Sarah D. Brown was born around 1840 in New York to Isaac and Eliza Brown. Her father was a farmer who owned $3,000 of real estate and $600 of personal property by 1860. The family moved to Salem, Wisconsin, in the 1840s, and she grew up and attended school there. By 1860, she was working as a teacher.

 

She married Myron Schultz on September 24, 1866, and they had six children, including Marian, born around 1869; Harriet, born around 1871; William, born in 1873; and Susan, born in 1875. Only two of their children survived to adulthood. William died on June 23, 1874, when he was eight months old, and Susan died of “hooping cough” on March 11, 1876, when she was eight months old.

 

They lived in Sugar Creek, Wisconsin, and her husband worked as a drover. She worked as a “traveling instructor of the Silsbee Commercial College,” teaching classes on penmanship. By 1870, they owned $150 of personal property. Her husband died on June 6, 1883. In May 1885, she opened a “school for an advanced course in bookkeeping and writing drills” in Watertown, Wisconsin. She closed the school the following month, after encountering “much discouragement during her labors.”

 

In March 1888, she opened a medical facility in Whitewater, Wisconsin, to promote hydrotherapy. She employed at least twelve “lady assistants,” and she marketed the baths as cures for “rheumatism, neuralgia, nervous prostration, insomnia, etc.” She died in Walworth County, Wisconsin, on March 13, 1916.

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