Welcome to the virtual exhibit page for Ossining Women’s History Month 2025!
While the installation at the Ossining Public Library (53 Croton Avenue) is no longer on display, the entire exhibit will live on this blog in perpetuity.
Who are these women?
These are all remarkable women local to Ossining who made a big impact in shaping our community and our world. Some are national figures. Some have local streets, schools or parks named after them. And some just did their work quietly. But all have accomplishments that deserve to be recognized and shared.
What will you see?
This is a retooling and enlargement of last year’s exhibit presented at the Bethany Arts Community, with expanded biographies and four more fascinating women included.
These women represent all facets of American life – art, religion, science, politics, military service, activism, and philanthropy. Those with a higher profile in life offer more images and material. Others avoided the limelight (either on purpose or through circumstance) and less is known about them, but this exhibit will help uncover and celebrate all of their remarkable stories.
To learn more about each woman featured, simply click on their names below and you’ll be quickly directed to a page with their detailed biography, including photos and links to further enrich their extraordinary stories.
Enjoy!
Caroline Ranald Curvan Ossining Town Historian & Exhibit Curator
Writer Activist Abolitionist Prison reformer ***Local Connection: Matron of Mt. Pleasant Women’s Prison (aka Sing Sing Prison)***
In a society that portrayed the ideal woman as submissive, pure, and fragile, Eliza W. Farnham created her own concepts of female identity. Her theories and actions, occasionally contradictory, offered alternatives to women who felt confined by the limited roles prescribed by their culture. As Catherine M. Sedgwick, a contemporary writer and friend wrote of her “She has physical strength and endurance, sound sense and philanthropy . . . [and] the nerves to explore alone the seven circles of Dante’s Hell.”
Born in Rensselaerville, New York, Eliza Burhans’s early childhood was marked by the death of her mother and abandonment by her father. Growing up with harsh foster parents, she became a self-sufficient, quiet autodidact, reading anything and everything she could get her hands on.
At 15, an uncle would retrieve her from the foster home, reunite her with her siblings and arrange for her to go to school. By 21, she had married an idealistic Illinois lawyer, Thomas Jefferson Farnham, and set off with him to explore the American West.
Eliza would have three sons in four years, though only one would survive childhood. Thomas and Eliza would write up their observations of the West — he would become a popular travel writer of the day, and she would publish her memoir, Life in Prairie Land, in 1846.
In 1840, the Farnhams returned east and settled near Poughkeepsie, New York, where Eliza became deeply involved in the intellectual and reform movements of the day. An early feminist who believed that women were superior to men, Eliza wrote articles in local magazines against women’s suffrage, believing that women could have a much greater impact as mothers and decision makers in the home. (However, in their 1887 History of Woman Suffrage, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony would write that Eliza’s attitudes evolved and that she ultimately saw the necessity of and supported women’s suffrage.)
Eliza also became interested in prison reform at the time, and in 1844 sought and was appointed to the position of Matron of the Mt. Pleasant Female Prison, at the time infamous for its chaos, rioting and escapes, to prove that kindness was a more effective method of governance than brutality.
The Mt. Pleasant Female Prison, built in 1839, was a department of Mount Pleasant State Prison (today’s Sing Sing) Courtesy of the Ossining Historical Society and Museum
She instituted daily schooling in the prison chapel and started a small library that allowed each woman to take a book to her cell to read (making sure that there were picture books available for those who couldn’t read.) She also believed that lightness and cheer were more conducive to reformation, and placed flowerpots on all windowsills, tacked maps and pictures on the walls, and installed bright lights throughout. She spearheaded the celebration of holidays, introduced music into the prison, and began a program of positive incentive over punishment. Finally, she fought to improve the food served to the women and ended the “rule of silence”, believing that “the nearer the condition of the convict, while in prison, approximates the natural and true condition in which he should live, the more perfect will be its reformatory influence over his character.” [1]
It must be said that her methods were deeply influenced by the now-discounted “science” of phrenology which looked at the correlation between skull shape and human behavior, giving a biological basis for criminal behavior (not, as many religious people believed then, sheer, incorrigible sinfulness.) Eliza would even edit and publish an American edition of a treatise by the English phrenologist Marmaduke Blake Sampson, under the title Rationale of Crime and its Appropriate Treatment. [2]
This phrenological poster ostensibly shows how to interpret bumps on the skull to predict and understand observed behaviors. Courtesy of the Library of Congress
Although the mayhem that had plagued previous matrons was significantly reduced, Eliza’s approach was viewed as simply coddling the prisoners. This led to conflicts with several staff members, including Reverend John Luckey, the influential prison chaplain. By 1848, a change in the political landscape installed new prison leadership and she was forced to resign.
She would move to Boston, to work at the Perkins Institute for the Blind until her explorer-husband died unexpectedly while in San Francisco. Eliza went to California both to settle his estate and execute a plan assisting destitute women purchase homes in the West to achieve financial independence. Though that initiative was not successful, Eliza herself bought a ranch in Santa Cruz County, built her own house, and traveled on horseback unchaperoned, among other scandalous things she would detail in her 1856 book California, In-doors and Out.
In 1852, she entered into a stormy marriage with William Fitzpatrick, a volatile pioneer. During this period, she had a daughter, who died in infancy, worked on her California book, taught school, visited San Quentin prison, and gave public lectures.
Divorcing Fitzpatrick in 1856, she returned to New York and began work on what is arguably her most significant work, Woman and Her Era. In it, she would glorify women’s reproductive role as a creative power second only to that of God. She further contended that the discrimination women experienced and the double-standard of social expectations stemmed from an unconscious realization that females had been “created for a higher and more refined existence than the male.”[3]
So, her initial disdain for women’s equality and suffrage stemmed from her unique feminist philosophy that ironically saw women as superior due to their reproductive function, historically something that had always defined female inferiority. Thus, in her world view, why should women lower themselves to the level of men to achieve “equality”?
It’s a fascinating way to look at the world, no?
Eliza would give numerous lectures on this topic before returning to California and serving as the Matron of the Female Department of the Stockton Insane Asylum.
In 1862, she would work towards a Constitutional Amendment to abolish slavery and, in 1863, answer the call for volunteers to help nurse wounded soldiers at Gettysburg.
She died of consumption a year later, likely contracted during her Civil War hospital work.
She is buried in a Quaker cemetery in Milton, New York.
Major Publications:
Life in the Prairie Land (1846) A memoir of her time on the Illinois prairie between 1836 and 1840.
