Elizabeth Rowell Thompson was born in Lyndon, Vermont, in a log house on February 21, 1821, the daughter of farmer Samuel Rowell and Mary Atwood. One of twelve children, she was raised amid hardships and privations and received little schooling. At age nine she went to work as a domestic servant for twenty-five cents a week. At twenty-two she met and married Thomas Thompson of Boston, Massachusetts, a wealthy Harvard College graduate and collector of valuable fine arts. Together they worked to alleviate sources of human misery for others. After her husband's death, she supported efforts to find the causes of yellow fever, provide business pursuits for heads of families, improve medical and scientific research, help child widows in India, and improve and establish right relations between capital and labor. She founded the town of Longmont, Kansas, in the Rocky Mountains and gave to Congress Carpenter's painting of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation by Lincoln in the presence of his Cabinet. She was regarded as one of the great women of her time and died in Littleton, New Hampshire, on July 20, 1899.