Sarah Fry was born on March 22, 1846, in Venango County, Pennsylvania, to Adam and Esther Fry. Her father was a farmer who owned $5,000 of real estate and $400 of personal property by 1860. She grew up and attended school in Venango County, Pennsylvania. According to an early biographer, “Three months of schooling each year in the old log house…marked the limits of her educational career.” She married Daniel E. Green around 1864, and their daughter Livona was born around 1868.
Her husband probably died in the late 1860s. By 1870, she was working as a teacher in Concord, Indiana. She married Delos A. Colburn on June 27, 1873, and they had at least three children: Ira, born around 1874; Ina, born around 1878; Lillian, born around 1880. They moved to Colfax, Missouri, in the 1870s, and her husband worked as a farmer.
According to one biographer, she was a “woman of forceful character and native ability,” and she was “aggressive in her opposition to the liquor traffic.” She was a member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Her husband probably died in the late 1800s, and by 1900, she was living with her children in Topeka, Kansas. By 1910, she was living in her daughter Ina’s household in Dakota, Illinois. She died in Paxton, Nebraska, on April 13, 1915.