California, In-doors and Out (1856) – A chronicle of her experiences and observations in California.
My Early Days (1859) An autobiographical novel describing Farnham’s life as a foster child in a home where she was treated as a household drudge and denied the benefits of a formal education. The fictional heroine reflects Farnham’s own character as a tough, determined individual who works hard to achieve her goals, overcoming all obstacles.
Woman and Her Era (1864) Farnham’s “Organic, religious, esthetic, and historical” arguments for woman’s inherent superiority.
The Ideal Attained: being the story of two steadfast souls, and how they won their happiness and lost it not (1865) This novel’s heroine, Eleanora Bromfield, is an ideal, superior woman who tests and transforms the hero, Colonel Anderson, until he is a worthy mate who combines masculine strength with the nobility of womanhood and is ever ready to sacrifice himself to the needs of the feminine, maternal principle.
SOURCES
James, Edward T., et al., editors. Notable American Women, 1607-1950 : A Biographical Dictionary. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971.
Wilson, James Grant, et al., editors. Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography. D. Appleton & Co., 1900.
[1] NYS Senate Report, 70th Session, 1847, vol. viii, no.255, part 2, p. 62
[2]Notable American Women, 1607-1950 : A Biographical Dictionary.
Henrietta Hill Swope, c. 1950s Courtesy of Kevin Swope
Henrietta Hill Swope 1902 – 1980
Astronomer Inventor ***Local Connection: The Croft, Teatown, Spring Valley Road***
Henrietta Hill Swope was a quiet, humble, but fiercely driven scientist whose work contributed to our current understanding of the structure of our universe.
Specifically working in the fields of Cepheid variable stars and photometry, her early work showed that that the Earth and the Sun were not at the center of the Milky Way galaxy as previously believed. From there, she surveyed all the variable stars within the Milky Way, thus tracing out the structure of that galaxy, something that had never been done before. She also helped invent LORAN, and contributed to the creation of a new technique to simply and accurately determine the distance of stars and galaxies from Earth.
Born in St. Louis, MO in 1902 to Gerard and Mary Hill Swope, Henrietta came from an extraordinary family. Her father was a financier and president of General Electric, while her uncle, Herbert Bayard Swope, was a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, war correspondent and newspaper editor. Her mother was a Bryn Mawr graduate who would go on to study with the pioneering educator John Dewey, and later work for Jane Addams at Hull House in Chicago.
Henrietta became interested in astronomy as a young girl, and was taken to the Maria Mitchell Observatory on Nantucket where she heard lectures from Harvard’s Dr. Harlow Shapley and others.
Henrietta went off to Barnard College, where she majored in Mathematics and was graduated in 1925. (She said she chose Barnard because she “didn’t have any Latin. My father didn’t believe in any Latin. He thought I should spend that time on either sciences or modern languages.”[1])
Henrietta Hill Swope Barnard Class of 1925 Photo Courtesy of Kevin Swope
In 1927, though she had only taken one course in astronomy, a friend alerted her to a fellowship offering for women only sponsored by Dr. Harlow Shapley at the Harvard College Observatory (HCO). She applied and was quickly accepted. (Her initial interpretation was that he was reaching out to women specifically because he “wanted some cheap workers.” Ahem.)[2]
She became Shapley’s first assistant, and while she looked for variable stars on photographic plates taken via the HCO telescope, she earned her Master’s in astronomy from Radcliffe College in 1928.
At the Harvard College Observatory, c. 1930s Looking for variable stars Courtesy of Kevin Swope
The following year, she became famous when she identified 385 new stars, accurately revealing the composition of the Milky Way galaxy. By 1934, she was in charge of all the Harvard programs on variable stars which were central to much of the astronomical research at the time.
In 1942, she left Harvard to work at MIT in a radiation laboratory, and the following year was recruited by the US Navy to work on a secret project which would come to be known as LORAN (Long Range Aid to Navigation.) This innovative technology allowed navigators to use radio signals from multiple locations to fix a precise position. She was appointed head of LORAN Division at the Navy Hydrographic Office in Washington, DC for the duration of the World War II.
Post-WWII, she would teach astronomy at Barnard College, then relocate to California to work as a research fellow at the Mt. Wilson and Palomar Observatories, as well as teach at the California Institute of Technology (CalTech). She would visit her family’s home The Croft in Ossining a few times a year, and is remembered by a niece as being “no frills. Very sweet, otherworldly, and decidedly bluestocking, none of us knew how accomplished she was or how important her work was.”
Henrietta Swope at The Croft, c. 1930s/40s Courtesy of Kevin Swope
During this time, Swope’s research focused on determining the brightness and blinking periods of Cepheid variable stars, and the quality and precision of her work allowed other astronomers to use these stars as “celestial yardsticks” with which to rapidly measure celestial distances. Swope herself used them to determine that the distance from earth to the Andromeda galaxy is 2.2 million light-years.
She remained at the Mt. Wilson Observatory and CalTech until her retirement in 1968.
In the 1970s, she donated funds to the Carnegie Institute of Washington to aid in the development of the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile.
The Henrietta Swope Telescope in Las Campanas, Chile
The 40-inch Henrietta Swope Telescope began operation in 1971 and though Swope died in 1980, she continues to help people look to the stars.
Kathryn and Lewis Lawes attending the Joe Louis v. Max Baer fight, 1935
Kathryn Stanley Lawes 1885-1937
“The Mother of Sing Sing” ***Local Connection: The Warden’s House, Spring Street*** (Today, the clubhouse of the Hudson Point Condominiums)
Kathryn Stanley Lawes (1885 – 1937) was known as the “Mother of Sing Sing.”
Wife of Warden Lewis Lawes, the longest tenured Prison Warden in Sing Sing’s history, she arrived at Sing Sing on January 1, 1920 with her two young daughters in tow. Settling into the drafty old Warden’s house situated next to the main cellblock, she would raise her girls (and have a third) within the walls of the prison.
Sing Sing Warden’s House, c. 1910 Courtesy of the Ossining Historical Society and Museum
She would regularly go into the prison and visit with the incarcerated. And her quiet kindnesses were the stuff of legend. She would arrange for every man to get a Christmas present – noting that some had never received one in their brutal lives. She would help them write letters to their families. Her youngest daughter, Cherie, recalled how her mother once gave away a favorite dress of hers so that the daughter of one of “the boys” could wear it to attend a high school dance.
