A Whole New Site!

It's a whole new world for me! Consider this your official, gilt-edged invitation to accompany me to my new website: stacycordery.com. I am very excited about it!

On the new website I will continue to post--and you can continue to read--my blogs. They will all be archived there as well. So this will be my last post from this blogspot address.

And here's some more news: in addition to the stacycordery.com website, I am also--starting now--on Facebook and Twitter. You can find me on Facebook as Stacy Cordery, Author. You can follow me on Twitter @StacyCordery

As we get closer and closer to the publication of Juliette Gordon Low: The Remarkable Founder of the Girl Scouts I will keep you all up to date on where I'll be speaking in the hopes that you'll come join me.

In the meantime, visit me on the new website! Check it out: stacycordery.com
Thanks!

Willy Low's Winning Racehorse

Juliette ("Daisy") Low's husband, William Mackay Low, was, as the Times of London put it in 1906, "a gentleman well known in sporting circles." For Daisy, this was not a good thing. "Sporting" usually implied gambling, and Willy was no stranger to the gaming table or the racetrack. When the Lows purchased Wellesbourne House, in Warwickshire, England, its stables and pastures were its chief attractions for Willy. He needed somewhere to shelter and exercise all the many horses he owned.

The horses were not a happy part of Daisy and Willy's marriage. She fretted that he would break his neck every time he rode in the dangerous steeplechases. When Willy turned his horses over to a jockey for other types of races, Daisy noted with increasing exasperation that Willy's horses seldom won. Despite the social nature of racetracks, he forbade her ever to go to a particular course. At important moments in their life together he was absent--off selling or buying horses instead of at her side.

Even at the end of his life, as he lay dying, Willy Low summoned enough strength to sell a horse. And not simply any horse. He sold Imari, the thoroughbred who had just won the Chester Cup.

Imari, from a cigarette card.

Because Imari won the race, held at the Chester Racecourse in Chester, Cheshire, Willy Low was richer by £2,000. In 2011 money, that is approximately $80,500.

Chester Racecourse

After the race, Willy Low sold Imari for £2,000.

How do we know this? Daisy Low, with Willy's sisters, contested his will. The estate of Willy Low was owed the worth of the Chester Cup stakes and the price of the horse's sale. Imari thus appears in the newspaper coverage about the will. Daisy and her sisters-in-law tried to prove to the court that the will Willy made should not be carried out because he was not in his right mind. The judge insinuated that Willy's having profited on Imari--not once, but twice--just weeks before he died suggested that he was in full possession of his faculties. "There is more in this case than meets they eye," retorted Daisy's attorney. There certainly was. But that's another, longer story--one I hope you will read in February, when Juliette Gordon Low: The Remarkable Founder of the Girl Scouts is published.

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Quotes:  "Robertson v. Low and Bateman," The Times, 20 March 1906, and  "Robertson v. Low and Bateman," The Times, 25 July 1905. With thanks to Dr. Dan Weinbren.
Photo of Imari from the New York Public Library, http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/
Photo of the racetrack from artvalue.com
Photo of Chester Races medal or member's pin, with thanks to Clive Hanley, from http://www.greyhoundderby.com/chest1905.htm

The Kinzie Church

When we--appropriately--think of Juliette ("Daisy") Gordon Low as a Southerner, we often forget that her mother's family were founders of Chicago, Illinois. Last week's blog about the church Daisy attended while she lived in England made me recall the extraordinary beauty of the church begun by her grandparents: St. James Cathedral.

Today St. James is a thriving congregation which serves as the cathedral for the Episcopal diocese of Chicago. It is located at 65 East Huron Street, half way between Navy Pier and Cabrini Green. The Cathedral's soaring architecture is stunning, and the interior is luminous. Yet this St. James would not be recognizable to Daisy or her family--in anything other than the faith of its communicants and the strength of its community.

In 1834--one year after Chicago was incorporated--Daisy's grandmother hungered for the Episcopal liturgy she had grown up with. Juliette Magill Kinzie and John Harris Kinzie called to their log cabin likeminded friends. There, Episcopalians initially gathered.

