Representative women of New England/Fanny C. Brown
FANNY CLIFFORD BROWN, in the closing years of the nineteenth century one of the best known, most active, and influential club women and philanthropists of Portland, Me., died in California, December 20, 1900. She was born at New- field, Me., May 11, 1834, daughter of the Hon. Nathan Clifford and his wife Hannah, daughter of James Ayer.
Nathan Clifford was born in 1803 in Rumney, N.H. Son of Deacon Nathan, Sr., and Lydia (Simpson) Clifford, he was—as shown in Dow's History of Hampton, N.H.—a lineal descendant in the sixth generation of "George Clifford, descended from the ancient and noble family of Clifford in England" (dating back seven hundred years and more), who came from Nottinghamshire, England, to Boston in 1644, and later removed to Hampton, N.H. Nathan Clifford as a young lawyer settled in York County, Maine. He was Attorney-General of the State, 1834-38; in Congress, December, 1839, to March, 1843; in 1846 he was Attorney-General of the United States in the cabinet of President Polk; in 1848 was sent as Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to Mexico; in 1858 was appointed by President Buchanan Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court; and in 1877 served as President of the Electoral Commission. He died in 1881.
Fanny Clifford married at the age of seventeen years the late Philip Henry Brown, of Portland, Me., a manufacturer and banker and a man of much culture. Eight children were born of this union. The father died October 25, 1893. The surviving children are: Philip Greeley Brown; Nathan Clifford Brown, Mrs. Linzee Prescott, Boston; Mrs. F. D. True; of Portland; and Helen Clifford Brown.
Of a strongly religious temperament, Mrs. "Brown early became a member of the High Street Congregational Church, and was always prominent in its activities. She also felt much interest in charitable work, and took such part in it as her home duties, permitted throughout her early married life. It was not, however, until her children had grown to maturity that she became the leader in local philanthropic work which she continued to be to the end of her life. She was also in her later years an enthusiastic club woman, was president of several organizations and a member of many others. She had a judicial mind, inherited, no doubt, from her father, and, having made a careful study of parliamentary law, was a tactful and popular presiding officer. Some of the clubs and charities of which she was a member are as follows: the Volunteer Aid Society, of which she was president, .jpg)
FANNIE CLIFFORD BROWN 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.