Father’s
favorite
Thomas Green
Clemson’s wife, Anna Maria Calhoun, was a highly educated,
well-traveled, political-minded and civic-driven individual
in her own right. Lucky for us — for everyone who has
benefited from Clemson University — he had the good sense
to marry her.
Anna was born Feb. 13, 1817, in the Abbeville District of South
Carolina to John C. and Floride Calhoun. Her famous father would
go on to have a long and sometimes fiery political career including
roles as U.S. senator, vice president, secretary of war and secretary
of defense.
One of seven children, often described as the one closest to
her father, Anna spent her early childhood in Washington, D.C.,
while her father served under President James Monroe.
Upon her family’s return to South Carolina in 1826, she
lived in her maternal grandmother’s Clergy Hall home (later
to become Fort Hill) in the Pendleton District. She also enrolled
in the Edgefield Female Academy and studied there for several
years. As a teenager she attended the S.C. Female Collegiate
Institute near Columbia. From both schools, she corresponded
faithfully with family and friends, her father in particular.
She often spent winters in D.C. and stood beside Sen. Calhoun
as he rubbed shoulders with the likes of Henry Clay, Daniel Webster
and other powerful statesmen of the time. She served as a copyist
for her father for three years, transcribing some of his papers
and correspondence.
Match made
in DC
It was in
the nation’s capital in the spring of 1838 that she met
the charming and worldly Thomas Green Clemson. Although he
was a confirmed bachelor at age 31, and Anna, 10 years his
junior, had expressed a determination to remain unmarried,
they each apparently had met their match.
After a whirlwind courtship, they were married later that year
during a candlelight ceremony at the enlarged Clergy Hall, now
called Fort Hill, at the heart of the present-day Clemson University
campus. As she left behind the political world of Washington,
Anna wrote to a friend that she was prepared to begin the “quiet
of domestic life.”
Her life with Thomas Clemson was anything but quiet. During their
marriage, she crisscrossed from D.C. to South Carolina to Philadelphia
to Cuba to Belgium to Maryland and back to South Carolina.
She supported her husband in each of his posts and endeavors.
She bore four children; only two — Calhoun and Floride — reached
adulthood. Moving often, she managed each new Clemson household.
And she soothed, encouraged and nursed her husband through his
disappointments and bouts of depression while dealing with her
own profound losses including her beloved father in 1850.
Yet, it’s her role later in life following the Civil War
that is most fortuitous for South Carolina.
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After
the war
The Clemsons — Thomas,
Anna, Calhoun and Floride — were living in Maryland when
the war broke out. Thomas and Calhoun left to join the Confederate
forces. Anna and Floride remained in Maryland until near the
end of the war when they returned to South Carolina.
Six months after their journey to Anna’s mother’s
home in Pendleton, Anna and Floride welcomed home Calhoun and
Thomas. Calhoun had been released from a Union prison camp after
21 months in captivity, and Thomas had been discharged from his
unit following its surrender.
The war had staggered the South’s economy, and widespread
suffering reigned throughout the state. Both Anna and Thomas
Clemson had a strong social sense of helping those around them.
Even as she cared for her dying mother, Anna took part in many
efforts to aid her ailing community in keeping with her father’s
maxim: “The duties of life are greater than life itself.”
She supported her husband’s interest in the promotion of
scientific education in the South and made their home a center
for others who shared their vision. Clemson was elected president
of the Pendleton Farmers’ Society in 1866. He and a committee
of likeminded leaders, appealed by “circular” for
the founding of “an institution for educating our people
in the sciences to the end that our agriculture be improved,
our worn impoverished lands be recuperated, and the great natural
resources of the South developed.”
Anna’s uncle offered 1,000 acres in the Pickens District
for such an enterprise, but the circular’s appeal for an
academic agricultural institution generated little more response.
From the
ashes
In the meantime,
the Clemsons’ daughter, Floride, had married and moved
to New York. She gave birth to a baby girl in 1870, their only
grandchild. But the Clemsons’ happiness quickly turned
to grief when Floride died the next year.
Only 17 days after her death, in a horrific twist of fate, their
son, Calhoun, died in a train accident.
Devastated by the loss of his children and disheartened by his
inability to help his adopted South, Clemson became despondent.
But his dream of a scientific agricultural college in South Carolina
became even more important to Anna, now partly as a monument
to her father.
Supporting her dream was the fact that her mother had left her
the perfect piece of land for such a school, the Fort Hill property.
Although it was in litigation involving claims by her deceased
brother Andrew’s family and a portion would go to her grandchild,
she knew the bulk would eventually come to her. And she would
will it to her husband.
When she gained control of the property in 1872, the Clemsons
moved to Fort Hill and began the task of restoring the long-neglected
home and grounds.
Despite her failing health, she pursued the Clemson vision of
a scientific agricultural institution.
In 1874, Anna personally selected a committee to issue a circular
calling for statewide support of a plan to build on land at Fort
Hill such an institution that would commemorate the legacy of
her father, John C. Calhoun.
Just a year later, at age 58, Anna died. She was buried by her “disconsolate
husband” at St. Paul’s Church in Pendleton. The realization
of the Clemsons’ vision was still many years and stumbling
blocks away, but her efforts may well have rekindled Thomas Clemson’s
own determination.
For the next 13 years, as though Anna were by his side, Clemson
worked harder than ever to convince lawmakers and other leaders
of the importance of a “high seminary of learning” to
improve the desperate economic conditions in the state.
And in his famous will, he was careful to require: “the
preservation of the home of the illustrious man [John C. Calhoun]
who spent his life in the public service of his country.” Perhaps,
in his heart, Fort Hill was even more a monument to his beloved
partner in life, Anna Calhoun Clemson. |