The Kinzie house, across the river from Ft. Dearborn, in 1832.

Outgrowing the Kinzies' parlor, they borrowed the Presbyterian church. Juliette Kinzie became the driving force for a permanent place of worship. Her efforts culminated in the appearance of the first Episcopal priest in the near-wilderness that was then Chicago. The Rev. Palmer Dyer arrived, stayed with the Kinzies, and on the morning of Sunday, October 12, 1834, celebrated the first Episcopal service in Chicago. That was 177 years ago this month.

Juliette Kinzie's efforts on behalf of the fledgling congregation were tireless. Within three weeks the Episcopalians were meeting in a barely framed building on North Water Street. In less than a year, the young state of Illinois elected its first Episcopal bishop, Philander Chase, to preside over its three nascent dioceses. This was news to Bishop Chase. He was serving as Bishop of Ohio, but philosophically accepted the call to move further west. Bishop Chase rose to the challenge of creating an infrastructure on the frontier, and in 1839 founded Jubilee College in Brimfield, Illinois, just as he had earlier established Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. The mission of both colleges was to train priests to minister to the vast Midwest as it was rapidly filling with Episcopalians migrating from the East.

Checking on the parishioners at St. James was hazardous. Juliette Kinzie recalled that the roads leading to Chicago were so poor that "the Bishop always had a few accidents, and generally some broken bones." Once so many ribs were cracked that he could not stand unaided to preach. Considerate parishioners made him a sort of chair from a washstand and placed it on the undersized pulpit. Daisy's mother, Nellie Kinzie Gordon, remembered the moment that things went wrong: when the Bishop adjusted his skull cap. At that point, the "chair" leg slipped off the pulpit, and the bishop went shooting into the chancel "like a catapult." Stunned silence ensued and the bishop lay awkwardly on the floor. Eventually someone helped him and, nothing daunted, Bishop Chase climbed back up onto the rickety washboard chair and continued to sermonize for another hour and a half.

In 1835, Juliette and John Kinzie donated two parcels of land for the building of a proper church. Juliette Kinzie and the other women in the St. James Ladies' Sewing Society raised nearly $6,000 to fund Chicago's first brick church. By Easter of 1837, Episcopal Chicagoans were worshiping in their own building. Juliette Kinzie taught Sunday school to children in the basement. It was in this unostentatious church on the prairie that Juliette and John's daughter, Nellie, was baptized and confirmed.

In 1852, the church moved to the corner of Wabash and Huron Streets, very near to its present-day location. John Kinzie was a member of the building committee. The church they erected seated over one thousand people, evidence of the growth of St. James. In this more magnificent edifice, Nellie was married to William W. Gordon of Savannah, Georgia. When Nellie and Willie brought their children north, it was to St. James Church that they all went to worship. Daisy knew it as her home church in Chicago.

St. James in 1871, looking like it did when Daisy worshipped here as a girl.

The Kinzie Church, as it was called in acknowledgement of the time, money, and energy invested by Daisy's grandparents, has had a long and fascinating history. Its magisterial architecture, particularly the lovely nave, have drawn local residents and famous guests--as diverse as Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King--for years. Ogdens, Palmers, Newberrys, Bowens, Ryersons, Leiters, and De Kovens were among the many leading families of Chicago who were members of St. James. The church--now cathedral--has a tradition of extraordinary music, which was true also in Daisy's time.

Daisy Gordon Low was strong and faithful life-long Episcopalian. Her Christianity mattered deeply to her. With a grandmother like Juliette Kinzie Gordon perhaps this is no surprise.

St. James Cathedral today

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For photos of St. James Cathedral and for more on its history, go to www.saintjamescathedral.org. For even more information, read Rima Lunin Schultz's The Church and the City (Chicago: The Cathedral of St. James, 1986). The quotes in this blog come from Schultz, 24.
Both photos from Wikimedia.

Influences?

