Minnie Bell Sharp

Minnie Bell Sharp, born in 1865 in Upper Woodstock, was a notable music teacher and businesswoman. She was the daughter of Francis Peabody Sharp, a renowned pomologist, and Maria Shaw. In 1899, she married Edwin Tappan Adney in Woodstock, and they had a son in 1937.

Minnie Bell Sharp fondly remembered her “glorious” childhood, where her entire family participated in maintaining her father’s  (Francis Peabody Sharp) orchard and market garden. She described her early years as living in a “veritable fairyland” and considered herself a “very precocious and very much indulged child” of affluent parents. At the age of five, she would read to her father’s workers, who formed an admiring circle around her. Her father, recognizing her musical talents, imported what she claimed to be the province’s first Steinway piano to nurture her skills. 

At 14, Minnie attended Compton Ladies’ College in Quebec for a year, followed by a term at St. Margaret’s Hall in Halifax. Around 1883, she began studying voice and keyboard in New York City during the winter months, under the tutelage of Liszt-trained performer and composer William Mason. It was in New York that she began her teaching career. Financial difficulties at home brought her back to Canada, where she supported herself by giving music lessons, first in Fredericton and then in Woodstock. In 1890, she opened a studio in Woodstock, where she and her pupils, along with a guest artist from New York City, presented a concert praised by the local press as “recherch[é]” and “severely classical.” Sharp was credited with introducing “high class music” to the town and was lauded as “an accomplished musician” with a rare ability to effectively impart instruction using modern methods.

In 1893, Sharp moved to Victoria, British Columbia, where she acquired the Conservatory of Music and its pupil list for about $1,200. As the principal, she and her predominantly female faculty offered training in music theory, performance, and languages to about 60 pupils. Despite financial struggles and friction with her peers over her extravagant claims about her New York-acquired pedagogical techniques, Sharp remained in Victoria until 1900.

She frequently returned to Upper Woodstock to assist her siblings with the orchard, describing herself as “the working boss.” During a 1897 visit, she was arrested for non-payment of local school taxes, an action the trustees admitted was intended to make an example of her due to her perceived extravagance. She spent 17 days in the Carleton County jail, where she reportedly remained active and gave lessons. On the 16th day, she discovered that, as a non-resident, she was immune from arrest. Upon this revelation, she was released and subsequently sued the authorities for false imprisonment, initially claiming $2,500 in damages. Although victorious, she was initially awarded only $1. However, after an appeal, a new trial in April 1900 awarded her $75 in damages, with the trustees’ appeal being unsuccessful.

During this three-year period of litigation, Minnie Bell Sharp married Tappan Adney, an artist, naturalist, and Maliseet ethnologist, whom she had known from New York, where she had boarded with his mother. Adney’s sister had studied at the conservatory in Victoria, and Sharp had exhibited his watercolours there. Running her Woodstock School of Music from studios in various western New Brunswick villages, Minnie continued to earn praise. Meanwhile, her husband gained fame for his book about the Yukon gold rush, The Klondike Stampede (New York and London, 1900). Both Minnie and Tappan helped with the family orchard. Their only child, Francis Glenn, born in 1902, took music lessons from his mother and later became a dance-band leader.

However, the Adneys’ 38-year marriage was neither conventional nor happy, and they seemingly did not live together for nearly half of it. Tappan spent early years working in Alaska and New York and served in the army for a time. In her 1919 autobiographical newspaper article, Minnie avoided all mention of her husband.

The Sharp family business faced severe setbacks in the 1890s. Although Minnie claimed “great success” in teaching in 1919, the Adneys’ earnings were insufficient to save the family property, which was sold—“stolen,” according to Minnie—in 1904, a year after her father’s death. By the second decade of the century, Minnie often found herself in court for breach of contract with piano wholesalers whose merchandise she had agreed to advertise and sell on commission. Both Robert Sloane Gourlay’s company and Amherst Pianos Limited experienced difficulties with her, leading to terminated agreements and repossessed instruments. She also faced legal troubles with landlords, pupils, the Woodstock Choral Society, prolonged litigation with creditors over family lands, and cases involving her husband.

Minnie frequently found herself alone, lacking basic necessities like food and firewood. On April 27, 1920, she used the Woodstock Press to advertise “Mrs. Adney’s Donation Party,” informing the community that “I have waited long for a benefit suited to the magnitude of my services and meritorious work in your behalf.” Three days later, in the Carleton Sentinel, she detailed the offerings she sought, ranging from food to a “Ford 4 passenger car” to “money that talks.” She signed off “respectfully and hopefully.”

In 1919, this gifted, troubled, and decidedly eccentric woman announced her candidacy for Parliament after Carvell resigned his Victoria and Carleton seat. Sharp was motivated by a desire to secure “adequate recompense” for soldiers returning from World War I. Additionally, she and many others were driven by dissatisfaction with the hypocrisy and corruption in politics. Though often referred to as the “women’s candidate” by the press, her only vaguely feminist concern was to create an economy in which children could be properly reared. Confident in her potential, she declared that from her earliest years she had “unlimited faith in my power for great achievements,” adding, “If I am elected, as I shall be, I shall accomplish the greatest work of all.”

When her name failed to appear on the ballot, she attributed it to malversation, but the truth was that, although women could vote in federal elections by this time, they could not yet run for the House of Commons. In 1921, she failed to raise the $200 required to file the nomination papers and complained that the Liberal Party should have funded her. The last and best organized of Sharp’s four attempts at elective office was the federal campaign of 1925; her name appeared on the ballot alongside those of James Kidd Flemming and Thomas Wakem Caldwell. Her slogan was “By their fruits ye shall know them,” a witty allusion to her heritage. Denied the Conservative Party nomination, which went to Flemming, she stood as a “candidate by the grace of God” and won 84 votes.

Little is known about the Adneys’ circumstances after the mid-1920s. Their son, studying to be an actuary at McGill University while continuing to lead a dance band, sent his parents money regularly and repeatedly urged his father to place his mother in an asylum.

In 1930, Sharp underwent surgery in Montreal to treat a degenerative eye disease. She lived another seven years, near Montreal and in Woodstock, poor, blind, and furious. Yet even in her misery, she affirmed that musicians could transcend greed and materialism and ultimately “scale the heights and walk in God’s gardens in Paradise.” 

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