Love, Fiercely

by Jean Zimmerman

  Almost immediately upon opening, the fair exploded into a national attraction. Its official name, the Columbian Exposition, was another instance of self-created symbolism, honoring the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the New World. Twenty-seven million people visited, at a time when the population of the United States was barely twice that. Fairgoers flooded in from farm villages, small towns and cities all over the Midwest and beyond.

  French’s refulgent, gold-leafed statue greeted them all, an American-made colossus that from the beginning was intended to match in grandeur the recently imported Statue of Liberty. Edith Minturn had been transformed into a giantess of sixty-five feet, over ten times her real height. Atop her thirty-five-foot pedestal, she stood nearly as tall as Bartholdi’s statue in New York harbor. Gazing out over the broad lagoon, flanked by the imposing buildings of the fair, Edith-as-Republic guarded the gaudy fairway, where the first Ferris wheel in the world slowly spun.

  To fairgoers it was as if an American goddess had materialized, with golden hair, draped in shimmering robes, with a halo of stars around her head by night. The fair displayed George Westinghouse’s electric lights as its most prominent innovation. The Republic’s incandescent diadem—which could be serviced if necessary from an ingenious catwalk inside Big Mary’s head—lent her form a magical, futuristic aura. The sculpture towered, head and shoulders, over the White City “campus.”

  Suddenly Edie Minturn’s golden image was everywhere, in the press, on lithographs, souvenirs such as trading cards, stereopticons, sheet music, even refrigerator magnets. A photograph of real-life Edith in midpose at French’s studio took first place at an exhibit of New York’s Society of Amateur Photographers.

  Robert Bowne Minturn (Courtesy of Lithgow Osborne)

  Robert Bowne Minturn, Jr. (Courtesy of Lithgow Osborne)

  Susanna Shaw Minturn (Courtesy of Lithgow Osborne)

  Edith Minturn (Courtesy of Lithgow Osborne)

  Susanna, May and Mildred (Courtesy of Lithgow Osborne)

  James Breese's portrait of Mildred, Edith, Gertrude and Sarah May Minturn, 1885. (Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film)

  I. N. Phelps Stokes (right) with his sisters and brothers (Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University)

  Portrait of Susanna Minturn by Fernand Paillet, 1892 (Collection of the New-York Historical Society)

  Portrait of Edith Minturn by Fernand Paillet, 1892 (Collection of the New-York Historical Society)

  Statue of the Republic, World's Columbian Exhibition, 1891–93 (Ryerson and Burnham Archives, Art Institute of Chicago)

  Head of the Republic (Ryerson and Burnham Archives, Art Institute of Chicago)

  In 1896, after the fair closed, the spirit of The Republic migrated to New York from Chicago when a smaller-scale Big Mary was brought to Manhattan by two Chicago businessmen. They joined the rush to develop Ladies’ Mile, the shopping district on Fifth and Sixth avenues between Union and Madison squares. Siegel-Cooper Dry Goods, originally a Chicago company, built a New York branch a full block long and six stories high at Sixth Avenue and 17th Street, designed to emulate the monumental proportions of the Columbian Exposition. The Ladies’ Mile store boasted free samples, floor demonstrations, air conditioning, a telegraph office, stock-trading services, a dentist and an advertising agency.

  When shoppers entered the lobby, they immediately encountered a life-size brass-and-marble rendition of Edith as the Republic, set in the middle of a Beaux-Arts fountain. “Meet me at the fountain” became a catch phrase at the turn of the century, the way “Meet me under the clock” would fifty years later, at New York’s Biltmore Hotel.

  Edie as the Republic went viral. A French-sculpted version of Edith capped the Wisconsin state capitol in Madison. At fifteen feet tall and weighing three tons, she still carries some heft, and she glows as only a twenty-two-karat coating from head to foot will make you glow. There are two differences between Big Mary and the statue Wisconsinites call Miss Forward. The Wisconsin statue has only one arm outstretched, and on her head she wears a helmet topped by a badger, the state animal.

