Background
Anne Hollingsworth Wharton was born at Southampton Furnace, Cumberland County, Pa. , the daughter of Charles and Mary McLanahan (Boggs) Wharton. She was descended from an old and distinguished family, the founder of which, Thomas Wharton, an Englishman, emigrated to Pennsylvania before 1689 and was an early settler of Philadelphia. He had belonged to the Church of England but became a Friend. One of his sons, Joseph Wharton, from whom also Anne was descended, built at "Walnut Grove" a handsome country house with grounds sloping to the Delaware. There, soon after his death, was held the Mischianza, the famous ball given by the British officers during the occupation of Philadelphia in 1778. For five generations, from the time of their coming to America, the Whartons were successful merchants, importing extensively, and Anne Wharton's father, like his cousin Joseph, became well known in the iron trade.
Education
She graduated from a private school in Philadelphia.
Career
As a young girl began the writing that was to occupy so much of her life. Her work took the form of children's stories, articles for newspapers and magazines, and books. Her field of especial interest was America in colonial and Revolutionary days. Through travel and research, both in Europe and America, she obtained material for her publications and ultimately became an authority on genealogy as well as on colonial life. In 1880 she published the Genealogy of the Wharton Family of Philadelphia, 1664 to 1880. Several of her later volumes were based on observations abroad, with more or less of historic interest; these were Italian Days and Ways (1906), An English Honeymoon (1908), In Chateau Land (1911), and A Rose of Old Quebec (1913). The field in which she is bestknown, however, and which she made particularly her own, is that of the manners, customs, and society of America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The result of her long-continued work in this direction was embodied in several interesting volumes: Through Colonial Doorways (1893); Colonial Days and Dames (1895); A Last Century Maid (1896); Martha Washington (1897); Heirlooms in Miniatures (1898); Salons Colonial and Republican (1900); and Social Life in the Early Republic (1902). One of the most interesting of her books, particularly for the account of Sulgrave Manor and the Washington background, is English Ancestral Homes of Noted Americans (1915). She was associate editor of Furnaces and Forges in the Province of Pennsylvania (1914) and also wrote In Old Pennsylvania Towns (1920). Her varied interest in life led her from history to its kindred subjects, and showed itself not only in the attractive volume on miniatures noted above, but also in articles for periodicals on literary and artistic subjects. In addition to studious habits and a zest for her subject, she brought to her writings clarity of thought, practical common sense, and much personal distinction. She was one of the eminent group of Philadelphia writers of her time, all of distinguished family, that included Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, Horace Howard Furness, Talcott Williams, and Sara Yorke Stevenson. In 1893, she was a judge of the American colonial exhibit at the World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago. She was one of the founders of the Pennsylvania Society of the Colonial Dames of America and was the first historian of the National Society of the Colonial Dames. A member of Old Christ Church, she was fittingly buried from that historic edifice.
