Frances Montresor Buchanan Allen Penniman

[1] Anna was the daughter of James Calcraft,[b] a veteran British artillerist, who had also served with reputation under the Duke of Marlborough, and came to the United States after the treaty of Utrecht, with the exalted notions of the part he had borne in the field, and of the reign of Queen Anne, under whose banners he had served.

[d] Brush and his wife and stepdaughter came to Westminster, Vermont, in 1771, to look after some 20,000 acres (8,100 ha) of land that he claimed in the Connecticut valley, and possibly to win distinction that he could not so easily gain in New York.

It was perhaps because his Toryism had made him too obnoxious to his Vermont neighbors, that in 1775, he was offering his services to Gen. Gage of Boston, from whom he received a commission.

[4] Penniman had been engaged, previous to her first marriage, to a British officer who died attempting to cross the Hudson River in a small boat in a storm.

John Buchanan, a British army officer who was killed shortly thereafter in service of the King's Loyal Rangers.

The settlement in that town was one of the oldest and best cultivated in the State; and the society of that portion of the new district, which had originally been settled as part of the New Hampshire Grants, excelled, as it preceded others, in comforts and refinement.

[7] Penniman was 18 when Ethan Allen, freed from imprisonment in the Tower of London, returned to North America.

There was a mutual and agreeable surprise, both manifestly pleased with the tone of thought and conversation, which ran on with a natural flow, and developed traits of kindred sympathies of intellect and feeling.

'"[7] In 1784, when Penniman was 24, and still Frances Montresor Buchanan, she was living with her sister, Margaret and step-father, Mr. Wall, in Westminster.

On February 16, Gen. Allen entered Margaret's apartment, and found Frances in a morning gown, standing on a chair, arranging china on the shelves of a china-closet.

But though she doubtless admired Ethan Allen's bravery, it is said that she was repelled by his rough manners and his tincture of infidelity, and possibly by his family of children, and hesitated for some time before yielding to his wooing.

[4] Penniman had more than the ordinary intellectual endowment; bold, striking, and original in her conceptions, and of singular facility and clearness in her expression.

All her prejudices were nurtured in favor of the British Constitution as developed by Magna Charta, and administered by a king and ministers responsible to the nation; which form of government she believed to be above all comparison the best in the world.

Yet, in spite of all these deeply-rooted prejudices, with a grasp of thought that could look at and examine questions of inherent right, on their original basis—with the abiding principles of the Christian faith to serve as a guide in judging of human duty in governments, and with the daily recurring practical examples of the conflicts of opinion between the Colonies and the mother country, which the American Revolution presented, she saw and acknowledged the wrongs inflicted on the Colonies—the justice of that cause in which they had, at length, banded for a higher measure of liberty, and the growing capacity of the people to maintain those rights.

She was thus made an intellectual convert to the doctrines of the Revolution, and became a most useful and capable counsellor to Allen, in the subsequent critical periods of his life.

Her mind was, indeed, a counterpart, in its boldness and originality, to that of her husband, whose intuitive mode of reaching conclusions enabled him to put into the shape of acts, what it might have sorely puzzled him sometimes to reason out; and what, indeed, if he could have reasoned ever so well, his bold and fiery zeal, and crushing rapidity of action, put him out of all temper to submit to the slow process of ratiocination.

[7] In 1789, Gen. Allen died suddenly, having been stricken with apoplexy while bringing a load of hay across the Lake from South Hero.

[4] To the Pennimans were born four children; Hortensia, who married Judge Brayton of Swanton; Udney, who inherited the homestead in Colchester; Julietta, who married Dr. Nathan Ryno Smith, a physician of Baltimore; and Adelia, who became the wife of Dr. Moody, one of the early physicians of Burlington.

She holds in one slender hand a basket of flowers, a prophetic hint of that taste that brought her so much satisfaction when she became middle-aged.

A granddaughter of Penniman tells how each of Scott's novels was purchased as soon as it appeared, and how eagerly it was read and the question of authorship discussed by the whole circle of friends of the family.

Many of the botanical names have long since been changed, and one at least, the ground or moss pink, had not been listed in the Vermont Flora, though reported as a recent "find" from Wallingford and also from Colchester.

Historian Hall, quoting from one who knew her well, says "She was a fascinating woman, endowed with an ease of manner which she had acquired from intercourse with the polite society of the day, in which she had been brought up; possessed of a refined taste and many accomplishments.