Charlotte Champe Stearns

Charlotte Champe Stearns Eliot (1843–1929), was a school teacher, poet, and social worker. She was the daughter-in-law of William Greenleaf Eliot, a leading minister in St. Louis, Missouri and a founder of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, mother of T.S. Eliot, a famous poet, editor and literary critic, and spouse of Henry Ware Eliot, who ran the Hydraulic Press Brick Company in St. Louis, Missouri.

Charlotte was born in Baltimore, Maryland. She was born the second daughter of nine children from her parents Charlotte and Thomas Stearns. Her father, Thomas, was a merchant who attempted living in different cities, before he settled down as a merchant partner in the trading firm of Stearns & Bailey in Boston, Massachusetts. Charlotte attended private school and graduated from the advance class of the State Normal School of Framingham, Massachusetts in 1862. She was employed as a teacher at a private school in West Chester, Pennsylvania. Her teaching career led her to Pennsylvania, Milwaukee at Antioch College and then back to Framingham and then to the St. Louis Normal School in St. Louis, Missouri.

Stearns married Henry Ware Eliot (1843 – 1919) on October 27, 1868, in Lexington, Massachusetts. They returned to Eliot's home city of Saint Louis, Missouri where they worked and reared their family. They had five daughters and two sons: Ada (Eliot) Sheffield, born in 1869; Margaret Dawes Eliot, born in 1871; Charlotte (Eliot) Smith, born in 1874; Marian Cushing Eliot, born in 1877; Henry Ware Eliot, Jr., born in 1879; Theodora Sterling Eliot, born in 1885 but died in infancy, and Thomas Stearns Eliot (T.S. Eliot), born in 1888. Charlotte's youngest child inherited his mother's literary skills and became the poet known as T. S. Eliot. In the 1870s when her husband hit bankruptcy, Charlotte taught school at the nearby Mary Institute

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