Daughter Joan Marie “Cherie” Lawes, seen with her pony just outside the gates of Sing Sing, c. 1930 Courtesy of the Ossining Historical Society and Museum
Kathryn hosted Labor Day picnics for inmates, Halloween parties for the neighborhood children, and oversaw special meals in the mess for Thanksgiving and other holidays.
Those incarnated in Sing Sing knew that they could trust her, with one quoted as saying that telling her something was “like burying it at sea.”
In 1937, the Logansport-Pharos-Tribune wrote one of the very few articles about her, saying “When a convict’s mother or near relative was dying, the convict was permitted to leave the Sing Sing walls for a final visit. On such occasions, instead of going under heavy guard, he was taken in Mrs. Lawes’ own car, often accompanied by the Warden’s wife herself.”
She was especially solicitous to those awaiting execution, doing little things to make their cells brighter, spending hours talking to them – sometimes she would even arrange for their families to stay in the Warden’s house as the execution date drew near. She also made sure that every incarcerated man (and women) had a decent burial if they had no immediate family.
Little things, perhaps, but important.
Born in 1885 in Elmira, New York, Kathryn Stanley was ambitious and smart. At 17, she took a business course and landed a job as a secretary in a paper company. It’s around that time she met Lewis Lawes, who was working as an errand boy in a neighboring office.
Kathryn Stanley in Elmira, c. 1900 Courtesy of Joan “Cherie” Lawes Jacobsen
But Lewis’ father was a “prison guard” (today the term is “Corrections Officer”) at the Elmira Prison, so it was rather natural that his son would eventually follow in his footsteps.
Kathryn and Lewis married in 1905 and started their family. Lewis quickly rose through the ranks in the New York prison system first in Elmira, then in Auburn. In 1915, he became Chief Overseer at the Hart Island reformatory, living right in the middle of the facility with Kathryn and their two infant daughters. Even then, Kathryn found time work with the boys in the reformatory, some who were as young as 10, giving many of them the first maternal attention they’d ever experienced.
Kathryn would be an essential participant in her husband’s success, helping cement his reputation as a progressive and compassionate Warden.
Still, it’s quite hard to flesh out Kathryn’s story. She gave very few interviews and those that she did give read like someone wrote them without ever talking to her. In fact, much of what we know about surfaced only after her mysterious death.
You see, one of the things that makes her story so complex and compelling is that she died at the age of 52 after falling off (or was it near?) the Bear Mountain Bridge.
The Bear Mountain Bridge, c. 1930
A Mysterious Death
On October 30, 1937, the New York Times published an article entitled “Wife of Warden Lawes Dies After a Fall. Lies Injured all Day at Bear Mountain Span.” In it, the New York State Police stated that she had “jumped or fallen” from the bridge. Though conscious when discovered by Warden Lawes, their son-in-law, and Dr. Amos Squire, she died in Ossining Hospital soon after from her injuries.
A few days later, a follow-up story was published in the Times that quoted heavily from Dr. Squire (the former Sing Sing Prison Doctor as well as Westchester County Medical Examiner). Dr. Squire had apparently gone back to investigate the scene of the accident. There, according to the article, he found “her high-heeled shoes caught between two boards of a walk” and concluded that she had gone hiking, perhaps venturing down the trail to pick wildflowers. He continued, “After falling and breaking her right leg, Mrs. Lawes evidently dragged herself about 125 feet southward along the path to the pile of rock where she was found exhausted.”
The men of Sing Sing were devastated when they heard the news of her sudden and shocking death. Eventually, in response to their entreaties, the prison gates were opened and two hundred or so “old-timers” were permitted to march up the hill to the Warden’s house to pay their last respects at her bier.
(In 1938, the New York Times noted that the “Prisoners of Sing Sing Honor Late Mrs. Lawes” with the installation of brass memorial tablet, paid for by the Mutual Welfare League, a organization of incarcerated individuals.)
Kathryn’s Influence
Fifteen years after her tragic death, Kathryn Lawes’ story continued to capture the attention of the press.
From a March 1953 feature in The Reader’s Digest “The Most Unforgettable Character I’ve Ever Met”, to the July 1956 exposé in tawdry Confidential Magazine below, Kathryn’s life (and death) remained compelling.
Even today, one can find sermons online that praise Kathryn Lawes’ generosity and compassion for those that society would rather forget.
Dr. Ruth Murray Underhill Courtesy Denver Museum Nature and Science Center
Dr. Ruth Murray Underhill 1883 – 1984
Red Cross Volunteer WWI Anthropologist Author Professor Television/Radio Host ***Local Connection: Linden Avenue***
Ruth Murray Underhill was an anthropologist known for her work with Native Americans of the Southwest. She was also a social worker, a writer, a Supervisor at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a professor, and a local television/radio host. Multi-lingual, Underhill spoke several Western languages, including O’odham and Navajo.
Underhill was born in Ossining in 1883. She grew up on Linden Avenue in the rambling Victorian home built by her father in about 1878. (The building still stands today.)
Ruth Murray Underhill and sister Margaret in front of the family home on Linden Avenue c. 1890 Courtesy of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science
The daughter of Abram S. Underhill and Anna Murray Underhill, her pedigree stretches back to one of the earliest European settlers of this country – Captain John Underhill, who arrived in 1632. And, according to a 1934 article in the Democratic Register, going even further back, the Underhills were related to a William Underhill of Stratford-upon-Avon who reportedly sold William Shakespeare his home. (It is impossible to ignore the irony that this woman, who spent much of her adult life studying and recording the language and culture of Native Americans, was directly related to Captain John Underhill, a man infamous for his brutal tactics against the Native Americans in the 1600s. He led several bloody massacres and murdered hundreds (if not thousands) of Lenape during the Dutch era in New York State.)
Ruth Underhill attended the Ossining School for Girls (located just across the street from today’s Ossining Public Library):
She would go on to study at Vassar College, graduating in 1905.
Ruth Murray Underhill, c. 1900 Courtesy of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science
But, as she wrote in her memoir An Anthropologist’s Arrival:
“I did not start with a career and a goal in mind, not even the goal of marriage – for nice girls did not know whether they would be asked or not. I pushed out blindly like a mole burrowing from instinct. My burrowings took me to strange places and now in my last hole I am trying to remember how I bumbled and tumbled from one spot to another. This is the story for those friends who wondered how I could even have started the bumbling, for many girls of my era did not.”
