Richards's mother, Julia Ward Howe, a poet and philosopher, is remembered as the author of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."
Richards married Henry Richards, an architect, on 17 June 1871. The couple had five daughters and two sons; they lived in Boston until 1876, when they moved to Gardiner, Maine, where Henry Richards entered the family paper mill. The Richardses remained in Gardiner for the rest of their lives.
In her autobiography, Stepping Westward (1931), Laura Richards suggests that their lives were pleasant, almost enviably so, but there were difficulties even if Richards plays them down. Among their greatest difficulties, aside from the deaths of two of the children, was the burning of the pulp mill in 1893. Although they rebuilt the facility, it closed permanently in 1900. They then opened Camp Merryweather, a summer camp for boys on Lake Cobbosseecontee, one of their most successful ventures, which ran for more than thirty years. It is evident that one of their problems was economic and that Laura Richards wrote, at least in part, to help out financially. After 1900, Camp Merryweather seems to have been their main source of income.
If Richards's autobiography has a failing, it is her extreme reluctance to reveal much about herself and even less about her own feelings; it is more of a record of her and her family's external lives, almost completely lacking the intimacy of really good autobiography.
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