Fanny Chamberlain

Resting here is Frances Caroline Chamberlain, known to all as Fanny. She was born in eighteen twenty-five and raised in Brunswick by a relative who was minister of the First Parish Church. There, playing the organ, she caught the eye of a Bowdoin College student named Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. They married in eighteen fifty-five.

Joshua would become a hero of the Civil War, the colonel who held the line at Little Round Top during the battle of Gettysburg, and later governor of Maine. Fanny served as the state's first lady while he held that office. She was an accomplished musician and artist in her own right, raising their children through long absences and the strain of his wounds and his fame. She died in nineteen oh five.