  The statue did not stay too long at the fair. A fire tore through the abandoned complex in July 1894 and destroyed The Republic along with nearly every other remnant of the storied exhibition. But a sculpture so celebrated could never be allowed simply to disappear. In 1918, French would re-create his masterwork at the request of the City of Chicago, albeit in a twenty-four-foot version. While the smaller statue was even more brightly gilded than the original, today it provides inspiration only for joggers and drivers around a Jackson Park traffic circle.

  The firm of Siegel-Cooper disappeared in a reorganization in 1930. The shell of the New York store currently houses a Bed Bath & Beyond. But the brass-and-marble Edith of the Fountain still holds her pose, a gift to Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale, California.

  Coed excursions, with or without chaperones. Bare-shouldered tableaux vivants. Chiton-modeling for Daniel Chester French. All dramatic departures from the conventions of the day. Given her mother’s overprotectiveness, these activities might not have been totally welcomed around the family hearth. But Edith did not let anyone’s expectations circumscribe her. It might feel a little odd to view her own gilded, low-girdled likeness on the department store floor, yes, and odder yet to have her likeness floating above the world’s fair multitudes, but it would be a lie to say it wasn’t extremely entertaining.

  5. The Howling Swell

  In 1883, a family departed New York City laden with the gear for a typical summer vacation in the great outdoors. Typical, that is, if you happened to be a Stokes of Murray Hill. Newton’s mother, Helen, noted in her diary the demands of preparing for “the summer campaign of the Stokes family.” A manservant would be sent ahead with the horses and dogs. Anson had chartered a special horse car directly from 42nd Street to haul their carriage, camping clothes and trunks. Because the journey required changes of vehicles, the goods would be unloaded and loaded again three times before their arrival.

  Helen ticked off the impedimenta, human and otherwise:

  Ten servants, Miss Rondell, one coachman, three horses, two dogs, one carriage, 5 large boxes of tents, 3 cases wine . . . Stove Pipe, 2 stoves, 1 bale china, 1 iron pot, 4 wash stands, 1 bbl. of hardware, 4 bdles. of poles, 17 cots and 17 mattresses, 4 canvas packages, 1 buckboard, 5 barrels, 1 half barrel, 2 tubs of butter, 1 bag coffee, 1 chest tea, 1 crate china, 12 rugs, 4 milk cans, 2 drawing boards, 25 trunks, 13 small boxes, 1 boat, 1 hamper!

  Summer was the time to rough it, Stokes style.

  The Adirondack Mountains, the family’s destination, were a new discovery, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, among vacationers of a certain standing. The sprawling Adirondack wilderness was not for people who doted on the more civilized pleasures of Newport or Saratoga. But the area had become popular with those who favored a rugged experience, a place where a hundred trout could be caught in a single afternoon, where it rained as often as the sun shone, and where summer came in haltingly in the middle of July and lasted only until mid-September. No bridges or causeways connected the little islands that became vacation fiefdoms for visitors, and intrepid tourists reached their private enclaves exclusively by boat. The most popular activities included swimming off the dock, racing sailboats, flower picking, tramping through the woods, and hiking the peaks.

  Newton’s relish for the outdoors came down to him from his father. Anson was what later generations would call an early adopter, with a specialty in discovering and securing new locales for his family to experience. Already an avid boater, horseman and hunter, Anson embraced the new romantic view of the wilderness, though of course without giving up the trappings of a cultivated New York City existence.

  In 1876, he brought eleven-year-old Newton to the Adirondacks, to the small hotel of a former Erie Canal boatman named Paul Smith. On the spot, Anson constructed a catamaran, the first sailboat i
n the region. Father and son spent an idyllic three weeks exploring the local lakes and camping at tiny, uninhabited Birch Island. Anson then bought the island for $200. (It would not be Anson’s only investment in island property. A decade later, he purchased 247 acres on Pasley Island in British Columbia’s Vancouver Sound as a hunter’s retreat, stocking his land with Japanese pheasants.)

