Anna L. Hawley was born January 29, 1886, in Chur, Switzerland, the daughter of Barth and Olmas Luetscher.

In 1912 she became Beloit’s first Visiting Nurse. She was a Beloit resident until 1980, and married Glenn Hawley on June 10, 1924. They farmed on the west side of Beloit on Nye School Road.

Anna was a registered nurse and was employed by the Beloit Health Department on December 2, 1912. She had studied at a Milwaukee hospital and spent a month in Chicago, where she received intensive training from the superintendent of the Chicago Visiting Nurses Association in all phases of public health nursing, baby welfare, anti-tuberculosis work, and similar subjects.

The Beloit Visiting Nurse Association was started in Beloit through the efforts of the Beloit Women’s Federation of Missions and the Salvation Army in May 1912. Orders for her services were left in a letter box at Emerson’s Drug Store by doctors, and she made her calls by walking or riding street cars until businessmen provided the association with a Ford Roadster in 1917.

In her first year, Anna made 1,514 house calls in Beloit and South Beloit, working Sundays and holidays if a patient was critically ill. She was expected to collect fifty cents per visit from those able to pay. These fees, along with donations, fundraisers, and Christmas seal sales, helped finance the work.

Most of her work had to do with infants and new mothers, undernourished children, tuberculosis patients, and their families. In 1916, a newspaper account attributed the reduction of infant mortality in Beloit from 98 to 56 largely to the work done by Anna.

She resigned in 1918 to become an Army nurse.

She died on January 19, 1988, in Fullerton, California, at the age of 101.