“GUPPY”
Cincinnatians like to point out to newcomers that Cincinnati was a city when Chicago was still an open prairie and Cleveland no more than a wide place in the Erie Canal System. Cincinnati reckons its existence from 1788, the year a Kentuckian named John Filson and a couple of partners purchased 740 acres in a natural amphitheatre beside the Ohio River surrounded by a handsome semicircle of hills and bluffs. Filson, an amateur surveyor, began laying out plans for his new city. He was also something of a scholar, and appears to have been fond of word games. He christened his city Losantiville, which sounds French but is actually a kind of reverse acronym. The basin of land that Filson and the others bought lay on the shore opposite the point where the Licking River enters the Ohio. The “L” in Losantiville therefore stood for Licking. Os is the Latin word for mouth; anti, of course, means opposite, and ville is French for city. Thus, read backward, Losantiville meant “the city opposite the mouth of the Licking.” The name, however, did not last long. John Cleves Symmes, another early settler, thought the name ridiculous, and allegedly bellowed, “Losantiville! What an awful name! God damn it, call it Cincinnati!”—honoring the Society of the Cincinnati, a veterans’ society of Revolutionary officers to which Symmes happened to belong. Symmes’s choice won, and outsiders have never since been quite sure how to spell it.
First-time visitors to Cincinnati, expecting to find a rawboned mid-western town on the order of, say, Omaha, are usually surprised to find a city of fine old houses, stately squares and parks, gas-lit streets and hills where, as in San Francisco, homes with the finest views command the highest prices. Even in 1819, Cincinnati startled visitors with its subtle mixture of Old World elegance and southern charm. Graham A. Worth, who came to Cincinnati around that time to direct the Branch Bank of the United States, exclaimed later, “Talk to me of the backwoods—these people live in the style of princes! The costly dinner service—the splendid cut glass—the rich wines—the sumptuous dinner itself.” Even Boston was impressed with the degree of culture achieved by Cincinnati; a correspondent from the Boston Courier in 1816 was moved to comment on “Pianofortes by the dozen in Cincinnati.”
Cincinnati used to be able to boast that there was no real poverty in the city. Everyone was hard-working, and everyone was reasonably prosperous. Some people, of course, had become very rich. Two world wars, and subsequent migrations of blacks from the rural South and whites from Appalachia, would change all that, and Cincinnati now has its share of poverty proportionate to that of any other American city, but the fact that the city was so stable for so long is reflected in a certain complacent, nil admirari urban attitude. The people who became very rich in the early days, furthermore, tend still to be very rich.
Among the “first-cabin” families are the Tafts—still very much around—who produced both a United States President and a United States Senator. For years the grande dame of the Taft family was Mrs. Charles P. Taft, Sr., who reigned over, among other things, the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Nor can one overlook the Longworths. It was said of the first Nicholas Longworth that he owned more land than anyone west of the Allegheny Mountains, and one of his descendants, Nicholas Longworth III, would become a congressman, Speaker of the House of Representatives, and the husband of Alice Roosevelt. In the Longworth family, one of the more remarkable ladies was Maria Longworth, an early feminist and artist who founded the Rookwood Pottery, which produced ceramic ware famous for its unusual designs and glazes.
All the prominent families knew one another, and society was very close-knit. Mrs. Charles P. Taft’s best friend, for instance, was Mrs. Thomas J. Emery, and the two ladies regularly sent “breakfast letters” back and forth to each other via their coachmen, even though their houses were very close. The Emerys are an altogether extraordinary family. The first Emery, Thomas, was born in England and came to America in 1832, bringing his wife and a young son, Thomas Josephus Emery, Jr. Soon a second son, John Josiah Emery, was born, and the groundwork for a small but important family dynasty was laid.
There has always been a pleasant logic to Cincinnati’s prosperity. The rich farmland around the city meant corn, and corn meant fodder for pigs. (At one point Cincinnati cheerfully earned the nickname “Porkopolis” because it had become such an important pork center.) Pigs provided bristles for brushes, hides for shoes and gloves, sausage for the city’s early German-immigrant population, and lard for candles and illumination. When John D. Rockefeller came out with kerosene as a substitute for lard oil, it was discovered that lard could also be used in soap making, and two Cincinnatians, William Cooper Procter and James Gamble, managed to make a very nice thing out of that. Procter & Gamble is still one of the city’s flagship industries. Even in hard times, it is pointed out in Cincinnati, people still need soap, and from the soap business Cincinnati has earned a reputation as a “depression-proof” city.
