Eleanor Hodgman Porter dedicated her 1913 serialized novel Pollyanna to Belle Marion Brown Knight, a woman then in her forties. Those words are a clue for Mark F. Hardy, a genealogical detective who has common descendants with Belle. He recently shared a beguiling family story about Eleanor, Pollyanna and Belle.
Belle Marion Brown was born January 23, 1875, to Frances (“Fannie”) and Adna Brown of Springfield Vermont. In New Hampshire, a year and a half later Eleanor’s father, Frank Hodgman, died, and it was this tragedy that reunited the former Woolson sisters: Eleanor’s mother Luella Hodgman, and Belle’s mother Fannie Brown. It also forged a life-long bond between their daughters.
The two Woolson sisters were Mayflower descendants. They had grown up in Lisbon, NH in comfortable circumstances and they had married enterprising men.
Luella French Woolson, a year younger than Fannie, wed Francis Hodgman, an apothecary from a prosperous Littleton NH family. His early death from tuberculosis in 1876 had widowed Luella and left two children: Fred, twelve and Eleanor, eight. An artist, Luella made ends meet by teaching art and selling her own work in Littleton. She encouraged her daughter’s interest in musical performance and accompanied Eleanor when the teenage girl attended the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.
Luella moved to Springfield in 1890, when Eleanor was twenty one. By train Springfield was slightly closer to Boston than Littleton, NH, and the Browns offered generous hospitality. Luella was becoming an invalid, however, and would live the remaining thirty years of her life as a star boarder with Eleanor and John
Her sister, Fanny Woolson, married Adna Brown in1863 (Feb. 3 in Littleton), and became the second wife of the wealthy magnate of Springfield, Vermont. Like her sister, Fanny bore a daughter and a son (Walter b. 1871). In contrast to Luella, however, she was very wealthy — Adna Brown was a protean industrialist whose enterprises enriched the town in the closing decades of the 1800s. He would be protective of Luella and Eleanor.
Adna (a Biblical name) had been a farm boy who apprenticed as a machinist in his native New Hampshire. He came to Springfield in 1850 at age 22. He worked for Davidson, Parks and Woolson, manufacturers of textile machinery, and in Horatio Alger-fashion he became manager and part owner of that concern. His 1888 acquisition of Jones & Lamson, a Windsor, VT machine tool company, stamped the region as “Precision Valley,” a technology powerhouse for the next century. The construction of an electric railway and wiring the village for electricity were chief among his projects — crowned by a 75-room hotel, the “Adnabrown.”
Eleanor’s uncle Adna may be seen as the epitome of America’s Gilded Age: a boy of lowly origins who mastered a new technology and became fabulously wealthy by risk and invention — a modern contrast to the Hodgman shopkeepers. He tentatively ascended the social scale. His children, Belle and Walter Brown, would enjoy upper class status. Their Littleton cousin was a collateral beneficiary.
From her teens until her marriage at age 24, Eleanor performed as a singer and pianist, mostly in Greater Boston. She taught piano as well. With her mother, she often stayed in the city where singers were in demand, and where John Porter, her future husband, worked in at the National Exchange Bank.
John was a Vermonter from the small town of Corinth. He had studied business at St. Johnsbury Academy, across the Connecticut River from Littleton. He met Eleanor when he was clerking at a Littleton Bank. She invited him to a card game, sparking a courtship of more than seven years. In 1892, she and John would celebrate a formal wedding in Springfield through the generosity of Aunt Fanny and Uncle Adna.
The new couple relocated as John’s banking career took them to Chattanooga, then to New York But their honeymoon was blighted by the Crash of ’93 and the subsequent national depression. More than 15,000 businesses failed and 640 banks closed. The Porters moved to Springfield in 1895 and became proprietors of a furniture store. Eleanor worked at the shop and continued her music vocation. They built a home on Wall Street. John was very active in the booming town. He was a Selectman and active on public and private boards They lived in Springfield until 1900.
