Early life and education
Julia Caroline Ripley was born in Charleston, South Carolina, on February 13, 1825. Her mother, Zulma De Lacy Thomas, shared a mingled Huguenot and Catholic descent. Her maternal grandparents were natives of France, who fled to South Carolina from San Domingo (i.e. Haiti) at the time of the successful slave insurrection in that island, near the close of the 18th century. Her father, William Young Ripley, was born in Middlebury, Vermont, the son of one of Vermont's pioneers, and it is through him that she was descended from some of New England's founders, including William Bradford, governor of Plymouth Colony, and William Ripley, who arrived in Hingham, Massachusetts, in 1638.
She referred to her early girlhood as the most eventful part of her life. There was the long journey to Vermont the summer she was 18 months old, and her young mother's death only four days after reaching the state which it had been hoped would give her health. There was the sojourn in New York, where William had established himself in business, and where he wanted his little daughter's company. Clear and vivid was her memory of that trip down the Hudson River taken with her father when she was three years old, and of their arrival at the small boarding school on then fashionable Bleecker Street. At six, she was back in Middlebury, browsing in her father's large and well chosen library —she could not remember the time when she did not know how to read—a library established in a newly built house four miles up the Otter from Middlebury village in a quarter of the town called Farmingdale, a house presided over by a new step-mother. Here, also she recited daily lessons to her father and did her daily "stent" of sewing or knitting. Dorr grew to womanhood in a home of culture and refinement, and it is here where she began writing as a little child. It is here also that the father engaged in business again, and devoted himself chiefly to the development of the Rutland marble quarries. The home also included her half-brothers, Edward H. Ripley and Major General William Y. W. Ripley, both of whom became prominent officers in the American Civil War.
Schooling came to her, as it was apt to come to a girl of her period, intermittently and in variety. She spent a year in a small boarding school in Plattsburg; an interval at a school kept at the Shurtliff homestead in Middlebury; attendance at the Middlebury Female Semimary; a winter at a village Academy in Rutland, where she recited Latin with boys preparing to enter college as sophomores; and a term or two at "Old T. C. A." It was at Middlebury, in a one-story school house on Pleasant Street, that she began the study of Latin, the subject of all others most useful in her adult life, as she declared. There, too, under Father Merrill, she wrote on the blackboard the list of English kings from Julius Caesar to William the Fourth, without a blunder. The feat was recalled by President John M. Thomas when in 1910 he conferred on her the degree of Doctor of Letters from Middlebury College, an honor which with characteristic modesty she accepted as a tribute to the women of her generation.
