Anna L. Fisher

Anna Linderfelt (or Linderfeldt) Fisher was born in Milwaukee,[1] but was often described as being from New York,[2][3] or from California, either Pasadena or Santa Barbara, depending on the source.[4][5] She was the daughter of Swedish-born librarian Klas August Linderfelt and Margaret Eliza Parker Linderfelt.[6] Her elder brother, Karl Linderfelt, was a Colorado National Guardsman involved in the Ludlow Massacre.[7] Anna Linderfelt was educated in Paris.[8]

During World War I, Fisher joined the Red Cross to do relief work in France, and later moved to working in Damascus. In 1919, she held the rank of captain in the Syrian army.[9] She was described as "unofficial ruler of the Arab Kingdom of Syria", in reference to her role as advisor to Faisal I of Iraq. She organized schools, encouraged the development of traditional handicrafts,[10] and ran the American Red Cross orphanage in Damascus.[11]

From 1922 to 1927, she was in New York City, managing the restaurant at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.[12] She also donated art objects to the museum during this period.[13][14] Soon after she resigned from that position, Fisher was appointed an attache to Iraq's Ministry of Education, based in Baghdad.[15][16][17] In 1933, the year Faisal died, she published a reminiscence, "My Memories of King Faisal", in Asia magazine.[18]

Anna Linderfelt was engaged to architect Oswald Constantin Hering IV in 1900, while she was living in Paris.[8] She married mining engineer William Bowditch Fisher after 1901. The couple lived in Boston and wintered in Santa Barbara, but they were living in Paris before World War I.[6] They had a daughter, Frances Fisher (later Collins), born in Idaho in 1907.[16][19] Anna L. Fisher died in 1939, at her daughter's home in Millbrook, New York, aged 61 years.[1]

• "Mrs. Anna L. Fisher of Santa Barbara, Cal. Head of the Damascus Orphanage, established by the American Red Cross", photograph of Fisher in the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
• Another photograph of Anna L. Fisher at the American Red Cross orphanage in Damascus, in the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.