Lucia Prudence Hall Woodbury

Born in 1848, she was an American author who also published as Mrs. Charles J. Woodbury. Surviving catalog and library records connect her most clearly with The Potato Child & Others, a small illustrated collection issued by Paul Elder and Company in San Francisco in 1910.

That book gathers three stories — “The Potato Child,” “A Story That Never Ends,” and “A Nazareth Christmas” — and modern public-domain listings have helped keep it in circulation for new readers. The tone is gentle and humane, with a special interest in childhood, loneliness, sympathy, and small acts of care.

Biographical details about her are limited in the sources readily available online, but genealogy-style records list her as Lucia Prudence Hall Woodbury, born in Plainfield, Vermont, in 1848 and deceased in Oakland, California, in 1927. No suitable verified portrait was found from the pages reviewed.