She spent the next decade searching for her calling – briefly serving as a social worker first in Massachusetts, then in New York City, then traveling around Europe with her family. When World War I broke out, she volunteered for the Red Cross, organizing orphanages for the children of Italian soldiers killed in battle.
Ruth Murray Underhill in Red Cross Uniform, c. 1917 Courtesy of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science
In 1919 she married Charles Crawford, but she described it as a loveless marriage on both sides that would end in divorce a decade later.
At age 46, Underhill went back to school, enrolling in a graduate program at Columbia University.
Ruth Murray Underhill c. 1930s
In her memoirs, Underhill tells the story about how she ended up studying anthropology:
“I am no longer quite sure which departments I visited before anthropology. I think they were sociology, philosophy, and economics. What I said to them in substance was: ‘I find that social work is not doing what I thought it did. I wonder if what you teach would really help me to understand these people. I want to understand the human race. How did it get into the state it is in?’
Upon asking this question of Dr. Ruth Benedict, a well-respected professor in the anthropology department, she found her answer: “You want to know about the human race? . . . Well, come here. That is what we teach.”
At the time, the chairman of Columbia’s anthropology department was Dr. Franz Boas, considered by many to be the “father of modern anthropology.” He seems to have been unusually encouraging towards female students – Margaret Mead and Zora Neale Hurston, among others, who studied with him. Both Boas and Benedict would encourage Underhill to pursue a PhD. [Fun Fact: Dr. Boas is buried in Ossining’s Dale Cemetery.]
In 1936, Boas financed field work for Underhill to go to Arizona to study the Papago (today known as the Tohono O’odham.) Out of this work came Underhill’s doctoral thesis “Social Organization of the Papago Indians” and the first published autobiography of a Native American woman, Autobiography of a Papago Woman. Living with and studying the Papago in southern Arizona for several years, she became close to Maria Chona, an elder and leader of her tribe.
Maria Chona, Elder of the Papago (Tohono O’odham) c. 1936 Courtesy of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science
Dr. Underhill peeling potatoes at her campsite in Arizona, c. 1936 Courtesy of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science
In her book, Underhill documented the rites, ceremonies and history of Chona and her tribe. Underhill even wrote about the rituals surrounding menstruation, which must have been deeply shocking for her readership at that time.
Underhill received her doctorate in 1937 and began studying Navajo culture.
Dr. Underhill with members of the Navajo nation, c. 1940s Courtesy of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science
From there, she went on to work for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, becoming Supervisor of Indian Education and helping develop curricula for Native American reservation schools.
In 1948 Underhill became a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Denver, but “found the students languid.”
Dr. Underhill in cap & gown for a University of Denver Commencement, c. 1950 Courtesy of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science
She would retire from the University just five years later and travel the world solo.
Dr. Underhill at the Rainbow Bridge in Arizona, c. 1950 Courtesy of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science
Upon returning home, she would write what is considered her seminal work, Red Man’s America – a textbook on Native American cultures and histories.
Dr. Underhill c. 1950s Courtesy of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science
On the strength of that, she was asked to host a public television program of the same name that ran from 1957 – 1962.
Dr. Ruth Murray Underhill on TV c. 1957 Filming “Red Man’s America” for KRMA-TV channel 6, an educational TV station owned and operated by the Denver Public Schools. Courtesy of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science
Underhill would stay in contact with the members of the Papago and in 1979, they honored her with the following:
“It was through your works on the Papago people that many of our young Papagos, in search of themselves, their past, their spirit have recaptured part of their identities. Your works will continue to reinforce the true identity of many more young people as well as the old. It is with this in mind that we wish to express our deep sense of appreciation.”
Playwright Author Civil Rights Activist ***Local Connection: Bridge Lane, Croton-on-Hudson***
Lorraine Hansberry was born in Chicago, IL to Carl August Hansberry, a successful real estate speculator (known as “The Kitchenette King of Chicago”) and Nannie Louise Perry, a teacher.
When Hansberry was 8, her parents purchased a house in a white neighborhood, but faced intimidation and threats from the residents who tried to force them to leave. Hansberry remembered rocks being thrown through their windows, and her mother prowling the house after midnight carrying a German Luger pistol when Carl Hansberry was away on business.
Illinois courts upheld the ongoing eviction proceedings and found that by purchasing their house, the Hansberrys had violated the “white-only” covenant of that subdivision. However, Hansberry’s father took the case all the way to the United States Supreme Court and won.
This experience would inspire Hansberry’s most famous play A Raisin in the Sun.
In 1950, Hansberry moved to New York City to pursue a career as a writer. Landing first in Harlem, she began working for Paul Robeson’s Black, radical newspaper Freedom, a monthly periodical.
At Freedom, she quickly rose through the ranks from subscription manager, receptionist, typist, copy editor to associate editor, along the way writing articles and editorials for the paper. It was during this time that she wrote one of her first theatrical pieces, a pageant for “The Freedom Negro History Festival” that would feature Paul Robeson, Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier, among other luminaries.
In 1953, she married Robert Nemiroff, a book editor, producer, and composer of the hit single “Cindy, oh Cindy.” They moved to 337 Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village and it was here, in 1957, that she wrote her semi-autobiographical play A Raisin in the Sun.
It took the producers nearly two years to raise the funds, as investors were wary of backing the first play of an unknown 26-year-old Black woman. Premiering in New Haven, Connecticut, A Raisin in the Sun opened on Broadway in March 1959 and was the first Broadway show to be written by Black woman and the first to be directed by a Black man (Lloyd Richards.) Starring Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee and Claudia McNeil, the production was nominated for four Tony Awards. The original production ran for 530 performances – a remarkable feat in those days and would make a successful transfer to the big screen in the 1961 movie written by Hansberry and starring most of the Broadway cast. Today it is a staple of high school and college curricula and is considered one of the greatest American plays of the 20th century. It continues to be produced all over the world.
After the success of A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry purchased a townhouse in Greenwich Village.
Soon after, she would purchase a house in Croton-on-Hudson. Ironically calling her Bridge Lane home, “Chitterling Heights,” it became her escape from the city, her writing studio, and a place where Black artists and progressives (such as Langston Hughes, Alex Haley, and Ruby Dee) would gather.
Lorraine Hansberry’s house on Bridge Lane, c. 2018
Hansberry’s Broadway success catapulted her into the whirlwind of popular intellectual discourse, and she used her newfound fame to speak out on things that mattered to her. She became a star speaker, dominating panels, podiums and television appearances. Her quick wit and provocative stances made her popular with the media as she could always be counted on for spirited discussion.
