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Fanny Reed Hammond

Fanny Bliss Reed (1875-1969) was a musician, curator, and benefactress of the arts, for whom the Pine Manor College Fanny Reed Hammond Collection of Keyboard Instruments was named. The daughter of Rev. Dr. Edward Allen Reed and Mary Bliss Reed, Mrs. Hammond was for most of her life a resident of Holyoke, Massachusetts. She married [url=https://www.discogs.com/artist/14091655]William Churchill Hammond[/url], noted organist, at the Second Congregational Church of Holyoke where he was music director (today the United Congregational Church) on June 28, 1898 and they had two sons, William Churchill Hammond, Jr. and Lansing Van der Heyden Hammond. In the 1920s she appears to have arranged sheet music for the violin and piano, published under C. W. Thompson & Co. of Boston. She was curator of the Skinner Musical Collection for many decades, appearing to likely have taken up the mantle as the main curator at Wistariahurst after the death of Nils J. Ericsson, a contemporary of Arnold Dolmetsch, after his death on February 17, 1933. This coincided with the same year the catalog of that collection was first released under the commission of William Skinner (II). Mrs. Hammond would remain with the Wistariahurst collection as curator up through its donation to Yale in 1960, and recorded at least 2 records of her narration and explanation of its instruments.