author
Lemuel Kayhart
1845–1926
A New Jersey poet whose verse lingers on childhood, home, faith, and memory, he wrote with the plainspoken warmth of someone deeply attached to everyday life. His best-known surviving book gathers nostalgic and reflective poems shaped by small-town experience.
1 Audiobook
Childhood's happy home, and other verses
by Lemuel Kayhart
About the author
Born on July 6, 1845, in old Pequannock Township, Morris County, New Jersey, he was raised on the family homestead and educated in local schools. A county history says he first worked as a wagon maker for about twenty-five years before later becoming proprietor of the Hotel Boonton in Boonton, New Jersey.
Kayhart is remembered today mainly for Childhood's Happy Home, and Other Verses, a collection preserved by Project Gutenberg. The poems center on home, family, love, loss, patriotism, and religious feeling, and they often look back on earlier years with affection and simplicity rather than literary show.
That combination of working-life experience and sentimental reflection gives his writing a direct, approachable tone. He died in 1926, leaving behind a small but evocative record of local American life and feeling in verse.