This is a transcription of the Margaret Sprague (Carleton) Pillsbury 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 17.
Margaret Sprague (Carleton) Pillsbury
MARGARET SPRAGUE, daughter and fifth child of Henry and Polly (Greeley) Carleton, was born in Bucksport, Me., September 20, 1817, but removed, with her parents, in 1823, to their former home in Sutton, N. H., where she was educated in the public schools. May 10, 1841, she married George A. Pillsbury of Sutton, removing with him to Warner, where he was in trade ten years. They removed to Concord in 1851, and in 1878 to their present home, Minneapolis, Minn., where their son, Charles A., is the head of the greatest flour manufacturing firm in the world. Fred C., another son, died there in 1892. An infant daughter died in Warner. Minnie Chamberlin, a relative of Mrs. Pillsbury, left an orphan in early childhood, was taken into their family, and has ever held the place of a daughter. Mr. and Mrs. Pillsbury celebrated the golden anniversary of their happy union in 1891, making it a golden year for others, also, by giving to Sutton a soldiers’ monument, to Warner a public library, and uniting in the gift to the Hospital Association at Concord of a spacious and costly edifice, appropriately named “The Margaret Pillsbury General Hospital.” Through all her life, wherever she has been, Mrs. Pillsbury has been felt and recognized as a power for good, and the bestowal of her name upon such an institution marks no new development in her character. It simply makes her known publicly for what she has always been, a philanthropist—to gain and merit which distinction is the highest earthly honor. This admirable Christian woman possesses a happy combination of qualities which her full and rounded life has afforded abundant opportunity to exercise, at home and abroad. Keenly perceptive, considerate, and, though pitiful, strictly conscientious, she is seldom wrong in estimating character or motive. She is a faithful friend, a judicious adviser to her husband in their mutual business affairs, a wise mother, a kind and capable ruler in her own household.