Jane Harrison

ANNA HARRISON

Anna Harrison was too ill to travel when her husband set out from Ohio in 1841 for his inauguration. It was a long and difficult trip, and at age 65 she was well acquainted with the rigors of frontier journeys. Born in 1775, Anna Symmes had grown up in the East, completing her education in New York City. At age19 she went out to Ohio with her father, a judge, bringing pretty clothes and dainty manners to the settlement on the "north bend" of the Ohio River.

A clandestine marriage on November 25, 1795 united Anna and Lieutenant William Henry Harrison. 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. Eventually, though, seeing her happiness, he accepted her choice.

Harrison’s service in Congress as territorial delegate from Ohio gave Anna and their two children a chance to visit his family at their plantation on the James River. Her third child was born on that trip, in September of 1800. When her husband was appointed governor of the Indiana Territory, he built a handsome house at Vincennes that blended fortress and plantation mansion. Five more children were born to Anna.

Facing war in 1812, the family went back to the farm at North Bend. She bore two more children. At the news of her husband's landslide electoral victory in 1840, home-loving Anna Harrison said simply: "I wish that my husband's friends had left him where he is, happy and contented in retirement."

When his wife 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. On April 4, exactly one month after his inauguration, he died, so Anna never made the journey. She had already begun her packing when she learned of her loss.

Accepting grief with admirable dignity, she stayed at her home in North Bend until the house burned in 1858; she lived nearby with her last surviving child, John Scott Harrison, until she died in February 1864 at the age of 88.