Fanny Scannell on the day she married Robert Scannell, April 16, 1925

By Ray Geselbracht, Bronxville Village Historian

Feb. 11, 2026: Heart-felt expressions of true love are perhaps harder to exchange on Valentine’s Day than the traditional cards, candy and flowers.  But the Bronxville History Center received recently, as a kind of Valentine’s Day present, some love letters exchanged by Robert and Fanny Scannell many years ago.

On their wedding day in April 1925, Robert and Fanny Scannell certainly seemed destined to have a glorious life together.  He was educated at some of the best schools in the country, including Princeton and MIT, and had very successfully begun an architectural career in Bronxville.  Fanny came from a wealthy Bronxville family and had recently graduated from Sweet Briar College in Virginia.  Over the four years following their marriage, Robert would open his own architectural firm in Bronxville and he and Fanny would have two children, James and Edith, and build for themselves a beautiful house in the Sunny Brae section of Bronxville.  A glow seemed to surround the Scannell family, and the future seemed to promise every happiness.

Real life, as it came to them, was often hard to bear.  First came economic hardship, in which they lost their Bronxville home.  As the years went by, their son showed signs of an illness which prevented him from ever living a normal life.  The World War II years brought more hardship and Robert and Fanny were often apart. 

In the midst of their joys and sorrows, Robert and Fanny wrote letters to one another which express with great purity the enduring love which they felt for one another.  “Dear One,” Fanny wrote on one of their wedding anniversaries, “Every day has been happier than I ever dreamed and every day I have loved you more…Between us there is understanding and a bond which grows closer all the time.”  On another occasion, she wrote, “You are so sweet and unselfish and altogether marvelous to me that tears come to my eyes when I think of it.”

Robert wrote to her in the same spirit after a long separation during and following World War II.  “I love you, yourself, for what you are and what you mean to me,” he wrote.  “I love every part of you, your body and your spirit and I have from the first moment that we met and I will until I die….  You have given me your love, your honesty, your frankness.  These are precious to me beyond price, more important than anything else in the world to me.  If I should lose them, I have lost everything.”  He apologizes to Fanny for sometimes failing her, but in his heart, he writes, “there is a constant and abiding love which nothing can ever change.  You are my woman—that’s all.”

Robert Scannell lived into very old age, and he lost first, in 1972, Fanny and their son James. In 1982 he lost his daughter, Edith. Robert Scannell died three years later, probably feeling that though he had lost much during his life, he and Fanny had never lost their deep love for one another, and that he was wealthy in all that really mattered.

Happy Valentine’s Day to the Village of Bronxville from Robert and Fanny Scannell.