Katherine Anne Porter to American frontiersman Daniel Boone and the writer O. Henry (whose real name was William Sydney Porter), her father's second cousin. In 1892, when Porter was two years old, her mother died two months after giving birth to her last child. Porter's father took his four surviving children (an older brother had died in infancy) to live with his mother, Catherine Ann Porter, in Kyle, Texas. The depth of her grandmother's influence can be inferred from Porter's later adoption of her name. Her grandmother died while taking eleven-year-old Callie to visit relatives in Marfa, Texas. After her grandmother's death, the
William Townsend Porter William Townsend Porter William Townsend Porter (1862-1949) was an American physician, physiologist, and medical educator who spent most of his career at Harvard Medical School. He founded the Harvard Apparatus company, which produced laboratory equipment for teaching and research in physiology, and was the founding editor of the "American Journal of Physiology". Porter was born on September 24, 1862, in Plymouth, Ohio. His father was also a physician. He attended the St. Louis Medical College (now the Washington University School of Medicine) and received his M.D. in 1885. He then studied physiological chemistry briefly in Philadelphia before traveling to Germany