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Courtney Hergesheimer | Dispatch photos |
Lincoln always welcome in area woman's home
Sunday, February 1, 2009 3:28 AM
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
Ties to 16th president have turned Grandview resident into history buff
Mary Todd Lincoln is shown trying to comfort her dying husband in Death-Bed of Lincoln painting. It depicts the crowded room in the Peterson House after the president was shot in the Ford's Theatre across the street in April 1865. The woman sitting next to the bed is Elizabeth Lord Dixon.
Her husband and three children aren't exactly supportive.
"They're so sick of it," said Van Deusen, Ohio's liaison to the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission. Feb. 12 is the 200th anniversary of Lincoln's birth.
"My husband likes football," Van Deusen said. "I like Lincoln." Van Deusen's Lincoln roots run deep. Her great-great-grandmother Elizabeth Lord Dixon was a close friend to Mary Todd Lincoln, who summoned her for support on the night the president was assassinated. Dixon comforted Mrs. Lincoln as the president lay on his deathbed that night in April 1865. Dixon's husband, James, was a Connecticut senator whom Lincoln often consulted.
Van Deusen's family connection doesn't stop there. During the Civil War her great-grandfather, James Clarke Welling, advised President Lincoln, as editor of the Washington newspaper the National Intelligencer. Van Deusen, 52, grew up outside Hartford, Conn., as Caroline Welling. The Dixon family's Hartford estate, Rose Mount, is now the site of the Aetna insurance headquarters. Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe were neighbors.
Caroline Van Deusen moved to Washington, D.C., from New Haven, Conn., in 1986.
"I wanted to get away from being a Welling," she said. "New Haven was kind of stodgy. When you grow up in Connecticut, everybody had a relative who fought in the Revolutionary War. It wasn't in good taste to talk about it."
But Van Deusen came full circle with her past while sitting in her Grandview Heights kitchen.
Looking through Lincoln: Illustrated Biography, she spotted John H. Littlefield's Death-Bed of Lincoln painting depicting the crowded room in the Peterson House following the shooting across the street at the Ford's Theatre.
Mary Todd Lincoln lay prostrate across the mortally wounded president. A woman sat at her side.
Something in Van Deusen's memory prompted her to call Brown University, where the picture hangs in its John Hay Library. The woman who answered the phone checked its key and told her that the woman by Mrs. Lincoln was E.L. Dixon, her great-great grandmother.
"I about fell over," Van Deusen said.
Today, she counts numerous artifacts and copies among her collection. There's a photo of the lock of Lincoln's hair given to Dixon by Mrs. Lincoln's family as a token of appreciation for her support. There's also the ticket Dixon received to attend the funeral, where she spent the entire time upstairs with Mrs. Lincoln. There's more, including a copy of Lincoln's 1862 letter to Horace Greeley emphasizing his primary intent: to save the union. Dixon was traumatized by Lincoln's death, Van Deusen said, and recounted this in two letters. One was to her sister. A year later, she wrote to O.C. Marsh, a relative and paleontologist at Yale University in New Haven.
"She said she paid reporters to keep her name out of the papers" following the assassination, Van Deusen said.Ohio's Lincoln bicentennial will kick off with a birthday party Feb. 12 at the Statehouse, Van Deusen said. Events will continue through the year, she said.
And when it's over?"I'm still going to love history and hopefully get my family's story published."
Meanwhile, her daughters might be lightening up a bit.
Elizabeth Dixon Van Deusen, 9, says she likes having a first and middle name that have been used by four of her ancestors. Taylor, 17, got a private tour of the Peterson House with her mother on the 140th anniversary of Lincoln's death and "thought that was cool."
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Sculpture jogs East Hartford's other link to Lincoln |
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By: John Karas
June 13, 2008
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With 15 Lincoln-themed sculptures installed to commemorate the Lincoln Bicentennial, Hartford and East Hartford's Riverfront could now be termed the 'Lincoln Capital of Connecticut' - if not of all New England. But few realize East Hartford has a closer, if less well known, connection with the martyred president.
