Anna Symmes Harrison

FIRST LADY OF THE WEST

Though she was First Lady for only a short time and never occupied the , , the wife of one president and the grandmother of another, faced the trials of the fron­ tier with great courage and deep reli­ gious faith.

he death of in 1841 in Southold, . Mr. and Mrs. Henry Tuthill uust one month after he was inaugurated as would raise Anna for the next fourteen years. the ninth president of the United States left Education and religion were the cornerstones of his widow, Anna Symmes Harrison, with Anna’s upbringing. The Tuthill family had been influ­ the unfortunate distinction of being a First enced by the Great Awakening, a religious revival in Lady who did not serve in the White House. She never the English colonies in America that occurred during had the opportunity to make herself known in the way the mid-eighteenth century. As a result, Anna received that such notable First Ladies as , Edith intense religious instruction from her grandmother Wilson, or did; instead, Anna Har­ and was raised a Presbyterian. This faith, evident in rison left the comforts of the East to make a new life in her letters to friends and relatives, would later sustain the wilderness of the . In spite of her through the deaths of her husband and children. numerous hardships Anna never moved back East, for When she was nineteen years old, Anna left the East she “felt that the future of the country lay in the ex­ Coast for the wild forests of the newly created North­ panding West.” A woman of great mettle and deep re­ west Territory. As a member of the Continental Con­ ligious faith, Anna would establish herself as a gress since 1785, Anna’s father had long been representative frontier wife. interested in colonizing schemes for the newly opened The second daughter of former chief justice of the western lands. Symmes made his first trip down the Supreme Court and River in the spring of 1787, and by October 1788 Anna Tuthill, Anna Tuthill Symmes was born on a he was given a contract from Congress for the one mil­ farm near the Flatbrook River in Walpack Township, lion-acre Miami Purchase. Early the next year he near Morristown, New Jersey, on 25 July 1775; her founded a settlement at a point on the river that would mother died exactly one year after she was born. Be­ later become known as North Bend. Congress named cause her childhood home was within the battle­ him a territorial judge in 1788. Symmes returned to grounds of the American Revolution, Anna was in New Jersey in 1794, where he married Susanna Liv­ danger. Her father, a militia colonel, managed to obtain ingston, the daughter of Governor . a British redcoat uniform and transport his youngest That fall he accompanied his wife and daughter to his daughter by horseback across enemy lines, and then by frontier home. The trip west was difficult. Along the boat to the safety of her maternal grandparents’ home way the party passed companies of federal troops or-

Carl Sferrazza Anthony

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