It has always been interesting to me to know that Daisy Low founded the most important organization for girls in the United States, yet she herself was childless.* While most people may go off on all the psychological speculations they like, historians are happiest when we have evidence of emotional or psychological states in writing. Diaries, letters, and journals wherein a childless woman pours out her frustration or unhappiness about not having children gives historians like me a firmer footing. With those sorts of confessions, we can (depending on their strength and consistency) make suggestions or draw conclusions about what makes that particular diarist or letter writer feel a certain way.

Alas, Daisy left no such diaries or letters.

Well, that's not exactly true. She did mention occasionally that she felt that she had failed in her duty to her family and to Willy's family by not bearing children. She wrote, in an opaque sort of fashion, that she felt somehow less a woman than her two sisters by being childless. And certainly she lived in an era when the predominant role for women was mother.

But still I wonder: was there anything else that made Daisy Low so open to the idea of an organization for girls?

She was superstitious, as we know. She was also a devout Christian.

So, when I was in England poking around Daisy's corner of the world, it struck me that every Sunday she sat in her local church, St. Peter's. In the silence, surrounded by families, her thoughts would naturally gravitate to her desire to be a mother. Where would she turn? Inward, in prayer--and outward, to the physical church around her. And because Daisy was an artist, she could not have helped her eyes from straying to St. Peter's gorgeous stained glass windows. When I took a count, the majority contained images of infants and children.

Of course, the fact that children are ubiquitous in St. Peter's Church windows does not mean that Daisy noticed this as I did, nor that she was affected by these images. It is one of those things I ponder, however. I will never have the written proof I need so I can not publish theories like this in my book. But a blog is different, and here I can speculate. 

The years that Daisy lived in Wellesbourne and attended St. Peter's Church were the years when she would have been thinking about why she was not pregnant. Did these idealized images of children--and of the adults instructing them, caring for them--sear themselves into her mind only to float to the surface of her consciousness later as she listened intently to (the then also childless) Robert Baden-Powell describe the joy he took in his Boy Scouts and Girl Guides? Did those stained glass images from her quiet, reflective times become part of the context she gave herself for becoming involved with Girl Guiding? We will never know, but I like to think so.

*I have a very dear friend who has no children of her own, but loves all children. She chose a career of working with children and youth. She is brilliant with children. I do not mean to suggest that only mothers can love or understand children. Many years ago I worked for a woman who told her husband that she would bear the children but that he must be the primary parent--and that's how it was. I know that humans are endlessly complicated and that Daisy Low lived in a very different era than our own.

Willy Low's English Homes

Daisy Gordon fell in love with Willy Low while he was visiting Savannah, Georgia. Low lived in Great Britain with his siblings and his father and had to return there--even though neither Daisy nor Willy wanted to be separated from each other. As soon as she could, Daisy found a way to cross the Atlantic Ocean to meet Willy again. She went to the Low home, called Beauchamp Hall, in Royal Leamington Spa, in the English Midlands. Daisy told her parents that she found a warm welcome there. She extolled the beauty of the gardens and the cozy feeling of the interior despite the outward size of the house.

I visited Warwickshire recently and my kind host took me on a brief tour of Leamington Spa which was famous in Daisy's time for its medicinal baths. The spas were so elegant that royalty sought healing and rest there, hence the town name beginning with "Royal." Below are some photos I took of the Low homes as they look today.

This is Beauchamp Hall. It sits on the corner across the street from a park and is currently a school.

Here's a shot from a little farther back so you can see the size of the house better. It goes on quite a way back and is much larger than it appears.

Right around the block, very near to Beauchamp Hall, is another Low home. Willy and his sisters were living in these luxury apartments in the 1870s.

This would have been their front entrance, 42 Clarendon Square:

And if you are wondering about what sort of neighborhood it was, here is a plaque on one of the homes just across the street:

As her biographer, going to investigate the places where Daisy and Willy courted and lived is important. It helps me to try to recover a sense of her. These two sites in England are very different today, of course, and many things have changed since the Low family lived in Royal Leamington Spa. But still I think it is well worth it to see them, to see the neighborhoods, to try to understand distances, to attempt to recover some of the wonder she might have felt upon her initial visit, and to ponder the sorts of sights and sounds she might have enjoyed while there. I hope my photographs assist you to peer into part of Daisy's world, if only dimly.