Minnie Bell Sharp Adney (January 12, 1865 – April 11, 1937) was a Canadian music teacher and businesswoman. Family, early life and education She was born in Upper Woodstock, New Brunswick, one of eight children of Francis Peabody Sharp and his wife Maria Shaw. Their first three children had all died of diphtheria within one week in 1861. Minnie Bell was the eldest of three sisters. She had one older brother and one younger. Her father, a noted experimental pomologist, owned orchards and fruit nurseries which grew to be the largest in Canada by 1890. Minnie Bell Sharp later described her childhood and youth as "a glorious life" and her family's home as "a veritable fairyland". She recalled having "an unlimited capacity for hard work" and being "up at daylight packing and shipping apples and plums" during the harvest season. She was educated mainly by her mother, with one year spent at Compton Ladies' College, an Anglican boarding school in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, when she was 14. Later she attended St. Margaret's Hall school in Halifax, where she excelled in music. Encouraging her musical development, her father purchased the first Steinway piano in New Brunswick During most winters between 1883 or 1884 and 1890 she studied voice and piano in New York City. The composer and pianist William Mason was one of her teachers. Career She taught music in Woodstock, New Brunswick and organized local concerts in which her students performed, on one occasion joined by friends of Sharp's from Fredericton and New York. She also organized concerts in Saint John, New Brunswick and Houlton and Calais, Maine. In 1893 she purchased the business name and goodwill of the Victoria Conservatory of Music at Victoria, British Columbia for $1200, of which $700 was in cash and the remaining $500 in the form of a promissory note. She took possession of the conservatory in September 1893 and remained its principal until 1900. It was the largest music school in the city, with as many as 60 students and 5 staff in addition to Sharp and her assistant Beth Walker, who had studied with Sharp in New York. Sharp taught voice and piano; other subjects taught included music theory and history, sight-singing by the sol-fa method, violin, elocution and languages (French, Italian and German). The conservatory regularly presented student recitals and benefit concerts in which Sharp and other teachers participated.