  There were only seven families around Upper St. Regis Lake when the Stokes family made camp the first year, six of them from New York. Over the years, hungry for more space, the family bought up adjacent islands to house their chickens, cows and pigs, and developed a fifty-acre farm on the mainland.

  Provisions came up regularly from New York City, including, if the family’s local stock of beef and pork fell short, meat in barrels. Helen would buy thirty-two lambs upon the family’s seasonal arrival, as well as two dozen chickens. Chefs were imported from Manhattan as the need arose, to supplement the permanent staff of ten, which included a governess and a tutor. The whole crew of servants made the hike to Birch Island. When Helen and Anson threw open their island camp to friends and relatives in the summer months, the household might number thirty or more.

  To an adolescent Newton, the place held a magical sway. Children decorated the dining tables with toadstools and water lilies. The imported French fad for all things Japanese had taken hold, and painted fans disported across the rough tent interiors. From the dock at dusk, Newton could gaze upon a fairyland of lanterns along the shore. His mother, entranced with the art of photography, had a flat-bottomed boat built to carry her and her camera safely.

  “I can still picture her drifting about the lake,” remembered one of Newton’s sisters, “with the camera on its tripod before her and a shawl over it and her head, so that she could see the image in the ground glass plate.”

  Fascinated with newfangled electric technology, Newton wired the whole island. He designed a telephone system, and with two friends put in eleven miles of line from Saranac Lake to Paul Smith’s, with a cable extension to Birch Island. When the family decided it needed a road through the forest from the Stokes farm to Paul Smith’s, about two miles, Newton marked it out. At the age of sixteen, he traveled north weeks ahead of his mother’s “summer campaign” to take care of business on the island. As a surprise for his mother, the intrepid Newton performed such “small” chores as designing and supervising the building of a breakwater, a lighthouse and a summer house. “Helen’s House,” the only traditionally built structure on the island at this point, had a parlor, dining room, servant’s hall and kitchen, with all its logs carefully varnished. Newton then had a shingle house of two stories built for himself.

  These would be Newton’s first architectural efforts. He served as clerk of the works to his mother’s contractor, executing her orders to build and revamp the camp’s structures every summer. That first summer of permanent camp on Birch Island, Newton showed up one day, tanned and shaggy, having been out in the woods for five weeks of canoeing and camping with a friend. He ordered a hand-built birch-bark canoe and named it The Deerslayer, after the James Fenimore Cooper character. He also inherited his father’s castoff boats. Anson tended to tire abruptly of his vessels: the catamaran, the flat-bottomed sharpie, the catboat, the jib-and-mainsail racing boat. Racing, Anson’s fetish, became the preoccupation of the entire summer settlement.

  House parties convened, with friends imported from the city. The young attendees would go out to hunt as couples, a practice that was regarded as titillating and slightly scandalous. There were no chaperones, and the party might go on for “weeks or months.” These adventures especially appealed to Newton, for whom unsupervised activity with young ladies was extremely rare. Years later, he reminisced about his youth in the wilderness, singling out the romantic intensity of couples lying in wait together under the birches, listening to the baying of the hounds. As a sixteen-year-old, he had had a crush on a girl he saw regularly on the social circuit, but his bashfulness made any approach impossible. Group parties in the Adirondacks provided a way for Newton to connect with his peers, in the confidence that came with knowing how to handle himself in the wild.

  HELEN’S DIARY PAGES dating from Newton’s adolescence capture the many advantages that were her eldest child’s birthright, but also dwell on the frequent illnesses that undercut the privileges he enjoyed. For every lavish birthday—for example, a masquerade party organized for fifty of her eight children’s closest friends—there were solitary, lonely battles waged against fevers and infections. At times it seemed the Stokes mansion was nothing but a sumptuously furnished infirmary. Newton’s childhood experience as a semi-invalid shaped his later life, as it would Edith’s, since her role was so often caregiver to her husband as patient.

