Early D.R. Love Interest?

Kansas resident Daniel Read Anthony married Anna Eliza Osborn of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. Long before he courted her, however, he showed interest in another girl from that state who eventually became a famous sculptor.

Fifteen-year old Harriet Hosmer was studying at The Sedgwick School in Lenox, Massachusetts when she knew D.R. He was twenty, living and working apart from his family for perhaps the first time in 1845. That was the year the Anthony family left the eastern border of New York State for their new home in Rochester, New York. D.R. presumably stayed behind for his job.

Besides being a talented artist, Harriet was also highly outdoorsy. Her physician father, after losing both Harriet’s brother and mother to illness, insisted that his daughter pursue a physical training program that included rowing, skating, and riding. This was an unusual custom for nineteenth century females, who were often corseted so tightly that they could not even bend over to tie their own shoes.

Harriet loved pranks and once “piloted a hand truck down a railroad track, almost colliding with a train,” according to biographer Kate Culkin in her book Harriet Hosmer, A Cultural Biography. The school she attended was well-known for teaching young women to think for themselves, a trait that D.R. found in abundance in his sister Susan.

So far I’ve found only one mention about their friendship, which leads me to speculate that their common bond was their boundless physical energy. After all, D.R. became an excellent marksman and horseman who seemed, during his land rush days in Kansas, comfortable in almost any environment. He was often described as “fearless,” a trait that might have described Harriet.

Perhaps Harriet, who was known to mold figures from the clay of river banks, opened D.R.’s eyes to artistic appreciation. In Kansas, Anthony was a frequent patron of the arts, even though he was likely not exposed to “worldly” drama, sculpture or music during his Quaker childhood.

If D.R. felt a love interest in Harriet, it might not have ended well, for during through her schooling in Lenox she experienced the first of many romantic relationships with women. For his part, D.R. remained single until he was forty and took as his wife a woman from Massachusetts who loved horses.

Photo: Harriet Hosmer Letters and Memories, by Cornelia Carr