. Simpers is best
known as a writer of prose; and, in addition to the large quantity of
matter she has contributed to the newspaper press, is the author of a
story of about two hundred pages illustrative of the principles and
practices and exemplifying the social life of the Friends, for which she
received a prize of two hundred dollars. This story was highly spoken of
by Dr. Shelton McKenzie, with whom she was on terms of intimacy for some
years immediately before his death, and also by many other distinguished
writers.
On the 22d of February, 1879, the subject of this sketch married Captain
John G. Simpers, who served with distinction in the Second Regiment
Delaware Volunteers in the war of the rebellion. They, at the time of
writing this sketch, reside near the summit of Mount Pleasant, and
within a short distance of the birth-place of Emma Alice Browne.