Bartram, Anna Smedley: 3/22/1987

Raised on a farm near Newtown Square, Delaware County, she was descended from an old Quaker family whose land in Chester County was deeded to them by William Penn. Her family donated the land on which was built the Willistown Friends Meeting, on Goshen Road in Willistown, Chester County.

 

In 1904, she married Wilmer Bartram, who was a descendant of John Bartram, the colonial Philadelphia botanist. They lived on a farm until 1917, when they sold it and he opened a hardware store in Malvern, Chester County, which she helped him manage. He died in 1943.

 

Anna Bartram grew up addressing people as "thee" and "thou" in what is called the "plain language." Her mind remained sharp into her last years, and she enjoyed recalling stories of old Philadelphia and the surrounding areas.

 

She was a member of Willistown Friends Meeting. She would have been 106 in June.

 

"She showed me a photo of her son in a cape," said longtime friend Signe Wilkinson, Daily News editorial cartoonist. "She said her aunt gave her the cape and her aunt wore it when she walked the cows up from Elfreth's Alley to a field that is now Lit Brothers.

 

"She also told the story of playing in a creek with her cousins and one of them had a camera and took a picture of her with her skirts up in the water. When they had the photo developed at a store on 12th Street, the photographer teased her about her petticoat showing."

 

Wilkinson said Anna Bartram "always looked for the best in people and found it and brought it out."

 

Anna attended Swarthmore College for two years but had to drop out to care for a brother who had contracted polio. She had worked for women's suffrage and had been a member of the American Friends Service Committee. She did charity and volunteer work during the Depression and World War II and later worked in the Paoli library.

 

Once, during the Depression, she had baskets of food for the poor to distribute near the Paoli train station, Wilkinson said.

 

Anna was warned that some local toughs across the street likely would take the baskets away from her. In typical fashion she walked across the street and confronted them and said that if they were hungry, she would help them find work with local farmers in return for food. They agreed, and she found them all odd jobs.

 

"She was small as a sparrow," said Wilkinson, "but after you got to know her, you didn't think of her as small at all.

 

"She spoke in meeting about bigotry . . . She made you aware of injustice and that each person could do something about injustice."

 

Faith Hidell, another longtime friend, said Anna Bartram believed in getting involved and changing things that were wrong and "not necessarily wait for someone else to do it." She added that one of Bartram's favorite stories from the Bible was of Jesus entering the Temple in Jerusalem where he overturned the tables of the moneychangers and chased them out.

 

"Three weeks before she died she was just as determined as the first time I ever met her," said Hidell. "Anna was a most remarkable person because she was a very thinking person and exceedingly thought-provoking in her expression of her convictions and her concerns . . . It's a shame everyone hasn't known an Anna Bartram in their lifetime."

 

Hidell's husband, Henry, said, "In yearly meeting, she'd get up and express some sincere thought. She had a knack of picking the right words at the right time. I guess she lived as long as she did because of things like that. A lot of people worry themselves to death because they're not too sure. She was always sure of herself."

 

At the age of 102, Anna wrote down some of her recollections of growing up in Chester County for the Ambler Gazette. She said that her father built a cupboard for magazines and the five children were encouraged to read "and discuss at the table and not to gossip. If we gossiped, we were sent from the table."

 

Anna also wrote that her mother didn't like the children using slang words like "darn," so she made up a word for the children to use in place of it, which was "Aly-berante-fontiosti-cus." But the children started using that word so often, said Anna, that "Mother had to invent a second, longer word."

 

When she was into her 100s, people invariably asked her how it felt to be that age. She would reply, "I don't know. I've never been this age before."

 

"She had a favorite quotation from William Penn," recalled Faith Hidell. " 'Love is the hardest lesson in Christianity, but for that reason it should be most our care to learn it.' "

 

Surviving is a son, Thomas Bartram.

 

Anna Bartram will be honored at a service at 10 a.m. Sunday at Willistown Friends Meeting.1