ALLEN, FRANCES MARGARET, SISTER

Nurse; b. Sunderland, Vermont, Nov. 13, 1784; d. Montreal, Canada, Dec. 10, 1819. She was the first daughter of Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen and his second wife, Frances Montresor Buchanan. Three years after her birth, the family moved to Burlington, Vermont, and two years later her father died. She grew up in a period of religious revival prompted in part by reaction against her father's deistic work, Reason: The Only Oracle of Man (1784). Although the revival affected her mother and her stepfather, Jabez Penniman, she remained skeptical. In 1807 she entered the school of the Sisters of Notre Dame in Montreal, where she experienced a spiritual crisis that led her to embrace Catholicism. When she announced her desire to become a nun, Dr. and Mrs. Penniman brought her home. Nevertheless, she returned to Montreal, accompanied by her mother, and on Sept. 20, 1809, entered the nursing order of the Sisters of the Hôtel–Dieu of St. Joseph. She pronounced her vows on March 18, 1811, and devoted herself to pharmacy. During the War of 1812, when the Hôtel–Dieu became a military hospital, she was instrumental in bringing converts into the Catholic Church. Long after her death, a hospital was erected (1894) on a plot that once formed a part of her father's farm, and the Sister Hospitallers of the Hôtel–Dieu were requested to operate it.

Bibliography: Archives, Hôtel–Dieu, Montreal. l. gibson, Some Anglo–American Converts to Catholicism Prior to 1829 (Washington 1943) 171–190. h. morrissey, Ethan Allen's Daughter (Quebec 1941).

[l. gibson]