Fannie Pearson Hardy Eckstorm (1865 - 1946)

Genre: Non-Fiction

Eckstorm, both author and ornithologst, was born Fannie Pearson Hardy in Brewer, Maine, and graduated from Smith College in 1888; at Smith, she founded the college Audubon Society. She was for a short time (1889-1891) superintendent of schools in Brewer, the first woman to hold such a position in Maine, and then briefly worked as a reader for Boston's DC Heath publishing company. She married the Rev. Jacob A. Eckstorm of Chicago in 1893, and they moved to Eastport, Maine; in 1898, the Eckstorms moved to a pastorate in Providence, RI, where Fannie was widowed in 1899. Eckstorm and her two children moved back to Brewer following her husband's death. She contributed articles to Bird-Lore and the Auk, before publishing her first two books in 1901.

Eckstorm founded Brewer's public library in 1908 and was active in the suffragette movement and in Republican politics. Her books and articles were often concerned with the Penobscot Valley of Maine. There's a section on Eckstorm in Jeff Hollingsworth's Magnificent Mainers (1995) and an article on her in the March 1955 "New England Quarterly," titled "Fannie Hardy Eckstorm, Maine Woods Historian." There is also an entry on Eckstorm in Famous American Women: A Biographical Dictionary from Colonial Times to the Present (ed. Robert McHenry, 1983). Besides her books below, Eckstorm also wrote a widely note critique on Thoreau's Maine Woods (1908), contributed to Louis C. Hatch's Maine: A History (1919), and wrote articles on Indian legends. Books include:

• The Bird Book (1901; children's book)
• The Woodpeckers (1901)
• The Penobscot Man (1904/1924/1970/1972/1978; about lumbermen)
• David Libbey: Penobscot Woodman and River Driver (1907)
• Indian Legends of Mt. Katahdin (1924)
• The Katahdin Legends (1924)
• Minstrely of Maine: Folk Songs and Ballads of the Woods and the Coast, with Mary Winslow Smyth (1927)
• British Ballads from Maine: The Development of Popular Songs with Texts and Airs, with Phillips Barry and Mary Winslow Smyth (1929)
• The Handicrafts of the Modern Indians of Maine (1932/1980)
• The Attack on Norridgewock, 1724 (1934)
• Jeremiah Pearson Hardy: A Maine Portrait Painter (1939)
• Maine Maps of Historical Interest (1939)
• Two Maine Texts of Lamkin (1939)
• Who Was Paugus? (1939)
• Indian Place Names of the Penobscot Valley and the Maine Coast (1941/1978);
• Correspondence, 1941-43
• Old John Neptune and Other Maine Indian Shamans (1945)
• Down the West Branch of the Penobscot, August 12-22, 1889 (1949)
• A Handful of Spice: A Miscellany of Maine Literature and History (1968)
• Tales of the Maine Woods: Two Forest & Stream Essays (1891) (1999)

Last Update: 05/30/2007

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