Anna Harrison was too ill to travel when her husband set out from Ohio in 1841
for his inauguration. It was a long trip and a difficult one even by steamboat
and railroad, with February weather uncertain at best, and she at age 65 was
well acquainted with the rigors of frontier journeys.

As a girl of 19, bringing pretty clothes and dainty manners, she went out to
Ohio with her father, Judge John Cleves Symmes, who had taken up land for
settlement on the "north bend" of the Ohio River. She had grown up a young lady
of the East, completing her education at a boarding school in New York City.

A clandestine marriage on November 25, 1795, united Anna Symmes and Lt. William
Henry Harrison, an experienced soldier at 22. Though the young man came from one
of the best families of Virginia, Judge Symmes did not want his daughter to face
the hard life of frontier forts; but eventualy, seeing her happiness, he
accepted her choice.

Though Harrison won fame as an Indian fighter and hero of the War of 1812, he
spent much of his life in a civilian career. His service in Congress as
territorial delegate from Ohio gave Anna and their two children a chance to
visit his family at Berkeley, their plantation on the James River. Her third
child was born on that trip, at Richmond in September 1800. Harrison's
appointment as governor of Indiana Territory took them even farther into the
wilderness; he built a handsome house at Vincennes that blended fortress and
plantation mansion. Five more children were born to Anna.

Facing war in 1812, the family went to the farm at North Bend. Before peace was
assured, she had borne two more children. There, at news of her husband's
landslide electoral victory in 1840, home-loving Anna said simply: "I wish that
my husband's friends had left him where he is, happy and contented in
retirement."

When she decided not to go to Washington with him, the President-elect asked
his daughter-in-law Jane Irwin Harrison, widow of his namesake son, to accompany
him and act as hostess until Anna's proposed arrival in May. Half a dozen other
relatives happily went with them. On April 4, exactly one month after his
inauguration, he died, so Anna never made the journey. She had already begun her
packing when she learned of her loss.

Accepting grief with admirable dignity, she stayed at her home in North Bend
until the house burned in 1858; she lived nearby with her last surviving child,
John Scott Harrison, until she died in February 1864 at the age of 88.