Anna tuthill symmes harrison biography templates

Anna Harrison was too ill to travel when her husband set out from Ohio in for his inauguration. It was a long trip and a difficult one even by steamboat and railroad, with February weather uncertain at best, and she at age 65 was well acquainted with the rigors of frontier journeys.

*After the death of his first wife, Anna Tuthill, Judge John Symmes married secondly to a Mrs. Halsey, and thirdly to Susan Livingston, daughter of New York.

As a girl of 19, bringing pretty clothes and dainty manners, she went out to Ohio with her father, Judge John Cleves Symmes, who had taken up land for settlement on the "north bend" of the Ohio River. She had grown up a young lady of the East, completing her education at a boarding school in New York City. A clandestine marriage on November 25, , united Anna Symmes and Lt.

William Henry Harrison, an experienced soldier at Though the young man came from one of the best families of Virginia, Judge Symmes did not want his daughter to face the hard life of frontier forts; but eventualy, seeing her happiness, he accepted her choice. Though Harrison won fame as an Indian fighter and hero of the War of , he spent much of his life in a civilian career.

His service in Congress as territorial delegate from Ohio gave Anna and their two children a chance to visit his family at Berkeley, their plantation on the James River. Her third child was born on that trip, at Richmond in September Harrison's appointment as governor of Indiana Territory took them even farther into the wilderness; he built a handsome house at Vincennes that blended fortress and plantation mansion.

Five more children were born to Anna. Facing war in , the family went to the farm at North Bend. Before peace was assured, she had borne two more children. There, at news of her husband's landslide electoral victory in , home-loving Anna said simply: "I wish that my husband's friends had left him where he is, happy and contented in retirement.

When she decided not to go to Washington with him, the President-elect asked his daughter-in-law Jane Irwin Harrison, widow of his namesake son, to accompany him and act as hostess until Anna's proposed arrival in May. Half a dozen other relatives happily went with them.