Slideshow image

On February 5, 1864, a successful 44-year-old poet, blind since infancy, wrote the words to her first hymn: We are going, we are going / To a home beyond the skies / Where the fields are robed in beauty / And the sunlight never dies. The poet, Fanny Crosby, would go on to pen the words to roughly 8,000 more hymns over the next fifty years of her life, including such classics as Blessed Assurance, To God Be The Glory, and I Am Thine, O Lord. She is likely the most prolific American writer of congregational worship music. When not writing, Fanny was a fixture in the rescue missions of New York City, often sharing her music with the people she served. (Pictured: Fanny Crosby, 1872.)