Belle Brent as a young girl 		   
Isabelle Eugenia Brent
1873-1947



Belle in Chicago, no date.

Belle Brent sitting in a chair, reading, at the family summer home called Brentwood.
         

Belle Brent, born 1 September 1873 in Pensacola, was the oldest of Francis Celestino and Mary Ella Shuttleworth's 13 children. Named after her maternal great-grandmother, she was known to all as Belle.

Like most of her father's brothers and sisters, Belle never married. Her mother died when her youngest sister, Frances, was only eleven years old.

After Frances Brent's first husband, Albert Whitted, died in a plane crash in 1923, she came home to Pensacola to live at the Brent home on La Rua. Belle helped Frances as she raised her two daughters, who were very young when their father died.

When Frances married Harold Fick in 1927 and left for California in 1928, Belle went with them. She lived with the Ficks for the rest of her life, in Washington DC, Norfolk, Virginia, Honolulu, Corpus Christi, Texas, and Coronado, California.



  Three of the Brent sisters posing with two friends. Back: Cora Brent, left, and friends. Front: Mollie Brent, left, & Belle Brent.
The picture was probably taken in the early 1900s.


Belle Brent and Catherine Brent with school friends at the Visitation Convent in Mobile, Alabama. Belle Brent, top right in back; Catherine Brent, back, 3d from left.


Belle Brent at Great Falls Park in Virginia, 1936.

      Belle Brent, Fanty Fick, and Frances Fick. Corpus Christi, Texas, December 1941.


Belle Brent, at left, had her picture taken while on an outing with the Fick family at Great Falls, along the Potomac River, in Virginia in the mid-1930s. Above, she poses with her sister Frances, on the right, and her niece, Frances "Fanty" Fick, in Corpus Christi, Texas. The family had come back to the states from Honolulu not long after Frances' other daughter, Jean, was married in May 1940, and were stationed at the Naval Air Station in Corpus Christi.



 

After World War II, the Fick family moved back to Coronado, California. It was there, on 20 November 1947, that Belle Brent suffered a heart attack and died. She was buried in St. Michael's Cemetery in the Brent plot in Pensacola, Florida.

Photograph of Belle's gravestone taken by Anne Field, May 2007.


Belle Brent's obituary



19 February 2007
updated 7 March 2008 		[home|brent|brent children]