Sarah White was born around 1841 in North Carolina to John White and Temperance Utley. Her father was a Massachusetts-born stone cutter who owned $1,000 of real estate in 1860. Sarah grew up and attended school in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She and her father remained loyal to the Union during the Civil War, and she observed in 1865 that “the state of our country has done much more towards breaking [her father] than five years of labor could have done [and] he has grieved a great deal over the dissolution of the old union.”

 

Sarah married Hiram Lewter in Chapel Hill on August 23, 1863, and she declared him “one of the kindest husbands with which woman could be blest.” Lewter was a 2^nd lieutenant in the 26^th Mississippi Infantry, but Sarah insisted that he was “ever opposed to this cruel war and often wished that he could get me out away from this country where we might spend our days together.” He was wounded in the Battle of the Wilderness on May 5, 1864, and he died nine days later in a general hospital in Staunton, Virginia. Sarah remained in Chapel Hill after the war, and she married William J. Woodward there on May 9, 1867. She died around 1868.

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