Fanny Graves Crenshaw (17 January 1890–8 October 1984), educator and athletic director, was born in Richmond and was the daughter of Spottswood Dabney Crenshaw, a Richmond and Louisa County entrepreneur, and Anne Warfield Clay Crenshaw, a woman suffrage activist. She attended Virginia Randolph Ellett's school (later Saint Catherine's School) and in 1908 entered Bryn Mawr College to study economics, history, and politics. An outstanding athlete, she was a member of the varsity field hockey team and also fenced, swam, and played basketball, tennis, and water polo. Captain of the indoor track team for three years, Crenshaw set women's world records in four events during her senior year. She received a B.A. in 1912 and returned to Virginia Randolph Ellett's school, where she taught history and mathematics until 1922. During the summers of 1914 and 1915 she pursued graduate studies in physical education at Columbia University. She did not marry.

In 1914 May Lansfield Keller, dean of the newly established Westhampton College, a women's institution coordinate with Richmond College (later the University of Richmond), hired Crenshaw as the school's first faculty member to teach physical education, which she did three afternoons each week. Because it was not considered suitable for a young, unmarried woman to travel alone on the streetcar out to the college's countryside location, Crenshaw took a younger brother along as her chaperon. Westhampton College had no athletic facilities, and the equipment consisted of a single basketball. From such unpromising beginnings Crenshaw, who became director of physical education in 1921, built a strong program.

In a career that spanned four decades Crenshaw, affectionately called "Fanny G." on campus, developed enthusiastic and winning varsity teams in tennis and track. She coached the varsity basketball team from 1919 to 1955, with undefeated seasons in 1949–1950, 1952–1953, and 1953–1954. She encouraged intramural sports, added archery and other individual sports to the physical education curriculum, and taught her students swimming and life-saving techniques in the Westhampton Lake. Instrumental in establishing physical education as a major in 1933, Crenshaw was also a key figure in promoting the construction of a gymnasium in 1936 to provide adequate accommodations for the school's growing physical education program.

Crenshaw was most noted for her contributions to field hockey, one of the few women's team sports early in the twentieth century. Introduced to the sport at Bryn Mawr by the Englishwoman Constance M. K. Applebee, her coach who had started women's field hockey in the United States, Crenshaw organized a team at Westhampton College in 1915. One of the first varsity field hockey teams in the state, it was scheduled to meet the Sweet Briar College team in December 1919 in one of the earliest women's intercollegiate athletic competitions in Virginia, but a sudden snowstorm forced postponement of the game until the following year. Crenshaw helped organize the United States Field Hockey Association in 1921 and was elected second vice president for the 1922–1923 term. She later served as president of the Virginia Field Hockey Association, as a national judge and umpire for the sport, and in 1954 as a member of the national selection committee for the United States field hockey team.

Crenshaw was not only a gifted athlete but also a skillful, dedicated teacher and mentor whose influence on students extended beyond the playing fields and courts. She advocated equal opportunities for women in collegiate sports, believed that women should be knowledgeable and independent in financial affairs, and in September 1920 was among the first Richmond women to register to vote. Interested in broadening her own knowledge, she traveled extensively, including a six-month trip to Egypt and Europe in 1952.

After retiring in 1955 Crenshaw served as a national judge for the Richmond Board of Women's Basketball Officials and as southeast chair of the United States Field Hockey Association, and she officiated at basketball and hockey games. At age seventy-five she earned a Red Cross award for swimming fifty miles during three-times-a-week stints in the Westhampton College pool, which in 1963 had been named for her. During the 1975–1976 academic year Constance Applebee established a Westhampton scholarship in her honor. A road and a playing field on the University of Richmond campus bear her name. In 1979 Crenshaw was the first woman inducted into the college's Athletic Hall of Fame, and in 1988 the Virginia Sports Hall of Fame inducted her as well.

Phlebitis in Crenshaw's last years and blood poisoning, probably caused by diabetes, necessitated the amputation of one leg and confined her to a wheelchair, and at the end of her life she suffered from senile dementia. Fanny Graves Crenshaw, the last surviving original Westhampton College faculty member, died in a Richmond retirement home on 8 October 1984 and was buried in Hollywood Cemetery.

Sources Consulted:
Autobiographical information, including birth date, on University of Richmond Alumni-ae Data Blank, Mar. 1955, Virginia Baptist Historical Society (VBHS), University of Richmond, Richmond; Crenshaw faculty files, including clippings, "Historical Sketch of Physical Education at Westhampton College, 1914–1939" (undated typescript probably by Crenshaw), and Women of Westhampton: A Brief Description of Their Portraits (1989), VBHS; Woodford B. Hackley, Faces on the Wall: Brief Sketches of the Men and Women Whose Portraits and Busts Were on the Campus of the University of Richmond in 1955 (1972), 17–18; Claire Millhiser Rosenbaum, A Gem of a College: The History of Westhampton College, 1914–1989 (1989), 29, 37, 43, 55; Dorothy Wagener, "She Could Outrun Us All: A Tribute to Fanny Crenshaw," University of Richmond Magazine 47 (winter/spring 1985): 6–7 (portraits); information provided by Jane Thorpe Stockman and niece Sally Clay Crenshaw Witt (2003); University of Richmond Collegian, 1 Dec. 1977; Richmond News Leader, 24 Mar. 1988; obituaries in Richmond News Leader and Richmond Times-Dispatch, both 9 Oct. 1984, and University of Richmond Collegian, 11 Oct. 1984 (1954 portrait by Marcia Silvette).

Image courtesy of the University of Richmond, The Web (1927).

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Elisabeth E. Wray.

How to cite this page:
Elisabeth E. Wray, "Fanny Graves Crenshaw (1890-1984)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2006, (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.php?b=Crenshaw_Fanny_Graves, accessed [today's date]).

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