Parsons, Anna

Variant names

Dates:

Active 1825

Active 1971

Active 1842

Active 1901

Active 1831

Active 1906-10-20

Gender:

Female

Nationality: Americans,

Language: English,

Biographical notes:

Anna was the daughter of Anna Quincy Thaxter (1791-1879) and Nehemiah Parsons (1773-1848), a former mariner and merchant on Boston's Long Wharf. Anna was a clairvoyant, whose specialty was reading a person's character, often just from a letter. She was also a women's rights activist who regularly visited Brook Farm, the utopian commune in Roxbury, where some artists and many of Boston's intellectuals lived in the 1840s. Anna and her mother and several sisters were early hikers in the White Mountains and they are credited with naming Cathedral Ledge, Echo Lake and White Horse Ledge, well-known sites in the area that were painted by White Mountain School landscape artists.

Anna was a friend of Samuel Stillman Osgood's wife, the poet Frances Osgood, and their letters to one another survive. Sadly, Samuel and Fanny lost their young daughters within a short time. Fanny, too, died young. The family's touching gravesite at Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, includes a monument with a lyre with broken strings representing each lost soul. Anna is also buried at Mt. Auburn.