Image of Anne William Smith (1830-1871)

Anne was born in Wake County, N.C., just a few miles north of Raleigh, on the plantation where her mother was born, Forest Hill [this according to info I found on line]. Her portrait was painted in 1847 by an artist named Grunewald while she attended the Moravian Seminary for Young Ladies in Bethlehem, Pa.; she turned 17 that year. The college is now named Moravian College & Theological Seminary. This copy is from the online version of Smith of Abram's Plains.

In December 1849, after the Smith clan & other North Carolina families had migrated to Arkansas, she married her father's first cousin, Benjamin M. Smith. Benjamin was said to have graduated from the University of N.C. in 1844. Anne's family actually lived in Hardeman County, Tenn., for several years, before making the move farther west.

Anne Smith had thirteen children, dying at age 41 after the birth of the youngest one on their plantation called Tulip Farm, just six years after the Civil War ended. Mary Benjamin Smith was 10 years old when her mother died; the following year her father married another cousin, Anne Wilson Smith.

According to Aunt Mame's notes, it was in 1894, the year before our grandfather Henry was born, that Mary Smith Tillett wrote a letter to the seminary to inquire about the painting of which she had heard her mother tell...Mary specified that the portrait was to be inherited by the eldest daughter in each generation of her daughters.