Belle Brown, who had been 17 years old at the time Eleanor’s wedding, married at age twenty-one in September 1896. It was a brief marriage to Nelson R. Lawrence, a Springfield man, that ended with his death in 1899. So, by the turn of the century, Belle, now a widow, lived with her parents on Mansion Hill near the village. Together, the young widow and her next-door neighbors — Luella, John and Eleanor —greeted the new century in snowy Vermont.
Very soon, happy vistas opened for both Belle and Eleanor. In 1901, Eleanor and John moved from Springfield to Cambridge, Mass. He became a bond dealer and corporate treasurer in Boston. Eleanor performed in concerts and gave music lessons. That year, under the name of Eleanor Stewart, she also began writing stories that she sold to women’s and Christian magazines. She would publish her first novel, Cross Currents, in 1907.
Belle also had change in fortune. She married again.
On June 17, 1902, she wed Frank Henry Knight, MD, who would become a prominent Ear, Nose and Throat specialist in New York. Dr Knight had also been born in Springfield, Vermont. According to the 1925 History of White Plains, his father, Granville Knight was an eminent Vermont physician whose practice took him to Massachusetts. Frank would attend public schools in Malden and go on to nearby Harvard University where he earned his Doctor of Medicine degree in 1902. With his bride Belle, he traveled to England for a year’s study at Gray's Inn Road Hospital to become an eye and ear surgeon. The couple returned to the US to reside in New York City.
They started a family. Granville Frank Knight was born on October 12, 1904. Twins Alwyn Woolson Knight and Adna Brown Knight (a.k.a. Ralph B. Knight) were born February 18, 1906. Belle’s young family moved to White Plains in 1909.
Also, Frank and Belle adopted a daughter: Marion Taylor born January 26 1903. She would be a special child in the life of Eleanor Porter.
Eleanor was forty one years old when Belle’s family relocated to White Plains. She lived with John and her mother at 40 Inman Street, a leafy neighborhood of roomy apartments and single homes near Central Square, Cambridge. It was convenient for John, as it was only two blocks from the electric trolley on Massachusetts Avenue that took him to his Boston office. Eleanor worked on the roof of the apartment building where she nested in a tent among flowering plants. Although Eleanor denied that she had “ever” been ill, she insisted on fresh air, which was prescribed for sufferers of tuberculosis — the disease which had taken her father in 1876 and would claim her own life in 1920. In the decade remaining to her, 1910-1920, she published all but two of her 15 books. She and John Porter would remain childless.
When Belle’s family took up residence in the suburb of White Plains, Mrs.Knight hit her stride! She became a leading citizen of the town. In the decade ending in 1920, the population of White Plains surged from 7,899 to 26,425, and Belle Knight, like her father, Adna Brown, took on big responsibilities in her community. According to the History of White Plains:
“She was the first woman member of the White Plains Chamber of Commerce and the first woman to hold the office of councilman in any municipality of the State of New York or as far as is known in the entire United States… Mrs Knight is now a director of the People's National Bank of White Plains which was recently organized and is the only woman acting on the board. … Mrs Knight was successively treasurer vice president and president of the Woman's Club of White Plains and she was the first president of the Contemporary Club.”
In Pollyanna, Eleanor told the story of an orphan who brings joy to a small Vermont town, but she is hit by a car and crippled. The book ends on a happy note as Pollyanna recovers completely. Little Marion, adopted daughter of her dear friend Bell, surely was on Eleanor’s mind.
At the time she was writing Pollyanna her cousin’s child, Marion Taylor Knight, was afflicted by polio. She was ten years old when Pollyanna was published. The legend among Woolson descendants is that Eleanor honored her cousin Belle and her adopted daughter, Marion with the themes of adoption and healing.
In any case, Belle no doubt enjoyed how Eleanor captured the sunny optimism of their youth, as we enjoyed Mr. Hardy’s stories of the fascinating Woolson family and their many accomplishments..
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Special acknowledgement to Mark F. Hardy for photos and proofing.
Thanks, Mark!