  In the Stokes household, milk punch, beef tea and saltwater baths constituted cures for anything from frostbite to typhoid fever. Contemporary remedies ranged from the quaint to the extreme. Helen viewed brandy and champagne as health-fortifying tonics for toddlers. Morphine occupied a prominent place in the home medical kit. The anxious parent might administer a liberal greasing with Vaseline to reduce a raging fever. The illnesses described by Helen in her journal as afflicting her brood over the course of just two years include tonsillitis, rheumatism, malaria, pneumonia, scarlet fever and mumps. She would stay by the bedside of her sick child until she herself collapsed. The family employed several physicians to make house calls, sometimes four or five times a day when a child’s temperature spiked.

  All of the children contracted illnesses, of course, but young Newton appeared to sicken more easily and suffer worse bouts of any illness that went around. When the children caught the measles, the fifteen-year-old’s case was the most devastating. His mother also recounts his episodes of “catarrhal conjunctivitis,” chronic mouth sores, dental woes and disfiguring acne. Severe asthma troubled Newton from an early age, becoming his worst affliction, and was responsible for frequent withdrawals from school over his teenage years. He studied with a tutor at home. The doctor’s reaction to Newton’s frequently painful, swollen eyes—probably, from a modern perspective, a treatable allergic reaction—was to direct the boy to go off to the woods and fish. “He quite liked the idea,” Helen commented drily.

  Yet aside from his illnesses, her son was, according to his admittedly indulgent mother, an exceptionally strong, charismatic individual from a young age, even a bit of a clown. An affectionate child, he would not enter or leave the house without calling for his mother and giving her a kiss. He kept up with the requisite dancing lessons, along with cornet instruction and debates with friends over mathematical equations. Helen confided to her diary that an element of dandyism crept into his adolescent personality: “He makes such a fuss over his collars. Our laundress cannot do them well enough (!) so he sends them to the laundry, and even then they must be just so! He said to-day that when collars were high, he need only wash his neck once a month, but if low he had to wash it once in two weeks! And so he keeps us laughing with his funny speeches.”

  One day Newton strolled into a courtroom where his father was seated, observing a lawsuit that had to do with the estate of his grandfather. Anson described in a memoir how a spectator walked in, “with a new suit, eye glasses, and a silver-headed cane, and the howling swell was Newton! He is getting so very particular about himself now, and looks as neat as a pin, but the cane is a new thing, which I think rather too fashionable.”

  The teenage Newton had an apprenticeship in the workshop of an engineer who developed models for inventors, as befitted the son of a man who also tended toward all things scientific. It was not uncommon in this age of discovery for a boy to try to emulate Thomas Edison or another scientific notable, but Newton’s mode of doing so was obsessive. He spent the season devising a new storage battery, one with lead plates divided into two series, the positive plates connected in one series and the negative in another. Each was sewed up in a flannel bag, impregnated with lead, then packed into a small vulcanite box with blo
tting paper soaked in chlorine. Somehow, someone passed the invention along to George Westinghouse himself, who was, came the word, “very much interested.” Newton talked to the great man, and Westinghouse listened patiently as the boy pitched him another proposal, that of electroplating the hulls of ships with copper instead of attaching copper sheets with nails and screws. Westinghouse had to let the young inventor down easy: copper, it seems, was simply too soft for this use.

  Newton also invented a type of electric telephone that embodied some of the principles later used in the dial phone, including the numbers 0 through 12 arranged as on a clock face and a pointer that moved from number to number and made or broke the electrical circuit. On Staten Island, the greenhouse had a tendency to freeze at night. Newton rigged up a system of platinum wires linked to a thermometer, a mechanism that sounded a bell in the gardener’s cottage when the temperature dropped too low. When he turned fifteen, Newton applied for a patent for a repeating rifle, and invented (or so he later claimed) the return postal card.

  It was also around this time that Newton embarked on a lifelong fascination with photography, taking pictures using the cumbersome wet plate process. He had been inspired by watching his mother embrace the art. The family as a whole gravitated to photography, filling frames and scrapbooks with a record of their home, their cherished things, their clothing, beginning in a period when few amateurs had the requisite equipment, money or skill to produce snapshots. They shared a reverence for family and a passion for genealogy and were determined to capture the details of their lives in a sheen of black and white.