Thomas Emery, however, started out as an “estate and money agent,” with a specialty of selling “country seats, situated from one-half a mile to eight miles from the city, not surpassed for elegance of buildings, gardens and orchards in Hamilton County.” Later he branched out into the lard business, and by 1845 his Emery Candle Company was one of the most successful in the country. “In the candle business we had a new process of distilling cheap greases,” he said later of his success. “Our competitors were using costly tallow and lard. Candles were high and our profits large for a number of years.”
Thomas Emery died in 1851, after falling through a hatchway in his factory, but his two young sons were ready to carry on. (There were also two girls, Kezia and Julia, who inherited large shares of their father’s fortune, but Kezia died and left everything to Julia, and then Julia died and left everything to the Salvation Army of England.) This was a long time before kerosene, and John D. Rockefeller was still an owlish schoolboy, but the Emery brothers shrewdly decided that, though they would keep the candle business, they would devote their principal energies to what had been their father’s first love: real estate. They formed Thomas Emery’s Sons, Incorporated, “Builders of Hearths and Homes.” One of their first big projects was the Hotel Emery, opened in 1877. Borrowing from the Piccadilly and Burlington arcades in London, the Hotel Emery had a block-long heated arcade of shops running through it, and office space above, which was unique in America at the time.
The Emerys also built one of the city’s first luxury apartment houses, again a very daring and foresighted move. At the time, apartments, or “flats,” as they were called, were considered fit habitations only for the poor; the affluent lived in private houses. But the Emerys’ first apartment house was found to be so convenient and comfortable that the young William Howard Tafts became tenants for a while. Spurred by this success, the boys built more, giving their apartment houses romantic, European-sounding names—the Lorraine, the Lombardy, the Brittany, the Saxony, the Normandy, the Warwick, Somerset, Cumberland, Essex, Clermont, Navarre, Verona, Madrid, Suffolk, Granada, Seville, Garonne, Aragon, and Castile—to name only a few. They built the Carew Tower, a forty-five-story office skyscraper, which is still Cincinnati’s tallest building. Like the Hotel Emery, the Carew Tower featured an enclosed shopping arcade, and it also included another hotel, the Netherland Plaza.
Two competing hotels were the Grand and the Gibson, which, young Thomas J. Emery believed, were profiteering by charging $3.50 a day for a room with meals. A good hotel, he claimed, could offer the same accommodations and service for $2 a day. The result was his Palace Hotel, opened in 1882. “As long as the sun shines,” Thomas Emery promised, “the Palace will be a two-dollar hotel.” To be sure, there was only one public bathroom and toilet to a floor, but that was standard for hotels of the time.
The Emerys began expanding their real estate operations beyond Cincinnati, and soon they were developing and building projects in such widely scattered places as San Francisco, Denver, Kansas City, Toledo, Indianapolis, Chicago, New York, Trinidad, and Puerto Rico. The brothers had more than two thousand tenants in Cincinnati alone, not counting, of course, the stream of transient guests in their hotels. By 1930 it was estimated that the only family in America which controlled more real estate than the Emerys of Cincinnati was the Astors of New York.
The Emery Candle Company, in the meantime, had weathered the age of kerosene, of gaslight and, eventually, electricity, and was turning out stearic acid, oleine, and glycerine products sold all over the world. Two other Emery companies had spun off from this—the American Oil Treating and Hardening Company, specializing in the hardening of oils, and the Twitchell Process Company, which supplied a reagent for splitting fats.
In 1866, Thomas J. Emery married twenty-two-year-old Mary Hopkins of Brooklyn. (His younger brother would remain a bachelor until fairly late in life, when a wife became necessary for dynastic reasons.) Mary’s background and upbringing were genteel. Her father, a New York clergyman named Francis Swaine Muhlenberg, was the son of General Peter Muhlenberg, a soldier-clergyman who had been a companion-at-arms of General George Washington in the Revolution, and a member of the family after whom Muhlenberg College is named. But Mr. Muhlenberg had died when Mary was quite young, and, when her mother remarried a well-to-do dry-goods merchant named Richard H. Hopkins, Mary began using her stepfather’s surname.
