Partner Lillie Rose Ernst

Queer Places:
6106 Pershing Ave, St. Louis, MO 63112

Leonora B. Halsted (1855 - September 28, 1929) was a St. Louis author and a fellow member with Lillie Rose Ernst of the Humanity Club. She willed her estate, $20.000, to Ernst upon her death in 1929, in "appreciation of her devoted care for many years, and of my abiding love." In turn, when Ernst died fourteen years later, she willed part of her estate to another woman friend (an unmarried school teacher), with a provision that when her beneficiaries died, the remainder of the estate would go to Washington University to establish the Leonora B. Halsted Fund to aid needy students.

Halsted is the author of "Bethesda" (1884) (published under the pen-name of Barbara Elbon), "George Eliot's Conjugal Ethics" (1886), "Friendship" (1893), and "A Victorious Life" (1910) and co-authored "Hegel's logic: a book on the genesis of the categories of the mind" (1890) .

She was born in 1855 in Northampton, MA, the daughter of Hatfield Halsted and Mercy Comstock. She was educated by governesses in America and tutors in Europe, where she spent six years. She was the secretary of the Humanity Club of St. Louis for many years, until it dissolved in 1912. Other than Bethesda and A Victorious Life she was also the author of many essays published in the Independent, New York Sun, St. Louis Globe-Democrat and others. She was a member of the Wednesday Club, St. Louis.

Since the death of her mother in 1882, she lived with her sister, who was wife of Gen. John W. Noble, Secretary of the Interior under President Benjamin Harrison; she lived in Washington with them and after the death of Mrs. Noble she was in charge of Gen. Noble's household until his death in 1912. She then moved to St. Louis and lived at 6106 Berlin Ave, later renamed Pershing Avenue.

Leonora B. Halsted died on September 28, 1929 in St. Louis City, Missouri.


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  1. In Her Place: A Guide to St. Louis Women's History By Katharine T. Corbett