Women’s History Month encourages us to celebrate the vital role women have played in American history. The story of Anna Safley Houston – “Antique Annie” – introduces us to a Chattanooga woman endowed with resilience, tenacity, and a lifelong focus on her dream of amassing what has been called the world’s finest collection of antique glass, ceramics, antique furniture and music boxes. The colorful but eccentric woman had at least nine husbands and lived her last years in poverty, refusing to sell her priceless antiques to pay for food or medical care.
Anna was only 13 when her mother died after giving birth to the family’s 11th child in Evening Shade, Ark. She dropped out of school after the sixth grade and became caretaker for her younger siblings.
The end of the 19th century marked the beginning of a national fascination with glass art, as American manufacturers created dozens of variations of hand-blown figures, mesmerizing a young Anna. She began creating vases and jars decorated with broken pieces of glass and left home at age 15 to embark on a life that would challenge female stereotypes.
Anna took jobs teaching, saving money to move to the big city and travelled extensively when she became a buyer of ladies’ clothing for Chicago’s Marshall Field’s and Macy’s in New York. While in the Big Apple in the 1890s, she met the seven “Sutherland Sisters,” who sang at Barnum and Bailey’s circuses. They also washed their floor-length locks to promote a successful line of patent medicine hair and scalp care products. Anna, herself an attractive woman with long red hair, wrote of those times on a group photo: “I was proud of my girls, all fine and continued so high type in character.”
Though she married as many as nine times, Anna’s love life remains clouded, made more so by the Chattanooga grave of her first suitor, the man who wed her younger sister. We do know that each marriage was on her terms, she did not hesitate to determine its end date, and she refused to tolerate fraud, mistrust or abuse.