| Main entry | Appleton, Lydia Ann |
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| Birth place | Ontario |
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| Birth date | 15 November 1824 |
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| Death place | Aurora, York, Ontario |
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| Death date | 25 December 1903 |
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| Identifier | 0446 |
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| Birth name | Lydia Ann Appleton |
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| Marital status | single |
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| Religious affiliation | Anglican |
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| Paid work | teacher (school) |
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| Biography | Lydia Ann Appleton (1824-1903) was born to an English father and American mother. She earned her first-class teaching certificate in Upper Canada in 1853, and that same year placed second in the examination in agriculture for the Governor General's Prize. She spent her life as a single woman, teaching school in townships near present-day Toronto, such as King, Whitchurch, and Aurora, after her poems were published in Toronto as a volume titled MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, MORAL AND RELIGIOUS, WRITTEN ON VARIOUS OCCASIONS (1850). Lydia seems to have adopted a son, Victor Arthur Appleton (1882-1917), in the 1880s. After his mother's death from heart disease on Christmas Day in 1903, Victor migrated west and settled in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia. |
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| Other notes | Some sources suggest that Appleton was at one time in Mercer, New Jersey and married on 4 July 1854 to an Aaron Van Hise. Death record and others, however, read "single," and not widowed or divorced.
Siblings: Mary Elizabeth Appleton (1820-1916), m. William Hartman; Teavill Cumberland Appleton (1822-1880), m. Abigail Rush, and was a farmer and miller; Susan Keziah Appleton (1827-1878), m. Samuel P. Irwin; Clayton Hollinshead Appleton (1830-1894), m. Candace Stiles, and was a blacksmith. |
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| Honours and awards | 2nd place, Examination in agriculture, Governor General's Prize (1853) |
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| Residences | King Township, York, Ontario (1851); Whitchurch, Ontario (1861); Aurora, Ontario (1891, 1901) |
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| Geographic regions | Ontario |
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| Primary genres | poetry |
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| Books | MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, MORAL AND RELIGIOUS, WRITTEN ON VARIOUS OCCASIONS (1850) |
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| Other publications | Anthologized in: Whyte-Edgar, WREATH OF CANADIAN SONG (1910) |
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| Father's name | Thomas Frederick Henry Appleton |
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| Life dates of father | 22 February 1784, Millington, England - 30 July 1866, Aurora, Ontario; m. 1821 |
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| Father's note | teacher (school) |
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| Mother's name | Elizabeth Hollinshead |
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| Life dates of mother | 19 September 1790, Burlington, New Jersey - 29 August 1857, King, York, Ontario |
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| Children number | 1 adopted son |
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| Children's names and dates | Victor Arthur Appleton (6 April 1882 - 24 October 1917), m. to Mary Ida Brillinger |
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| Biographical references | 1851 Census of Canada East, Canada West, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia; 1861 Census of Canada; 1891 Census of Canada; 1901 Census of Canada; Ontario, Canada, Deaths, 1869-1936 and Deaths Oversea, 1939-1947 |
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| Bibliographic references | Watters, CHECKLIST OF CANADIAN LITERATURE...1620-1960 (1970), p. 9 |
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| Research references | complete |
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| Image credits | Line drawing by Una Vernelli (Vancouver, British Columbia). |
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| Copyright | This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/. Please cite Canada's Early Women Writers. SFU Library Digital Collections. Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada. 1980-2014. |
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