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Caroline Van Deusen, a descendant of the town's venerable Brewer family and whose patriarch, Selden Brewer, built the stately home now at the corner of Main Street and Naubuc Avenue, came back to town Wednesday to attend the Lincoln Sculpture Walk inauguration ceremony.
"My great-great-grandparents were friends with the Lincolns," Van Deusen explained during an interview at the steps of Brewer house. "My great-grandfather, on my fathers' side, was Senator James Dixon. He was a Republican, and he went to Washington the same time as Lincoln [did] in '47. And he was there, as well in 1860. But more importantly, it was his wife, Elizabeth Dixon, who was friends with Mary Todd Lincoln, and you can see a picture of hers in the Alonzo Chappel painting called the 'Final Hours of Lincoln.' She comforted Mary Todd Lincoln the night of the assassination."
In fact, saying that the Dixons are "in" the painting Chappel created to memorialize all of Lincoln's friends and associates who attended the vigil at the president's deathbed, is an understatement. Not only the artist depicted Elisabeth at the center of the composition, by Lincoln's bed and at the side of his wife - evidence of the close relationship between the two families - Elisabeth's sister Mary Kinney is also shown on the front row, to the right.
And a daughter of the family is somewhere in the crowd, too.
It was an experience that left Dixon so traumatized, Van Deusen related, that she would later pay reporters to keep her name off the newspapers. And she refused to pose for Chappel when first asked.
"She was a very private individual, and she refused to sit for this painting, and so they found a picture that they already had, and they used that," she noted. "Later, she was convinced [to pose.] And there are two versions of this historical painting. One she is looking directly to the painter and her head is turned - that one is at Brown University, and the other is this one, and it's at Chicago Historical Society."
"My great-great-grandparents were friends with the Lincolns," Van Deusen explained during an interview at the steps of Brewer house. "My great-grandfather, on my fathers' side, was Senator James Dixon. He was a Republican, and he went to Washington the same time as Lincoln [did] in '47. And he was there, as well in 1860. But more importantly, it was his wife, Elizabeth Dixon, who was friends with Mary Todd Lincoln, and you can see a picture of hers in the Alonzo Chappel painting called the 'Final Hours of Lincoln.' She comforted Mary Todd Lincoln the night of the assassination."
In fact, saying that the Dixons are "in" the painting Chappel created to memorialize all of Lincoln's friends and associates who attended the vigil at the president's deathbed, is an understatement. Not only the artist depicted Elisabeth at the center of the composition, by Lincoln's bed and at the side of his wife - evidence of the close relationship between the two families - Elisabeth's sister Mary Kinney is also shown on the front row, to the right.
And a daughter of the family is somewhere in the crowd, too.
It was an experience that left Dixon so traumatized, Van Deusen related, that she would later pay reporters to keep her name off the newspapers. And she refused to pose for Chappel when first asked.
"She was a very private individual, and she refused to sit for this painting, and so they found a picture that they already had, and they used that," she noted. "Later, she was convinced [to pose.] And there are two versions of this historical painting. One she is looking directly to the painter and her head is turned - that one is at Brown University, and the other is this one, and it's at Chicago Historical Society."
What is almost unbelievable, however, is that Van Deusen has a connection with the other side of this tragedy, too.
"At that night I had a great-great-grandmother who was sitting with Mary Todd Lincoln," she related. "And I had John Wilkes Booth* hoping that his confession would be delivered to my great-grandfather, her son in law."
Van Deusen's other ancestor was James Clarke Welling, editor of the National Intelligencer, a newspaper arguing at the time that Lincoln had overstepped his Constitutional bounds, by pursuing the course he did. He was also the person Lincoln sent his famous Horace Greeley letter, where he outlined his thoughts on the war, slavery and the Constitution. Welling later married Dixon's daughter, and that's where Van Deusen's East Hartford link comes from. Her mother, Harriet Ford, was born Welling-Brewer, and her own father was a scion of the Brewer family, born and raised at the Brewer house. She used to visit her cousin there, and play, as a young kid, and remembers an entirely different town.
