Born on May 7, 1823, in Charleston, South Carolina, Harriet Cannon was left an orphan at the age of one and was reared by an aunt in Bridgeport, Connecticut. She attended local schools and studied music privately. In 1851 she moved to Brooklyn, New York, to be near her elder sister and supported herself by giving music lessons. The death of her sister in 1855 was a great loss, and in February 1856 she entered the Episcopal Sisterhood of the Holy Communion headed by Sister Anne Ayres. She became a full member in February 1857. In 1858 she was given charge of a ward in the newly opened St. Luke╒s Hospital, staffed by the order. A growing disagreement with the rule of the order, which she had hoped would be more traditionally conventual, culminated in her being asked to leave St. Luke╒s in early 1863, four others of like mind left with her. In September 1863 they were invited by Bishop Horatio Potter to take charge of the House of Mercy, a rescue house and reformatory for young women. A year later they also took over the Sheltering Arms orphanage and in February 1865 St. Barnabas╒ House for homeless women and children. After much planning the informally associated sisters became the founding members of the Community of St. Mary in February 1865, the first women╒s monastic order constituted by an Anglican bishop. In September Sister Harriet was elected first superior of the order. She made her life vows in February 1867. At first the order was met with widespread suspicion of their very Roman Catholic like rule; they were dismissed from St. Barnabas╒ in 1867 and from Sheltering Arms in 1870. They made a success, however, of St. Mary╒s School in New York City, opened in 1868, and followed it with St. Gabriel╒s School in Peekskill, New York, in 1872, St. Mary╒s School in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1873, and Kemper Hall in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 1878. St. Mary╒s Free Hospital for Poor Children opened in New York City in 1870, and city missions serving immigrant neighborhoods were established in New York in 1880 and in Chicago in 1886. Mother Harriet died at St. Mary╒s convent at Peekskill, New York, on April 5, 1896.