She was deeply involved in the Civil Rights movement, appearing at numerous events and meeting with political leaders:
Hansberry with Nina Simone at a Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee event, 1963. Courtesy of the New York Public Library
By 1963, as one of the intellectual leaders of the civil rights movement, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy would meet with her, James Baldwin, Lena Horne, Harry Belafonte and others for advice on civil rights and school desegregation initiatives. (Read a May 25, 1963 New York Times article about this meeting here.)
In 1964, Hansberry was integral in organizing and participating in one of the first fundraisers in the New York City area for the civil rights movement, held at Croton’s Temple Israel. (The 1963 Birmingham church bombings catalyzed many on the East Coast.)
She was the MC of the event, and brought in other like-minded celebrities, including Ossie Davis, James Baldwin, and Judy Collins. They raised over $11,000 for organizations like the Congress of Racial Equality – Freedom Summer voter registration project (CORE), the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the NAACP.
Some of the money raised went towards the purchase of a Ford station wagon that Freedom Riders James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were driving the night they were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in Philadelphia, Mississippi.
Unofficially separated for several years, Hansberry would divorce Robert Nemiroff in 1964, though they remained close collaborators and business partners to the end of her life. Nemiroff produced her final play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, which opened on Broadway in October 1964.
In January 1965, Hansberry would die from pancreatic cancer at the age of 34, two days after The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window closed.
She is buried in the Bethel Cemetery in Croton-on-Hudson, New York.
CODA:
“You are young, gifted, and black. In the year 1964, I, for one can think of no more dynamic combination that a person might be.”
The above quotation comes from a talk Lorraine Hansberry gave to six teenage winners of a Readers’ Digest/ United Negro College Fund writing contest. In 1968, ex-husband and literary executor Robert Nemiroff would compile many of Hansberry’s unfinished and unpublished works into an off-Broadway play called Young, Gifted and Black. This in turn would be adapted into a posthumous autobiography of the same name published in 1969.
Singer/Songwriter Nina Simone would be inspired to write and record a song with that title and in 1972, singer Aretha Franklin would release an album of the same name.
There have been numerous productions of her seminal play A Raisin in the Sun – on Broadway and off-, internationally, in regional theaters, on television and film. In 1973, a musical version of the play, called Raisin won the Tony Award for Best Musical. In 2010, playwright Bruce Norris wrote Clybourne Park which tells the story before and after the events of A Raisin in the Sun and in 2013, Kwame Kwei-Armah wrote Beneatha’s Place which imagines what happened to the character of Beneatha after the events of A Raisin in the Sun.
It is a play and a story that continue to inspire.
Yet, it took until 2013 for Lorraine Hansberry to be inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame:
Finally, today, in addition to her other accomplishments, Lorraine Hansberry is now being hailed as a figurehead of the LGBTQ movement. However, this is a little tricky, as Hansberry was not out during her lifetime. For five decades after her death, ex-husband and literary executor Robert Nemiroff restricted access to any of Hansberry’s writings that explored her sexuality. It wasn’t until 2013 that researchers were allowed to see these previously hidden articles, letters, and journal entries. Since then, Hansberry has emerged as a queer icon. Her published works from this cache, often signed only with her initials, reveal a thoughtful and progressive thinker, while her private writings offer a new perspective on this multifaceted artist.
Did you know that Emma Goldman, famous anarchist, had a country home on Allapartus Road in the early 20th century?
Do you even know who Emma Goldman was? Or what anarchy is? Don’t worry, most people I’ve tried to impress with this piece of Ossining history don’t know either.
Now, today, instead of being described as “The High Priestess of Anarchy,” Emma Goldman is more often thought of as a progressive feminist, an author, a magazine publisher, and an inspirational speaker. Her passionate advocacy for birth control, marriage reform, sexual freedom, worker’s rights, and vehement anti-war activism was extremely progressive for the time.
And in the 19th/early 20th centuries, Emma Goldman made headlines as “Red Emma” and “A Dangerous Woman.”
Believing that “Fighting injustice and exploitation is all that matters,” she tirelessly spoke out on behalf of the marginalized, the exploited and the oppressed.
Now, I have to delve into this anarchy thing before I go any further, because it’s essential to understanding what Emma Goldman was about.
Basically, anarchy (in the way that Goldman defined it) describes a society without any centralized authority. So, no rulers, government, laws — frankly, it’s a movement that I never found that interesting because it seems so irrational, so angry, and so violent. And perhaps it is on the surface, and violent acts have certainly been perpetrated in its name.
In 1893, when Goldman was imprisoned for “inciting to riot”, she gave a jailhouse interview to Nellie Bly, a reporter for The New York World, and explained why she was an anarchist and what she hoped to accomplish:
I am an Anarchist because I am an egotist. It pains me to see others suffer. I cannot bear it. Everything wrong, crime and sickness and all that, is the result of the system under which we live. Were there no money, and as a result, no capitalists, people would not be over-worked, starved and ill-housed, all of which makes them old before their time, diseases them and makes them criminals. To save a dollar the capitalists build their railroads poorly, and along comes a train, and loads of people are killed. What are their lives to him if by their sacrifice he has saved money?
In further researching this topic, I came upon this definition by the writer Rebecca Solnit: “Anarchists are idealists, believing human beings do not need authorities or the threat of violence to govern them, but are instead capable of governing themselves by cooperation, negotiation, and mutual aid.”[1]
Between Goldman and Solnit’s explanations, on paper anarchism certainly seems like a utopian ideal but really – has there ever been such an idyllic civilization? Could it ever really exist? Did Emma Goldman meet any human beings? (Ooops, my cynicism is showing.)
But she truly believed this world was possible and pursued these ideals her entire life. And for all her fight and spirit and refusal to accept the status quo, Emma Goldman was a radical optimist, a passionate believer in the essential good of the human beings, if only the jackboot of authority could be lifted from their necks.
Born in 1869 in Popelon, Lithuania, Goldman emigrated to Rochester, New York in 1885. The first job she would find was working in a sweatshop sewing men’s overcoats at a wage of $2.50 per week. (She marked this as the beginning of her advocacy for worker’s rights.)
According to her 1931 memoir Living My Life, Goldman was radicalized after the 1886 Haymarket Affair bombing.
