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CHAPTER 1 The Minister's Daughter I n the summer of 1850, twenty-four year old Frances Adams pursued her passion for all that is beautiful. "Fanny," as she was called by friends and family, was living in Portland, Maine's largest city, once lovingly described by one of its sons, the poet Longfellow, for its shady, tree-lined avenues and its busy harbor, with the "sheen of the far-surrounding seas and islands...." She had made the short journey to Portland on the new rail line from her childhood home in Brunswick, Maine, having set off for that city shortly after the death of her muchloved adoptive mother, Sarah Folsom Adams. Here Fanny hoped to establish herself as a painter and musician in Portland's thriving art community. Establishing a painting room, as an artist's studio was then called, she declared her determination to enter a profession in which few women of that time achieved recognition. She also continued her study of music with the English-born Prof. Frederick N. Crouch, who had recently arrived in Maine. Crouch, trained in the choirs of St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey, had won international fame singing the "Irish" ballad he had composed, "Kathleen Mavourneen," a song of love and sad parting.1 Fanny's circle of friends came to include artists, writers, composers and poets, but Benjamin Paul Akers, a talented and rising young sculptor, became her closest friend. Akers shared Fanny's love of the arts and literature, and he charmed both Fanny and her adoptive father, the Rev. George Adams. Fanny's father, himself a lover of the arts, approved of her friendship with Akers, whom he consulted regarding the monument for his wife's grave, but Fanny's relationship with Akers cooled when she began to see beyond his considerable talent and charm to a man of irre- Benjamin PaulAkers sponsible character. In the early days of their relationship, Fanny had seen him as not only a gifted sculptor, but as a "noble, good, & pure" man. Yet she would be disappointed by Akers' apparent willingness to adopt the uninhibited bohemian lifestyle of the 19th century artiste. Perhaps Fanny's judgment saved her from the fate of the woman who would become Paul Akers' wife several years later. In her memoirs , Elizabeth Taylor Akers wrote bitterly of a trip they made to Europe, a seemingly compulsory pilgrimage for every serious artist of the time. Though yet to be married, Akers took charge of Elizabeth's money and went through her hard-earned savings so recklessly that they soon found themselves stranded on the Continent.2 Fanny in later years described her relationship with Akers as a friendship, not love, grounded on their mutual love of art, but Anna Davis, Fanny's adopted sister, acknowledged the disillusionment Fanny experienced during that period. Anna, recovering from a broken relationship of her own in early 1852, commented to Fanny, "I don't think much of the men— and I know you do not—." Fanny was about to begin a relationship with another man who, though no artist, had what she saw as an inner beauty that would touch her heart as no other had. He was the man she would marry and with whom she would spend the rest of her life.3 Fanny, born Caroline Frances Adams in 1825, was the seventh and last child of Ashur Adams and his third wife, Amelia Wyllys Adams. It was a family proud of their lineage, for they were cousins, though distant, to the John Adams family of Boston and were descendants of Miles Standish. Amelia, called Emily by her family , was a descendant of the Wyllys family, the early governors of Connecticut. Yet if the biography of Ashur's elder brother, Eliashib Adams, is to be considered, Fanny's birth father grew up a poor and sickly youth on a rundown farm in Canterbury , Connecticut. Though they were impoverished, Ashur attended the Andover Academy's Latin School and in later life was a Boston banker and broker. But Ashur Adams and his family, at their home in rural Jamaica Plain just outside the city, lived in perpetual genteel poverty, frequently teetering on the brink of economic disaster.4 Despite their limited means, Ashur Adams placed great value on education and the arts, and music and art flowed from the Adams' home, as well as a good deal of laughter. Though an acumen for financial success seemed to elude all members of this household...

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