Page:Sketches of representative women of New England.djvu/194

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REPRESENTATIVE WOMEN OF NEW ENGLAND
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the society having been formed during the Spanish War; the Invalids' Home; the Women's Council; the Crockett Club; the Women's Literary Union; the Clifford Club, which was named by the other members in honor of Mrs. Brown's father; the Portl'and Fraternity; the Civic Club; the Beecher Club; the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; and the Young Women's Christian Association. She was president of several of these clubs, and refused this office for many of the others. She was deeply interested in the Diet Mission. She was vice-president of an organization recently formed for establishing a maternity hospital at Portland. But her favorite charity was undoubtedly the Temporary Home for Women and Children, of which she was one of the founders in 1882 and always a steadfast friend. She was the ardent champion of the home throughout a long period during which it was frowned upon by the community as an ill-advised institution — a period happily long past. It is not too much to say that most of the present popularity of the home is due to her. She was chosen vice-president of the home in 1886, and retained the office as long as she lived, being for many years, on account of the invalidism of the titular president, practically president.

Mrs. Brown's death was a pathetic sacrifice and the direct result of her maternal devotion. In December, 1900, she learned by telegraph that her son John (twenty-seven years of age), who had served three years with distinction in the United States army, had left the Philippines and had reached San Francisco, where he lay very ill, in a military hospital, of disease contracted in service. She at once started with a daughter for the Pacific coast. A cold caught on the train developed into pneumonia. Her nervous system having been subjected to a severe strain throughout the journey and her vitality being much lowered by anxiety, her illness soon became alarming, and twelve days after her arrival in San Francisco and after she had seen and comforted her son, himself doomed to a speedy death, she died, December 20, 1900.

The announcement in Portland of her death was followed by a remarkable manifestation of sorrow in the newspapers, and in the clubs of which she was a member, as well as in her family and among her every-day friends. A wide- spread desire was expressed for a suitable memorial of her beneficent life; and, under the leadership of the club women of Portland, action was at once taken for its fulfilment. Nowhere, it was felt, could a more fitting place be found than at the Temporary Home, Mrs. Brown's favorite charity; accordingly, within a few months a nursery was erected there, to bear her name. On one of its walls is fixed a tablet with the inscription:—

IN GRATEFUL MEMORY OF
FANNY CLIFFORD BROWN.


S. AGNES PARKER, Past National Chaplain of the Woman^s Relief Corps, was born in New London, N.H., January 12, 1841, daughter of Martin and Anna (Adams) Packard and the eldest of five children. Her father was son of David6 and Susanna (Perkins) Packard, of North Bridgewater, Mass., and lineally descended from Samuel1 Packard, of West Bridgewater, through Zaccheus,2 David,3 William,4 and Lemuel.5

Anna Adams, wife of Martin Packard and mother of S. Agnes, was daughter of Moses, Jr., and Betsy (Stinson) Adams and on the paternal side a descendant in the seventh generation of Robert Adams, of Newbury, Mass., and his wife Eleanor. The ancestral line was Robert,1 Abraham,2 John,3 4 ’Moses,5 Moses, Jr.6 Abraham7 Adams, born in Salem in 1639 — the year before his father removed to Newbury—married Mary Pettengill. John,3 born in Newbury in 1684, married Sarah Pearson, and resided in Rowley, Mass. John,4 born in 1721, married in 1764 for his third wife a widow, Meribah Stickney (born Tenney), of Bradford, and some years later removed to New London, N. H. Moses,5 born in 1765, married in 1790 Dolly (or Dorothy) Perley, and resided in New London, N.H., where his son Moses, Jr.,6 above named, was born in 1792. Moses Adams, Jr., and Betsy Stinson were married in December, 1819. They had four daughters. Anna,