Soon after this, Goldman would meet and fall in love with Alexander Berkman, an equally fiery anarchist and activist. In 1892, in response to the strikes in Andrew Carnegie’s steel mills in Homestead, Pennsylvania where Pinkerton guards were brought in to quell the conflict with billy clubs and bullets, Berkman decided to follow the anarchist’s playbook, deploy “targeted violence,” and murder Carnegie’s right hand man Henry Clay Frick. (The idea was that this murder would inflame the masses, causing revolution to take place, thus toppling capitalism.)
Frick survived, and Berkman served 14 years in prison for attempted murder. Goldman was initially implicated, but there was no evidence with which to charge her. However, this incident would mark her as a violent, dangerous person, one the authorities would trail and watch closely.
Knowing this, she still toured the country giving speeches, encouraging workers to “Demonstrate before the palaces of the rich; demand work. If they do not give you work, demand bread. If they deny you both, take bread.” It was after one such lecture that she was arrested and convicted for “inciting to riot.” She spent a year imprisoned on Blackwell’s (now Roosevelt) Island, New York working as an amateur nurse in the prison hospital and giving occasional interviews to sympathetic reporters.
After serving her term, she traveled to Europe for formal nursing and midwife training and would fall back on these skills throughout her life to support herself.
Ossining Connection
In 1905, a wealthy friend, Bolton Hall, purchased a small farm at the top of Allapartus Road (technically in New Castle, just outside the Ossining border) and gave it to Goldman.
Farmhouse on Allapartus Road, c. 1910 (now demolished) Courtesy of Gareth Hougham
She would come to this little farmhouse to decompress, to cook, to garden and to write. As she described it “The house was old and shaky, and there was no water on the premises. But its rugged beauty and seclusion, and the gorgeous view from the hill, made up for what was lacking in comfort.”
Alexander Berkman would join her there after his release from prison. Though they would discover that their romantic relationship was irretrievably broken by their time apart, they would remain professional colleagues for many years.
It’s around this time that Goldman found her radical periodical Mother Earth. She would serve at various times as its publisher, head writer, and editor. She attracted many of the progressive/radical writers and artists of the time, such as Floyd Dell, Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton played her in the movie Reds), Man Ray, and Margaret Sanger.
Courtesy Gutenberg.org
(Fun Fact: Croton resident Max Eastman would found his socialist magazine The Masses in 1911 and employ some of the same writers and artists. And both magazines would be shuttered in 1917 by the US Government for violating the Espionage Act for their radical anti-war/anti-conscription stances.)
In addition to putting out her monthly periodical, Goldman spent the 1910s on lecture tours speaking on topics ranging from anarchism, birth control, homosexuality to pacifism:
1915 Lecture Handbill from Portland, Oregon Courtesy of JWA.org
She would get arrested several more times for violating both the Comstock and Espionage acts – and this last one would cause her deportation to Russia in 1919, along with Alexander Berkman and around 200 others the US Government branded as communists/anarchists. She and Berkman would write the following pamphlet on Ellis Island as they awaited their boat to Russia:
Goldman died in Toronto in 1940 at the age of 70, after a series of strokes. However, even death could not silence her: Her body would be transported to Forest Park, Illinois to be buried near those who were executed for the Haymarket bombing.
Her final words, chiseled on her gravestone are: “Liberty will not descend to a people. A people must raise themselves to liberty.”
[1] Solnit, Rebecca A Paradise Built in Hell, 2010
Sojourner Truth, c. 1864 Photographer: Mathew Brady Credit: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Sojourner Truth (aka Isabella Baumfree Van Wagenen) c.1797 – 1883
Abolitionist Activist Speaker ***Local Connection: Zion Hill, Sparta*** (today the site of the Beechwood Condominium Complex off Route 9)
Sojourner Truth was born Isabella Baumfree in about 1797, to James and Elizabeth Baumfree. One of about ten children, the family was enslaved by a Col. Hardenburgh who owned a large farm in Ulster County, New York.
First, we’re able to know so much about her because in 1850 she dictated her memoirs to friend Olive Gilbert and they were published. This Book of Life would be added to and republished in 1878:
You can read it in its entirety here if you’re interested.
At the age of 9 (or so), Isabella was sold away from her family “for the sum of one hundred dollars, to one John Nealy, of Ulster County, New York; and she has an impression that in this sale she was connected with a lot of sheep.”
Sojourner Truth plaque in Ulster County
Her first language was Dutch, and she was said to speak with a Dutch accent when speaking English (which then brings into question the stylized “dees, dems and doze” accent she is often quoted as having in her famous “Ain’t I a Woman” speech. But more on that anon.)
Because at this point (she was NINE!) Isabella could only speak Dutch and the Nealys could only speak English, she was frequently whipped for her misunderstanding and confusion. Within a few years, she was again sold, this time to a tavern owner named Martinus Schryver who lived nearby in Port Ewen. She would later describe this as “a wild, out-of-door kind of life. She was expected to carry fish, to hoe corn, to bring roots and herbs from the wood for beers, go to the Strand for a gallon of molasses or liquor as the case might require . . . morally, she retrograded, as their example taught her to curse; and it was here that she took her first oath.”[3]
Within two years, Schryver sold her to a John Dumont in New Paltz, New York.
So, before she was 15, she had been taken from her family and sold as chattel to three other men.
Around the age of 18, she was “married to a fellow-slave, named Thomas, who had previously had two wives, one of whom, if not both, had been torn from him and sold far away.”[4] She would have about five children with Thomas.
Now, beginning in 1799, New York State began slowly abolishing slavery – so slowly, that it would take until 1827 for it to be completely outlawed. As described in her Narrative:
“After emancipation had been decreed by the State, some years before the time fixed for its consummation, Isabella’s master told her if she would do well, and be faithful, he would give her ‘ free papers,’ one year before she was legally free by statute. In the year 1826, she had a badly diseased hand, which greatly diminished her usefulness; but on the arrival of July 4, 1827, the time specified for her receiving her free papers, she claimed the fulfilment of her master’s promise; but he refused granting it, on account (as he alleged) of the loss he had sustained by her hand.”[5]
Furious, Isabella would sit down and spin about 100 pounds of wool before taking her infant daughter and walking away from the Dumonts early one morning (walked away, not run away. The distinction was important to Isabella.) She would eventually find herself in the home of the Van Wageners, an abolitionist, Quaker couple. When John Dumont tracked her to the Van Wageners, they offered $25 for Isabella and her infant. Dumont acquiesced, and Isabella lived with the Van Wageners (and took their name) until she was legally freed by the State of New York a year later.
