Anna Warner

Two teenage girls, Susan and Anna, were plucked from their swanky Manhattan townhome to relocate to a dilapidated farmhouse on a deserted island that years earlier had protected the Hudson River Valley from invading British forces during the Revolutionary War. Their father, a prosperous New York City lawyer, had bought the island as a summer home, but the Depression of 1837 wiped out the family fortune. The sisters moved with their dad and aunt to this two hundred fifty-acre Constitution Island, accessible to the mainland only by rowboat. They gave up their party dresses and fine dining; now, there was wood to chop and crops to grow. Most of the furniture and fine China moved to the island had to be sold to stave off bill collectors. Their dad never recovered from his financial ruin and died a few years later. So, what were two young single women going to do to keep the place going? They turned to writing. They wrote one hundred and six novels, eighteen of which they co-authored. Susan Warner hit it big on her first attempt, as her novel Wide, Wide World, the story of the religious development of a thirteen-year-old orphan, sold a million copies and was second only to Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the national bestseller list. Anna Warner’s (1827-1915) claim to fame was composing lyrics to a children’s song in her novel Say and Seal, which William Bradbury set to music that we know as “Jesus Loves Me.” She also published Gardening by Itself, a do-it yourself guide that popularized gardening for pleasure instead of only associating it with the arduous task of farming. The sisters never made much money, as literary pirates and lax copyright laws cut into their profits, yet they never went hungry. They hosted a popular Sunday school for West Point Cadets on the island for fifty years. One of the last cadets to attend the class before Anna died in 1915 was Dwight D. Eisenhower, our 34th President. They could have made millions had they sold the island to developers who wanted to turn it into an amusement park. Instead, they willed it to West Point, which remains today as they left it more than a century ago. Anna and Susan are the only civilians buried at West Point Cemetery. Anna’s prayer is a keeper: