Life — August 28, 1924 — page 8: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

LIFE A Woman for the Ages The Strange Story of Lucy Frances Higginbotham, Five Times First Lady of the Land HEN Lucy Higginbotham was born in 1789 in the little Ver- mont village of Whitefield, people trav- cled from place to place in drawn by horses. Electricity was prac- tically unheard of. The motion pictures were in their infancy. When she died in 1914 this simple farm girl had taken part in shaping the destinies of four nations. Lucy had no schooling. A knowl- cdge of the three R’s—Cooking, Sew- ing and Baking—was all that was decmed necessary in those days. It was not until she married John Quincy wagons From Godey's Lady's Book, 1853. MRS. HIGGINBOTHAM, WITH YOUNG CHARLES OF ANTIETAM FROM THE TERRACE OF Adams, the hired man on her father’s farm, that her education really began Lucy was then cighteen years old and showed little sign of that ravishing beauty which caused King Leopold of Belgium to abdicate his throne and go into voluntary exile. At first John Q Adams and his bride had rather a hard time of it. The arrival of triplets only complicated matters, Then came one of those lucky breaks that sometimes occur: John Quincy Adams was elected President of the United States, The change in their circumstances—for they now had what was for those days a tidy WATCHING THE BATTLE HER SUMMER HOME income—gave Lucy some leisure mo ments, and it was during this period that she invented the sewing machine an) wrote the works of Louisa M. Alcott 4 charitably draw a veil over divorce from John Quincy Some historians—notably Ban croft and MeMaster—think that An drew Jackson was not from blame. Suffice it to say that Lucy accidental discovery of Preside Adams and Jenny Lind in a Baltimore gin-mill changed the history of our country, and retarded the invention of the printing press for many generations Then came the Crimean War, Lucy, who had been successively mar ried to Presidents Tyler, Pierce, and Buchanan, and was now temporarily unattached, enlisted at once as a trained nurse under the assumed Florence Nightingale. sacrific entirely free and name of Her heroic seli at once won her the sobriquet f{ “the Swedish Nightingale” from the rough men among whom she toiled. During the Civil War Lucy was tori between devotion to her native New gland and loyalty to her husbanc Jefferson Davis, who had been electe« President of the Confederacy. Conse- quently she remained in Richmond and knitted sweaters for the soldiers. Little remains to be told. Broken and impoverished by the terrible co flict, she played the part of Little Eva in a traveling Uncle Tom's show, but indifferent success with The wonderful voice that had electrified La Scala in + Milan was already showing signs of age. On January seventeenth, nineteen fourteen, a feeble old woman lay on a cot in a dingy furnished room house on Houston Street, w York. The slatternly maid who was supposed to attend her.was attracted by a cry. She ran into the room and found the old woman sitting up in bed. “Don't fire until you sce the whites of their eyes!” she gasped, and fell back upon the bed Thus died Lucy Frances Higginbotham, of whom Anatole France said, “She was more than a mother to me. Newman Levy, The Red Badge S he brave? “T should say he is. He'll kiss one girl with the paint of another still wet on his lips.” comicbooks.com