Once free, Isabella Van Wagener wanted to find her young son, Peter who, at the age of five, had been sold away from Isabella by John Dumont. Now, human enslavement in New York State operated in a bit of a gray area. Post-1799, several laws were passed that would free all enslaved minors once they reached the age of 21, and specifically outlawed selling enslaved minors out of state. However, these laws were enforced only occasionally. But Isabella Baumfree was not to be trifled with and she marched down to the courthouse to file a lawsuit. Long story short, she got her son back from Alabama where he’d been sold – a remarkable feat for a woman of that era.
A page from court documents pertaining to Isabella (Baumfree) Van Wagener’s suit to regain her son, Peter, recently discovered in the NYS Archives Courtesy of the New York State Archives
It’s at this point in her life that Isabella Baumfree Van Wagener’s Ossining connection arises. It’s a very complicated story and even the Narrative doesn’t get into the particulars, but let’s just say that in 1833 she was hired to be a housekeeper for what can really be only called a cult, led by one Prophet Matthias. They all ended up in a house in Sing Sing/Scarborough called Zion Hill (still standing today as part of the Beechwood condominium complex,) living with Benjamin and Ann Folger.
We can be quite certain that she really did live here, because Benjamin Folger implicated her in the murder of one Elijah Pierson, a follower of Matthias and resident of Zion Hill, who mysteriously died after eating blackberries. But though accused of murder, Isabella went to court, sued Benjamin Folger for libel and, amazingly, won. See (former Ossining Village Historian) Miguel Hernandez’s article here for a deeper dive.
Isabella would continue working as a servant for about ten more years, before she heard the Lord call on her to preach. She changed her name to Sojourner Truth on Pentecost Sunday, 1843 and began preaching against slavery. By all accounts she was a very charismatic speaker and an inspiring singer. She would go on to dictate her memoirs, and with the proceeds, buy a house in Massachusetts.
In 1851, Sojourner Truth gave her famous “Ain’t I a Woman” speech at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention.
Today it’s believed that this is probably not at all an accurate representation of the speech Truth gave. A transcription was published at the time and is very unlike the version that has become associated with Truth. In fact, it wasn’t until 1863, at the height of the Civil War, that the version linked to above became the accepted version. (For more on this, check out the Sojourner Truth Project here.) But let’s just say the popular speech sounds pretty racially stereotyped linguistically and not at all like it came from someone who spoke with a Dutch accent.
Regardless, I think we can agree that Truth’s speech enlightened many who heard it, as did her life story.
Truth was a savvy marketer. She would sell Cartes de Visites (postcards) like the one below to support herself and fund her lecture tours. Often carrying the caption “I sell the shadow to support the substance,” these cards symbolized Truth’s struggle between self-promotion and her desire to be seen as a sophisticated and respectable free woman. Distributed at anti-slavery conventions and through mail orders, these postcards became wildly popular, enabling Truth to fully pay off her first home within three years and then purchase a second home.
In this image, the seemingly random coils of yarn on her skirt are believed to have been placed quite deliberately – if you look closely, they seem to form the shape of the east coast of the United States. This symbol reiterates Truth’s message of freedom and equality that applied to all states, both North and South. Courtesy of the Library of Congress
Truth would move to Michigan, join a Seventh Day Adventist sect there, all the while preaching about equality.
She would die in Battle Creek, MI in 1883, in the home she owned, bought with money she had earned from her writing and speeches, surrounded by her children.
Jeanne Eagels, as a war orphan in the 1918 play “Daddies,” produced by David Belasco
Jeanne Eagels 1890 – 1929
Broadway and early film star ***Local Connection: Homes on Kitchawan Road (Rt. 134) and Cedar Lane***
Okay, first, if you are under the age of 95, you might ask, who is Jeanne Eagels?
Well, she was a big Broadway and film star in the 1910s and ‘20s — in fact, one of the biggest.
And her Ossining connection is that she owned not one, but two estates here: a 30-acre estate called “Kringejan” at 1395 Kitchawan Road, and 22-acres of land and a house on Cedar Lane Road.
In fact, I’m convinced that these two photos below were taken in the gardens of Kringejan:
Photographs by Maurice Goldberg for Vanity Fair, c. 1925 Public Domain
And here’s a description of her 2nd home in Ossining, on Cedar Lane Road:
Courtesy of the Ossining Historical Society
In those days, Ossining was quite the place for the gentry to land – businessmen, bankers, writers and actors were snapping up farms and transforming them into elegant country estates. According to Eric Woodard and Tara Hanks in their biography Jeanne Eagels: A Life Revealed, Eagels fell in love with the Ossining area when she was making silent films at Thanhouser Studios in New Rochelle.
Hers was the classic “lift yourself up by your bootstraps” story that America loves: the small-town girl who comes to the big city and makes good. She started by nabbing bit parts in around 1908, and by dint of hard work, talent and luck, reached the top of her profession before her untimely death at the age of 39.
1924 found her on a list with Rockefellers, Roosevelts, Guggenheims and Harrimans when the income tax payments of Manhattan’s wealthiest were made public.
But somehow, that’s not at all how she’s remembered.
She lived most of her life on that tricky front line where she was applauded for her success while at the same time condemned for it. She was raised up and then torn down time and time again. The insatiable curiosity of the press and the public transformed almost every detail of her life into something salacious.
So, let’s try to separate the fact from fiction and give this accomplished woman her due.
Jeanne Eagels was born Amelia Eugenia Eagles in Kansas City, Missouri in 1890.
The story goes that Jean Eagles [sic] ran off with the Dubinsky Brothers Stock Company at the age of 15 (though she was really 18.) Starting off with a few small parts (and possibly by marrying one of the Dubinsky brothers) she clawed her way to the top there. At the time, stock companies were how most people living outside cities got their entertainment in the years before film and radio. And also how many actors got their starts.
These companies were constantly touring, often doing one night stands, after which the company would sleep sitting upright on chilly trains as they overnighted to the next stop. They played all sorts of venues, from legitimate theaters to church basements to tents in the nicer weather. On the rare occasion they played more than one night in a particular town, there were limitations about where they could stay because many hotels wouldn’t rent rooms to actors due to their supposedly loose morals. (And maybe because more than one had skipped out without paying.)
Sometimes they played in theaters, sometimes in tents . . .
She left the Dubinsky Brothers in 1910 (and changed her name to Jeanne Eagels) to join a tour of Jumpin’ Jupiter, landing on Broadway for three weeks in March of 1911. While the show was savaged by critics, Eagels managed to land on her feet and score a job in the chorus of The Pink Lady, a Klaw & Erlanger production.
