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Anna Bemis Stearns The Anna B. Stearns Charitable Foundation has promised a large gift - as much as $100,000 in a challenge grant - to the Randolph Mountain Club's base camp project. Who was Anna B., and why has her foundation decided to support us? For seventy years, Anna B. Stearns was one of Randolph's more colorful residents. Bostonian and patrician to the core, she talked with a distinctive Brahmin drawl and drove her Mercedes fiercely. My father, recounting a terrifying journey with her, remembered that as her car screeched around a corner, seemingly on two wheels, she said, "Don't worry, Stephen, it's got to tip far more than that before it goes over." Gordon Lowe replaced the clutch in her Mercedes on a regular basis. She was a hardy hiker, walking and snowshoeing well into her eighties. On an RMC climb, she would always leave the summit first, complaining that she was too slow. We rarely saw her short of the trail head. Anna was born in 1895 and raised in Dedham, Massachusetts. Her father, Harris B. Stearns, was a wealthy Massachusetts banker and stockbroker. She graduated from Vassar College in 1918. I remember her scornful comments about her classmates after she had attended her 50th reunion - "Hardly any of them could even walk!" Anna came to Randolph in August 1920 (this is the year in which the names of the Stearns family first appeared on the membership list of the RMC). The family, as far as I can tell, stayed at the Ravine House throughout the 1920s, and Anna became one of the adventurous younger hikers in the community. She met my parents in the mid-1920s, and their subsequent friendship spanned many decades.
Anna was a member of the RMC beginning in 1920. Between 1939 and 1969, she served 13 years on the Board, with 6 years as secretary, 2 years as vice-president and in 1956-58 two as president. Tom Barrow recounted that during the 1940s, when labor for clearing trails was scarce, Anna and his father took charge of clearing the Beechwood Way. (Louis F. Cutter had invented an "adopt-a-trail" scheme to solve the World War II labor crisis.) She was also camps chair for two years in 1960 and 1961. As a major contributor to all of the RMC's building projects over the years, she established a personal foundation in 1951 that was further endowed by her considerable fortune upon her death at the age of 94. The Stearns Foundation, subsequently honoring Anna's desire to support projects in northern New Hampshire, has donated substantial grants to the Nature Conservancy to purchase and support the Green Hills reservation in North Conway, for Randolph's Community Forest, and now to the RMC for its base camp. In her later years, Anna was one of a group of inveterate older climbers that included my mother, Charlotte Maddock, Nora Joensson, Miggy Arnold Woodard, Kay Billings, Louise Baldwin, and Barbara Wilson (the baby of the group). In 1969 (when Anna was in her mid-seventies), she and my mother hiked in June up the Ammonoosuc Ravine Trail to view the alpine flowers. On the way down, crossing a snowfield, as my mother described in our family logbook: "Almost fell in when a snow bridge broke, & Anna lost her cane in a torrent under the snow." On a "perfect day" that same September they climbed down through Mahoosuc Notch and up Mahoosuc Arms: "Final mile unpleasant because of recent logging. Encountered some difficulty in finding trail's emergence on Success Pond Road. Very relieved when the car was spotted. Celebrated this feat by drinking sherry." And in October, with Barbara Wilson, they climbed North and Middle Moat: "Missed turn and came out on road leading to Bartlett, added about 5 miles to circuit...Annoying but taken in good stride by all." Many current RMC members never
knew Anna B. Stearns. However, her long association with Randolph
and the RMC set the stage for the generous gift by her foundation
to the base camp project.
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In
1929, Anna's father decided to build a summer home in Randolph.
My parents had purchased an open pasture to the west of Bowman,
a lot with about 20 acres of land. My father also bought for
$100 an adjacent lot of about 18 acres to the east, reselling
it to Stearns. (This was Mr. Stearns' idea, as he felt that because
he was known to be very wealthy, he would be asked to pay more.)
Stearns engaged John Boothman to build him a spacious house,
which was ready for occupancy in the summer of 1931. The family
spent summers in their new home, moving to hotels in Boston or
South Carolina during the colder months. Harris Stearns died
a few years after building his Randolph "cottage,"
but Anna and her semi-invalid mother returned to summer in Randolph
each year. After her mother's death in the 1940s, Anna spent
May through October in Randolph and the rest of the year in an
apartment on Beacon Hill.