In 1879, his father retired from that position for health reasons and bought a tobacco farm near Pittsboro, North Carolina named Gum Spring Plantation.

Tappan was exceptionally bright and entered the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill at the age of thirteen, where he remained for two years.

[1] After his father's death in a farm accident,[2] his mother took him and his younger sister Mary Ruth to New York City to further their education.

To earn a living, she ran a boarding house, where Tappan got to know his future wife Minnie Bell Sharp of Woodstock, New Brunswick, a piano and singing student, who was one of his mother's tenants.

[3] He graduated from art school at the age of eighteen and provided 110 illustrations for The Handbook of the Birds of Eastern North America.

Tender, low, it thrills The listening hunter's inmost soul: Yet resonant it fills The valley with an echo from The everlasting hills!

[1] Adney married Minnie Bell Sharp on September 12, 1899, at Saint Luke's Episcopal Church in Woodstock, New Brunswick.

During the First World War he was as an engineering officer at the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario (1916–19) constructing scale models of fortifications for training purposes.

After the war, he created a set of three-dimensional coats-of-arms of the Canadian provinces, then numbering nine, and one Territory that adorn Currie Hall at Royal Military College of Canada.

In 1946 Peter Lewis Paul, friend of Tappan Adney and member of the Wolastoqey First Nation, was convicted of the theft of ash saplings.

Tappan Adney had previously advocated MP John MacNicol, who was resolved to push a re-examination of the Indian Act, that such activity by a First Nation member was a right guaranteed by treaty.