But her nickname was “Guppy.” No one knew where that came from, but she clearly liked it because she often signed her letters that way. And in appearance she did rather call to mind a little fish. She was small and plump, and not really pretty, though she had big, deep-set eyes and was proud of her flawless white skin and her tiny, delicate hands. She was also bookish. She spent the equivalent of her high-school years, from 1857 to 1862, studying at the Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn Heights. Packer was, in those days, a school for well-born young ladies—tuition was $12 a quarter, plus 50 cents each for “books in ink,” which made it, for its time, an expensive place. It was also unusual in that it was then the only school in New York City where a woman could receive the equivalent of a higher education—indeed, it was the only school of its sort for miles around. Vassar did not come into existence in Poughkeepsie, New York, until 1861, and Barnard was established some years after that. While others of her generation were learning to work petit point and pour tea, Mary was studying science, mathematics, Latin, German, French, and art history. Before meeting Thomas Emery, she had planned to become a schoolteacher.
When Emery brought his bride home to sober, solid Cincinnati—Serene Cincinnati, it has been called—she fitted right in. The population base of Cincinnati was largely English and German, two nationalities not known for extravagance and show. On Mary Emery’s father’s side, her ancestors were German Lutherans; on her mother’s, they were English Episcopalians. Cincinnati has never been accused of being trend-setting or avant-garde, and neither was the new Mrs. Emery. Though she was married to one of the city’s richest men, Mary Emery’s bearing was modest. Her simple coiffure was tucked carefully under a net made of her own fine hair. Instead of hats, she favored bonnets. Her dresses were high-collared, long-sleeved, long-skirted, and nearly always of black or dark purple, though she occasionally appeared in a white mohair outfit. When she ventured out, she was always black-gloved and carried a black parasol.
Edgecliffe, the house the Thomas J. Emerys built for themselves in Cincinnati, was large, but not overpowering in the sense of a Whitemarsh Hall. It contained only sixteen principal rooms, plus a kitchen, service area, and basement. Mary Emery had chosen the site—high on a bluff overlooking a wide bend in the Ohio and the Kentucky hills beyond—because of its literary overtones. Both Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Charles Dickens had visited Cincinnati, and had declared this particular hilltop view the most beautiful in the city. Edgecliffe was built of gray stone in the style of a castle on the Rhine, and a round third-floor tower faced the river and overlooked a series of balconies and terraces. From the rooftop widow’s walk a panoramic view extended for miles in all directions.
Edgecliffe was decorated and furnished with Victorian exuberance, and yet with a certain amount of Victorian restraint. The wide wrought-iron doors of the entrance led into a marble-floored central atrium with a fountain at its center, lit by a coffered skylight ceiling three stories high. In this hall stood two marble lamps of learning imported from Italy, and a statue representing the youthful Michelangelo. Up from the atrium led a wide marble staircase, culminating in a balcony which connected the rooms on the second floor. Just off the entrance hall was the music room, its walls covered in pale green silk brocade, its windows hung with green velour drapes, the room itself furnished with Louis XV and XVI pieces. Opposite was the dining room, with an elaborate, tapestry-hung fireplace, carved-plaster walls and ceiling, and four Moorish-style hanging sanctuary lamps. The furniture in this room was all hand-carved by local artisans in the Jacobean Renaissance style. Also on the main floor were a library with an Italian marble fireplace, with walls covered in red brocade, lighted by brass chandeliers and twin nine-foot-high French Renaissance torcheres; a morning room, containing a Louis XVI desk, a copy of the one used at the signing of the Treaty of Versailles; and a river-facing solarium with French doors leading into the terraces and gardens. Outbuildings included a carriage house and two hothouses, for Mary Emery was very fond of flowers.
Though the Emery house was certainly a grand one, it was by no means the grandest—or largest—house in Cincinnati. (That distinction probably belonged to the Wurlitzers, who manufactured organs.) Nor was it really designed for huge entertainments. There was no ballroom, and the dining room could accommodate sixteen at most. Mary Emery did not like to give large teas or receptions and, in fact, had little interest in becoming a great hostess. Her entertaining was limited to her long and formal Sunday dinners, served in the middle of the day, and the guests were usually close friends and family.
