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Sophia Allegre Gallatin: Gallatin's First Wife:
Albert Gallatin met Sophia Allegre while staying at her mother's boarding house in Richmond, Virginia during the mid-1780s. Against her mother's wishes, Sophia married Albert on May 14, 1789.
As the newlyweds travelled to their wilderness home at Friendship Hill, Sophia wrote to her mother "... forgive dear mother, and generously accept again your poor Sophia... Could you then form a wish to destroy the future peace of your child: and prevent her from being united to the man of her choice? He is perhaps not a very handsome man, but he is possessed of more essential qualities, which I shall not pretend to enumerate..."
Tragically, Sophia fell ill five months later and died at Friendship Hill. At her request, Albert buried Sophia in an unmarked grave atop a hill overlooking the Monongahela River.
Within a wooded glen 100 yards down this trail lies as low stone wall which, according to local tradition, encloses Sophia's final grave.
Beyond Sophia's grave, the trail winds through an old-growth, mixed-oak forest, a remnant of Pennsylvania's wilderness. |