Jeanne Eagels is third from the left in this c. 1910 photograph. Courtesy of the New York Public Library – Billy Rose Theater Division
From here on, she’d continue to work steadily and for the most influential producers on Broadway, such as Charles Frohman, David Belasco, and the Shubert brothers.
Arguably, her most famous role was as Sadie Thompson in the play Rain. Whether you know it or not, I can guarantee you’ve heard of it somehow, or at least of the character of Sadie. Based on what was at the time considered a wicked and immoral story by Somerset Maugham (written in 1921), it’s about a prostitute named Sadie Thompson and the married missionary who falls in love with her as he tries to save her soul. It was provocative, controversial and just downright shocking.
Audiences couldn’t get enough of it.
Rain first premiered on Broadway in 1923. Lee Strasberg, the father of Method Acting, called her Sadie “One of the great performances of my theater-going experience . . . An inner, almost mystic flame engulfed Eagels and it seemed as if she had been brought up to some new dimension of being.”
(Fun fact: Gloria Swanson sold her Croton-on-Hudson estate to finance the 1928 silent picture version of Rain called Sadie Thompson, which she produced and starred in. Other actors connected to Rain in later films include Joan Crawford and Rita Hayworth. And, in 2016, the Old Globe Theater in San Diego premiered a musical version also called Rain. It’s a story that continues to fascinate.)
Jeanne Eagels quickly became as big a star as you could be back then. She appeared on Broadway and took her shows on the road, often selling out when she was the star. The Cleveland News ran a story about her which noted her “Lightning energy . . . Eyes snap. Voice trills. She seizes the attention.” It goes on to praise her realism and emotionalism – attributes it seems that most actresses of the time lacked.
In 1925, Eagels secretly married Ted Coy, a famed Yale football player and supposedly the inspiration for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s character of Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby.
Ted Coy, legendary Yale football star.
But Eagels didn’t allow marriage to slow down her career. She stayed on tour with Rain until 1926, when she left to take on the role of Roxie Hart in the Maurine Dallas Watkins-penned play Chicago (in 1975, John Kander, Fred Ebb and Bob Fosse would turn it into a hit musical.) But as her star continued to ascend, her marriage with Coy became more and more volatile.
It’s at this point of her career that the legend of her temperamental nature becomes the story. Soon, the papers were running article after article about her failing marriage, health problems, mental instability and whispers of drug addictions. Ultimately, they got the better of her, and she quit Chicago.
After spending a few months in Ossining recuperating and trying to repair her marriage, she signed on to star in the play Her Cardboard Lover opposite a young Leslie Howard. Directed by an early-in-his-career George Cukor, and with a script doctored by P.G. Wodehouse, it seemed destined for success. Alas, Eagels’ reviews paled next to Leslie Howard’s.
Thus began a series of missed performances and general incidences of unprofessional behavior.
Here’s an excerpt from an article in the Milwaukee Sentinel from May 6, 1928, during the tour of Her Cardboard Lover:
Miss Eagel’s eccentricities are of long standing. Before each performance, the company and management wait anxiously to see if she will appear at all. When she does, nobody knows what she will do on the stage, and the stage manager stands ready to ring down the curtain in case of trouble.
The article goes on to describe how she simply disappeared when the show moved from Chicago to Milwaukee:
Days passed, the theatre remained dark, the company idle, the management began to tear its hair, already made gray by the erratic star. Towards the end of the week, the lady of mystery turned up with the simple explanation that “She hadn’t been feeling well.” It was too late to do anything in Milwaukee, but there was a fine advance in St. Louis. So the manager bought flowers for the star and the company took turns petting and pitying her and asking no questions.
But the newly formed Actors’ Equity Association (of which Eagels, along with her New Castle neighbor Holbrook Blinn, had been unsupportive and initially refused to join) brought her up on charges for her behavior, levied a $3,600 fine equal to two weeks’ salary (or $48,000 in 2025 dollars) and banned her from appearing on the Broadway stage for a year.
In response, Eagels just went off and made films because she could. She had made some silent movies before her stage career took off, and film producers had never stopped clamoring for her.
However, her personal demons were taking over, and after missing two weeks of shooting, she was fired from MGM’s Man, Woman and Sin, a silent film in which she was co-starring with John Gilbert. (Since she’s in the final cut, it seems like most of her scenes had been shot.) It’s also around this time the gossip columns start calling her “Gin Eagels” because she was known to drink hot gin “prescribed by her doctor to relieve persistent neuralgia.” (Let’s not forget, this is all during Prohibition.)
For the last year of her life, most of her press mentions concern her health (many hospitalizations), her divorce (in lurid detail), and her films. And, of course her tragic death.
Her last project was a 1928 film called The Letter. It’s her only talkie, and she was posthumously nominated for a Best Actress Oscar Award for her performance (it went to Mary Pickford instead.)
Here’s a link to a scene. She does not look like she is at her best here.
Sadly, the story that’s mostly remembered is the tragedy of her early death, and her erratic behavior. This was helped along by a titillating biography written in 1930 by a muckraking Chicago reporter, Edward Doherty. Called The Rain Girl: The Tragic Story of Jeanne Eagels, her death was attributed to heroin addiction and alcoholism.
Eagels’ story was still bankable in 1957 when Columbia Pictures produced a highly fabricated biopic based on the Doherty book, starring Kim Novak:
Even the New York Times was not immune to capitalizing on her death. Her 1929 obituary made sure to remind everyone of her volatility and instability. It even took the time to follow up on her cause of death, publishing an article several days later that quoted the City Toxicologist’s finding that she “died from an overdose of chloral hydrate, a nerve sedative and soporific.”
The Times would go on to cover her funeral, burial and the settlement of her estate, noting that it totaled over $88,000 (that’s $1.1 million today) and consisted of her Ossining home, nearly $12,000 in jewelry and furs, and a rare Hispano-Suiza autocar.
A 1927 Hispano-Suiza motorcar. Imagine living in Ossining when cars like that were on the road! Today such cars can sell for up to $450,000
Clearly she was troubled and likely an addict of some kind, and I’m not trying to be an apologist here for the unprofessional behavior reported by the press at the time. The fact of the matter is that she was a remarkably successful actress, and producers kept hiring her because she sold tickets and made money for them. Looking at her films today, it might be hard to see the appeal, but back then, she was the cat’s meow.
Ossining History on the Run 