Page:Frances Wood Shimer 1826-1901.djvu/25

 were destroyed. It was a crushing disappointment, coming when future finances seemed assured, and after the prime of life, when recuperation is more irksome than first acquisition. It was more keenly felt, for this “purse of Fortunatus” was intended for the dower of her child&mdash;the Seminary&mdash;when she could no longer provide for its maintenance. With much of the vigor of more youthful days, she began to plan to retrieve losses, laboring, if possible, more assiduously than ever, asserting again and again that she had “no time to rest.” An accident from which she never recovered frustrated the execution of plans. Could she have had for active work the five years that were spent in helpless inactivity on her reclining chair, a larger part of the loss would have been recovered.

As Mrs. Shimer approached her seventieth year, conscious of waning activities, and feeling the weight of responsibilities which she had carried for nearly half a century, her anxiety for the future of the school increased. It was her lifework, and she felt for it the strong, deep, deathless solicitude of a mother for an only child. To secure its perpetuity, a transfer of the school property, with twenty-five acres, was made in 1896 to a board of trustees, and the name changed from Mount Carroll Seminary to “The Frances Shimer Academy of the University of Chicago.” It was her hope that, as her life waned, new energy and vigor would come to the school from its new environments, and it is a tribute to her that her passing away makes no break in the continuity of the school. Mrs. Shimer never revisited the school nor left her adopted state after she relinquished the title and management. A fall in February, 1897, injured her hip; and, though confined to her bed and chair, she continued a large part of her business correspondence, and directed extensive interests connected with property both north and south. But years of unremitting toil and anxieties had taxed and exhausted her nervous vitality. There was no manifested disease, only a gradual decline of nature's forces. It was inevitable that one who had given herself so generously should herself be spent. The nervous shock attending a second accident hastened the end.

With the change to the peacefulness and comparative freedom of private life, her intellectual and social gifts, which had been held in abeyance, were more prominent. The concise, decisive manner of