Anna Pierce Brace

Female

December 19, 1797

1836

Litchfield, CT

Charles Greely Loring (March 30, 1818)

Anna Brace Lording was the daughter of James Brace and Susan Pierce Brace of Litchfield, Connecticut, and the sister of John Pierce Brace. She attended the Litchfield Female Academy from 1811 until 1815 and also taught at the Female Academy. While studying at the Female Academy she met Charles Greeley Loring of Boston, Massachusetts. Charles had graduated from Harvard in 1812 and had begun studying as a student at the Litchfield Law School in 1813. In 1814 they became engaged and they married four years later. During their marriage she and Charles had four children. Anna passed away in 1836. John Pierce Brace wrote of his sister "Ann P. Brace's character was of very slow growth. When young and during my college life, she was indolent and seldom roused to mental effort. Her memory was poor, ...her mind slow, and her imagination feeble. When I took the school in 1814, she was then just engaged to Charles G. Loring of Boston, whom she married & was then taken under the immediate care of Aunt Mary, and resided at Miss Pierce's. Aunt Mary's judicious training out of school and the exertions of Aunt Sarah & myself in school, soon made her a good scholar, of uncommon strength of judgment and keeness of appreciation. She possessed an infinite fund of humour, was a capital comic actress, and had the keenest sense of ridiculous of anyone I ever met with, save Emma Brace. Few could have recognized in the polished, quiet, rather formal Boston lady, the fun loving girl. She married in 1818 and died in 1836."
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In 1814, Anna Pierce Brace hosted a quilting party attended by Litchfield Law School students Charles Greeley Loring, Edward King, Peleg Spraque, Benjamin Daniel Greene, George Edward Head, and William Platt Buffet.
(More Chronicles of a Pioneer School)

Ca. 1815, Mary Pierce wrote Loring about Anna's fear for her heartbroken friend, James Johnston, a Litchfield Law School student. Johnston had been rebuffed by Litchfield Female Academy student Euphemia Blanch "after having given him by the pleasure with which she received his attentions before his declaration great encouragement to be accepted."

The rejection devastated Johnston who, according to Mary Pierce, was "a foolish unprincipled youth" who "threatened to kill himself."

Johnston's classmates sat ...up with him all night to prevent his suicide and he left Litchfield the next morning. He then wrote his Litchfield friends, including Anna, "frenzied letters." He asked Anna to show the letter to Euphemia, "thinking that if there were a spark of affection in her heart such extravagant attachment would awaken it, and move her to save him."

Mary Pierce said Anna worried so much for Johnston that "her cheeks grew pale, her appetite was entirely gone, and her nights sleepless."

Charles Loring Collection, Litchfield Historical Society, ca. 1815/1816
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1811-1815

Educator

ENV transcribes of copy of "Jephthah's Daughter" a play written by Sarah Pierce. The students who acted in the play are listed - A.P. Brace played Elizabeth (Chronicles page 119); "Rules for the School and Home" and Names of the Young Ladies belonging to Miss Pierce's School in the Summer of 1814 (Archives, Litchfield Historical Society).