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DARDEN, FANNIE AMELIA DICKSON (1829-1890). Fannie (Fanny) Darden, early Texas writer and painter, the daughter of Eliza Ward (Pickett) and Moseley Baker,qv was born near Montgomery, Alabama, on September 13, 1829. Her second name is often given as Augusta and her third is often spelled Dixon. The Baker family arrived in Texas sometime between 1835 and 1837. From 1842 to 1846 Fannie attended school in Alabama. She started a novel, but destroyed the manuscript soon after her marriage on January 26, 1847, to William John Darden, an attorney from Norfolk, Virginia. She and her husband moved to Columbus, Texas, in 1852, where she began writing a series of poems that were published in the local newspaper, the Colorado Citizen (see COLORADO COUNTY CITIZEN). She also produced numerous novelettes, short stories, and paintings and taught art at Colorado College in Columbus after it opened in 1857. She established a reputation as an artist in Columbus, Dallas, Houston, Fort Worth, and other towns in Texas. Many of her paintings had religious themes; The Good Shepherd, for instance, hangs in the parish hall of St. John's Episcopal Church in Columbus. Fannie's husband died in 1881. In November 1882 she underwent breast-cancer surgery in San Antonio. After returning to Columbus apparently fully recovered, she met Laura Jack Irvine, a correspondent for the American Sketchbook, when the latter was in Columbus researching an article. In March 1883, when Irvine resigned from the magazine, Darden took her position, apparently the only time she was employed as a professional writer. Some of her poetry was included in Sam Houston Dixon'sqv The Poets and Poetry of Texas (1885) and in Ella Hutchins Steuart's Gems From a Texas Quarry (1885). One of her poems, "Yokonah," was included in Davis Foute Eagleton'sqv Texas Literature Reader (1916). She was also published in the Houston Telegraph, Texas Siftingsqv of Austin, and Texas Prairie Flower of Corsicana. Fannie Darden wrote about historical events and her own personal experiences; her best prose works are considered to be a short article called "Reminiscences of Early Childhood in Texas" (1921) and Romances of the Texas Revolution (n.d.). She was stricken with paralysis in December of 1889 and died in Columbus in October 1890. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Evelyn M. Carrington, ed., Women in Early Texas (Austin: Pemberton Press, 1975). Colorado Citizen, November 9, 1882, March 8, 1883. Fannie A. D. Baker Darden, Narrative, 1870 (MS, Barker Texas History Center, University of Texas at Austin). Sam Houston Dixon and Louis Wiltz Kemp, The Heroes of San Jacinto (Houston: Anson Jones, 1932). Sam Houston Dixon, The Poets and Poetry of Texas (Austin: Dixon, 1885). Lee Quinn Nesbitt, Moseley Baker and His Daughter (MS, Nesbitt Memorial Library, Columbus, Texas).
Bill Stein
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