Evangeline W. Andrews

Biography

Writer and historian Evangeline Walker Andrews was born on New Years Day, 1870 in London England. She was the daughter of Indiana native Dr. John Crawford Walker (1828-1883) and his English wife, Laura Marion Seymour (abt. 1850-1924). Her father was a physician and newspaper editor whose tenure as a colonel in the Union Army during the American Civil War was punctuated with clashes with his superiors and charges of insubordination. He eventually became involved with a secrete organization associated with the anti-war Copperhead movement called the Sons of Liberty. When their plot to free Confederate POWs at Camp Morton and seize the Federal armory in Indianapolis was exposed, Walker fled to Canada and later England. By September of 1873 all was forgiven and, along with his British born family, returned to America aboard the SS Denmark. Evangeline was raised in Indianapolis and Wayne, Indiana along with an older brother and younger sister. Three years after her father's death in 1883, Evangeline's mother married Dr. William E. Brandt (1849-1919), a former associate of her father's at an Indianapolis hospital for the mentally ill. Evangeline received her early education at Girls' Classical School in Indianapolis and was among the 1893 graduating class at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. She would go on to found the Bryn Mawr Alumnae Association, serving for a number of years as President and also as Editor-in-Chief of the Bryn Mawr Alumnae Quarterly. One of the fond memories she retained from her years at Bryn Mawr was her friendship with Susy Clemens and becoming acquainted with her father, author and humorist Mark Twain. On June 19, 1895 she married nutmegger Charles McLean Andrews (1863-1943), a history professor at Bryn Mawr who would later hold the Farnham Chair at Yale University and win a Pulitzer Prize for a series of books on Colonial America. Within the first few years of their marriage the couple became the parents of a girl and a boy. In 1920 their daughter, Ethel Andrews (1897-1972), married architect Henry Killam Murphy (1877-1954). He would later design of a number of the government buildings built by the Nationalist Chinese during the 1920s and 30s. This marriage did not last and in 1928 she married attorney John Marshall Harlan II (1899-1971), who would later become an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Their son, John Williams Andrews (1899-1975), was a man who held a variety of careers. He was known as a lawyer, journalist, Department of Justice investigator, owner of a public relations firm, author of non-fiction works and a co-recipient of the 1963 Robert Frost Poetry Award. Evangeline Walker Andrews and her husband, were unabashed Anglophiles. Her specialty was Elizabethan history and, starting in 1900 at Bryn Mawr College, is credited with reviving Elizabethan May Day celebrations in America. She collaborated with her husband on a number of historical works both as a writer and editor. In 1921 the couple edited Janet Schaw's "Journal of a Lady of Quality", an addition to the Yale Chronicles of America series. Angeline and her husband also edited "Jonathan Dickinson's Journal ; or, God's Protecting Providence : Being the Narrative of a Journey from Port Royal in Jamaica to Philadelphia between August 23, 1696 and April 1, 1697" that was published in 1945. Evangeline was an active member of Connecticut Society of the Colonial Dames of America, serving as their president from 1927 to 1933 and had worked on a number of historical preservation projects over her long life. During the First World War she served as Chairman of the Girls' Patriotic Society in New Haven. In the early 1920s she was headmistress at the Ethel Walker School in Simsbury, CT, a girl's preparatory school that was originally founded by her sister, Ethel Walker Smith (1872-1965), in 1911 at Lakewood, NJ. Ethel was married to Dr. Earl Terry Smith (1876-1952), a noted Hartford eye, nose and throat specialist, Evangeline Walker Andrews died at the age of ninety-two on February 25, 1962, in New Haven, Connecticut. She was survived by her children and sister. No record could be found by this writer of her brother, Reginald J. C. Walker (abt. 1866 - ?), beyond the 1880 US Census of Wayne, Indiana. Passenger Manifest SS President Pierce, August 27, 1927, US Census Records, 1880, 1900, 1910, The Daily Review Hayward, California, February 26, 1962, The Bridgeport Post, February 26, 1962, PubMed U.S. National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health, New York, Times, June 16, 1965, An Incident at Bryn Mawr by Evangeline W. Andrews, Woman's Who's Who of America: a Biographical Dictionary of Contemporary Women of the United States and Canada, 1914-1915, Connecticut Historical Society. History of Indianapolis and Marion County (1884), 35th Indiana Infantry "1st Irish".