ethan
allen homestead history
fanny allen
| Who
was Fanny Allen? There were two Fanny Allens, Ethan's second wife and his elder daughter by her. Frances Montresor Brush Buchanan was an attractive and well-educated young widow of twenty-four when she met Ethan in 1784 in Westminster; he then being a widower of forty-six with three young daughter's. Fanny had grown up in New York, and, through her stepfather, had strong Tory connections. |
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She was very interested in botany and was an accomplished musician
- skills hardly suitable for frontier life. However, the marriage
seems to have been very happy. After Ethan's death in 1789, Fanny
and the children moved back to her mother's home in Westminster. In
1793 Fanny married her third husband, Jabez Penniman. Despite conflict
over the intervale property, Fanny and her new husband lived there
from 1794-1800. |
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| After
years of litigation Fanny and Jabez finally established their claim
to ownership of the land in the early 1800's. In 1814 they sold
the property to the benefit of Ethan's heirs. Fanny died in 1834. Fanny Margaret Allen was Ethan and Fanny's eldest child. She was five when her father died. She spent her formative years in Burlington, Westminster, and Swanton. She attended Middlebury Seminary, inherited her mother's interest in science, her father's religious skepticism, and was considered well-educated. In 1807, Fanny went to Montreal to study French, where she subsequently underwent conversion to Catholicism. As tradition relates it, her conversion was based on a supernatural experience; whatever the impetus, she became a sister in the Religious Hospitaliers of St. Joseph. She spent the rest of her life nursing the sick and indigent, although she was officially the hospital chemist. Fanny died of consumption in 1819, at the age of thirty-five. She was revered after her death, as she was in her life. The Fanny Allen Hospital in Colchester, Vermont, run by her order, the Religious Hospitaliers of St. Joseph, was named in her honor. |
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