Because Mary missed the East and the fresh sea breezes off Brooklyn Heights, the Emerys built a second home in Newport, called Mariemont (pronounced, in the English fashion, Mary-mont.) But here again, Mariemont was austere compared with the castles which Vanderbilts, Astors, and Belmonts were building in Newport at the time. Mariemont, built in the Victorian shingle style, was far from the fashionable reaches of Bellevue Avenue, and it was not even on the waterfront—nor did the Emerys, who could certainly have afforded to do so, care to mingle or compete with the other families of the summer colony. The gardens, not the house, made Mariemont a showplace, and fourteen Portuguese gardeners were required full-time to maintain them. And so a pattern was established. For the six cold months of the year, the Emerys lived at Edgecliffe in Cincinnati, where Mary was quietly beginning to assemble her art collection. For the six warm months, the family stayed in Newport under the supervision of Sophie, Mrs. Emery’s personal maid. Travel was usually by private railroad car, but even here there was a prudent Cincinnati difference. Though the Emerys could have afforded to buy their own private car, as other rich Americans were doing, the Emerys leased theirs for the trip. It made sense, considering the size of the staff that traveled with them. A private railroad car rented for the same price as a carful of Pullman accommodations, plus a surcharge of 15 percent—and was cheaper than the cost of ownership and maintenance.
Mary Emery was to demonstrate that, to be a grande dame, it was not always necessary to be haughty, despotic, arrogant, eccentric, demanding, vain, or outrageous. As the wife of a very rich man, she was none of these things. On the contrary, she was soft-spoken, gentle, domestic and retiring, and more than a little shy—plain little Guppy. In addition to art, she loved music. She seemed to have a dread of becoming a public figure, and she set aside every Wednesday as her private day. On Wednesdays she would receive no callers, and, instead, would work in her gardens, or meditate, or read, or listen to Bach and Beethoven on her wind-up Victrola with its painted morning-glory amplifying horn.
Like so many grandes dames of the era, Mary Emery was not immune to personal tragedy. The Emerys had two children, both boys, Sheldon and Albert. Albert, the younger, was an athlete and an outdoorsman. Sheldon was scholarly, like his mother something of a bookworm, and a brilliant student. Like many introverted youths, he was also sickly, but Mary Emery loved both her sons unqualifiedly. Albert Emery was killed in 1886 at the age of eighteen in a sledding accident at St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire. Sheldon died in 1890, at twenty-three, from pneumonia, while a student at Harvard.
Sheldon’s funeral in Cincinnati was attended by a Harvard classmate and friend named Charles J. Livingood, and Mary Emery was immediately struck by what she saw as Livingood’s uncanny resemblance to his dead classmate. Subsequently she asked him if he would consider coming to work for her, and from then on, and for the rest of her life, Charles Livingood would be Mary Emery’s right-hand man, managing her business affairs and civic projects.
In 1906, Thomas J. Emery died while on a business trip in Egypt, and Livingood—now married and a father himself—became a sort of surrogate husband as well as son. Livingood’s daughter Elizabeth recalled in 1981 that, as a little girl, she had owned a coral necklace with a gold clasp fashioned in the shape of two angels’ heads. Mrs. Emery had admired the necklace and asked to see it. Fingering the clasp, she said to Elizabeth Livingood, “The names of these two angels are Albert and Sheldon.”
Elizabeth Livingood recalled that she was not particularly pleased to hear that’ her two gold angels had boys’ names. Later, of course, she realized that the death of Mrs. Emery’s two sons, followed by the death of her husband, had a lot to do with the sort of woman Mary Emery would become.
Because it was at this point, with all the menfolk in her family dead and easily the richest woman in Cincinnati, that sixty-two-year-old Mary Emery quietly—almost secretively—embarked upon her extraordinary career in philanthropy.
“I think now,” said Elizabeth Livingood, “that she may have been one of the saddest, loneliest women I’ve ever known. Though she was by nature extremely shy, she felt that somehow she had to reach out and touch the world.”