Ellen Louise Axson Wilson (May 15, 1860 – August 6, 1914) was the first wife of President Woodrow Wilson and the mother of their three daughters. Like her husband, she was a Southerner, as well as the daughter of a clergyman. She was born in Savannah, Georgia, but raised in Rome, Georgia. Having an artistic bent, she studied at the Art Students League of New York before her marriage and continued to produce art in later life.
She was the first lady of the United States from Wilson's
inauguration in 1913 until her death. During that period, she arranged White
House weddings for two of their daughters. She was the third First Lady, and
the most recent, to die during her tenancy.
Biography
Ellen Louise Axson, born in Savannah, Georgia, was the
daughter of the Reverend Samuel Edward Axson, a Presbyterian minister, and his
wife Margaret Jane (née Hoyt) Axson. Ellen became a woman of refined tastes
with a fondness for art, music, and literature. When she was eleven years old,
she began studying art at Rome Female College in Rome, Georgia. After her
graduation in 1876, Ellen's drawing titled School Scene was submitted to the Paris
International Exposition. Where it won a bronze medal for excellence.
In April 1883, she met Woodrow Wilson when he was visiting
his cousin Jesse Woodrow Wilson in Rome, Georgia, on family business. At that
time, she was keeping house for her widowed father. Woodrow Wilson thought of
Ellen, "What splendid laughing
eyes!" They were engaged 5 months later but postponed the wedding
while he did postgraduate work at Johns Hopkins University and nursed her
ailing father. Ellen's father committed suicide while hospitalized for
depression, after which she went north to study at the Art Students League of
New York.
Wilson, who was 28 years of age, married Ellen, age 25, on
June 24, 1885, at her paternal grandparents' home in Savannah, Georgia. The
wedding was performed jointly by his father, the Reverend Joseph R. Wilson, and
her grandfather, the Reverend Isaac Stockton Keith Axson. They honeymooned at
Waynesville, a mountain resort in western North Carolina.
That same year, Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania offered Dr.
Wilson a teaching position at an annual salary of $1,500. He and his bride
lived near the campus, keeping her little brother with them.
Together, the Wilsons had three daughters:
Margaret Woodrow
Wilson (1886–1944) - singer, businesswoman, Hindu nun (1940–44)
Jessie Woodrow Wilson
(1887–1933) - she worked three years at a settlement house in Philadelphia. She
married Francis B. Sayre at the White House in 1913. They settled at Cambridge,
Massachusetts, when Sayre joined the faculty of Harvard Law School. Jessie was
active in the League of Women Voters, the YWCA, and as secretary of the
Massachusetts Democratic Committee.
Eleanor Randolph
Wilson (1889–1967), she married Secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs
McAdoo.
Insisting that her children must not be born as Yankees,
Ellen went to stay with relatives in Gainesville, Georgia for Margaret's birth
in 1886 and Jessie's in 1887. But Eleanor was born in Connecticut in 1889,
while Wilson was teaching at Wesleyan University.
Wilson's career at Princeton University began in 1890,
bringing Ellen new social responsibilities. She took refuge from such demands
in her art. As First Lady, she drew sketches and painted in a studio set up on
the third floor of the White House. She donated much of her work to charity.
She arranged the White House weddings of two of her daughters.
After Wilson was elected as president in 1912, the Wilsons
preferred to begin the administration without an inaugural ball. The First
Lady's entertainments were simple, but her unaffected cordiality made her
parties successful. In their first year, she convinced her scrupulous husband
that it would be perfectly proper to invite influential legislators to a private
dinner.
Wilson had grown up in a slave-owning family. As First Lady,
she devoted much effort to the cause of improving housing in the national
capital's largely black slums. She visited dilapidated alleys and brought them
to the attention of debutantes and Congressmen.
She died of Bright's disease at the White House on August 6,
1914. She was buried in Rome, Georgia among her family at Myrtle Hill Cemetery.
In December 1915, President Woodrow Wilson remarried, to
Edith Bolling Galt.
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