1828–1855
Summary
Annie Rebekah Smith was a gifted writer, editor, artist, and the elder sister of Uriah Smith. Born in West Wilton, New Hampshire, on March 16, 1828, she became one of the principal editorial helpers of James and Ellen White at the Saratoga Springs and Rochester Review and Herald offices in the years 1851–1854. She wrote poems that were set to music and remain in Adventist hymnals to the present day. She died of tuberculosis on July 26, 1855, at the age of twenty-seven.
Early Life and the Review Office (1828–1851)
Per the Encyclopedia of Seventh-day Adventists (Dan Shultz), Annie was born March 16, 1828, in West Wilton, New Hampshire, the only daughter of Samuel Keyes and Rebekah Spaulding Smith. She joined the Baptist Church at age ten but withdrew in 1844 to identify with the Second Advent movement along with her mother and her younger brother Uriah Smith. She studied at the Charlestown Female Seminary in Massachusetts. An eye problem in 1850 prevented her from accepting a teaching position.
In late 1851, encouraged by her mother, she attended Joseph Bates’s meetings in Boston and accepted the seventh-day Sabbath. Her poem “Fear Not, Little Flock” reached the Review and Herald, prompting an immediate invitation from James White to assist him as copy editor at Saratoga Springs, New York. She arrived, was prayed for, and saw her vision problem clear up — and from then on served as Smith’s editorial right hand.
Ellen White on Annie Smith’s Help (November 1851)
Ellen White’s first-person record of Annie’s help is preserved in Christian Experience and Teachings, p. 141, par. 4: “Sister Annie Smith, who now sleeps in Jesus, came to live with us and assist in the work. Her help was needed.” (Christian Experience and Teachings, p. 141, par. 4; refcode CET 141.4).
The same paragraph quotes James White’s February 20, 1852 letter to Stockbridge Howland on the labor of those days, including: “We are unusually well, all but myself. I cannot long endure the labors of traveling and the care of publishing. Wednesday night we worked until two o’clock in the morning, folding and wrapping No. 12 of the Review and Herald; then I retired and coughed till daylight” (Christian Experience and Teachings, p. 141, par. 4; refcode CET 141.4).
Ellen White’s December 1851 Letter 9, 1851 — written from Saratoga Springs — preserves a snapshot of life at the office: “James is very busy correcting proof sheet. Sister Annie Smith is assisting him, and that gives me a little time to write. I have written this evening after the Sabbath by candle light, with aching eyes, so you must excuse poor writing.” (Manuscript Releases, Letter 9, 1851, par. 12; refcode 1LtMs, Lt 9, 1851, par. 12).
The Ellen G. White Estate’s own commentary in Letters and Manuscripts preserves a further note from a month earlier (Lt 8, 1851), giving Ellen White’s appraisal of her young assistant: “She is just the help we need. She takes right hold with James and helps him much. We can leave her now to get off the papers and can go out more among the flock” (The Ellen G. White Letters and Manuscripts: Volume 1, p. 321, par. 3; refcode 1EGWLM 321.3).
Three Years of Faithful Labor — and Tuberculosis
Loughborough records the brevity and the cost of Annie Smith’s labor: “Sister Annie’s help in the office as proof-reader, etc., was timely. For three years she labored faithfully and effectively, receiving only board and clothing. At the end of this period consumption had marked her for its victim.” (The Great Second Advent Movement, p. 315, par. 4; refcode GSAM 315.4). Loughborough adds, in the same paragraph, that during the lingering disease she wrote her best-known poem, “Home Here and Home in Heaven,” whose preface she finished the day before her death.
Death (July 26, 1855)
Annie Smith died of tuberculosis on July 26, 1855, at the age of twenty-seven — only weeks after writing the preface to “Home Here and Home in Heaven.” Her brother Uriah Smith, who would soon become the editor of the Review and Herald, edited her collected poems for posthumous publication. Several of her poems became Adventist hymns; “I Saw One Weary,” “How Far From Home?”, and “Long Upon the Mountains” remained in Adventist hymnals well into the twentieth century.