"I was not born here," she said, "but I played in this house, because my father's brother family still lived here - they were all in the tobacco business."
Van Deusen grew up in Simsbury, and later moved to Ohio where she now lives with her husband and three children. And it was only when she left the state, she says, that she started really appreciating the history she left behind - and she discovered the Chappel painting about which nobody in the family knew.
"Living in New England and Connecticut, everybody has a relative who was somehow connected to either Independence, or the Civil War," she said. "We were always taught not to talk about that kind of thing. It wasn't until I went to Columbus, Ohio, and my children were in school, and they were looking through history books - and I had been told that my great grandmother was there when Lincoln died. And I was looking through history books and I saw this picture. And I thought 'Oh, my God, I wonder if this is my great grandmother.' And I called the where it was, and they looked up the key, and they came back to the phone, and they said 'Her name is E.L. Dixon.' And I just about fell of my seat. No one in my family had seen this picture, and it took my children to be school children 140 years after this occurred for us to find out. "
Her Connecticut and New England connection - and the Lincoln episode - is also why she was recently appointed state liaison for Ohio on the Lincoln Bicentennial Commission that prepares the events for next year's celebration.
But what really excites her, she confided, is the new understanding about her great-great-grandmother and her world that she discovered in family papers and memorabilia, which she now transcribes and catalogs.
"She left a wonderful legacy of letters and journals," she said. "She wrote beautifully, and left it all for us."
* Current day Lincoln assassination authoritative experts believe Booth's confession letter was intended for John Coyle not Dr. James Clarke Welling. For earlier reference to Welling letter see Surratt Courier article by James O. Hall.
By ALAN FROMAN ThisWeek Staff Writer
Grandview Heights resident Caroline Van Deusen has been selected as Ohio's representative to the Governor's Council to the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission.
Van Deusen, whose great-great grandmother Elizabeth Lord Cogswell Dixon was a friend of Mary Todd Lincoln and comforted the First Lady during the night of the assassination, will participate Monday in a meeting of the council.
One of the council's main tasks is to gain passage of legislation to create a commemorative coin in 2009, the bicentennial year of Lincoln's birth.
"I'm really honored to have been selected by Gov. Taft's office to be Ohio's representative," Van Deusen said. "I'm anxious to meet the other representatives and find out more about their connection or interest in Lincoln. It should be fascinating."
Elizabeth Dixon is depicted in "The Death of Lincoln," an oil painting by Alonzo Chappel that includes 47 people who visited the room Lincoln was taken to in his final hours after being shot. She is shown sitting next to a weeping Mary Todd Lincoln, who kneels by her husband's side.
Chappel's painting enlarges the actual size of the small room in order to include all of the night's visitors.
"My family always knew my great-great grandmother had been there the night Lincoln was shot," Van Deusen said. "But it was never something that we talked a lot about."
Dixon was married to James Dixon, an anti-slavery senator from Connecticut. The Lincolns and Dixons may have met and became friends during Lincoln's single term in Congress in 1847-48. As Whig Republicans, the two men were political allies, she said.
The friendship was renewed when Lincoln returned to Washington as president, and the two wives often went together to army hospitals to visit wounded soldiers.
"As a result of the friendship, on the night his father was shot, Robert Lincoln called for Elizabeth to come to the scene to help and be at Mary's side," Van Deusen said. "His mother was hysterical, as you can imagine."
Dixon stayed with Mary Lincoln throughout the night, consoling her between visits to Lincoln's bedside, she said.
In a letter to her sister, Dixon later "described this night in vivid detail," Van Deusen said.
"At that hour, just as the day was struggling with the dim candles in the room, we went in again," Dixon wrote. "Mrs. Lincoln must have noticed a change for the moment she looked at him, she fainted and fell upon the floor. I caught her in my arms and held her to the window which was open, the rain falling heavily.
"She again seated herself by the President, kissing him and calling him every endearing name, the surgeons counting every pulsation and noting every breath gradually growing less and less," the letter continues. "Then they asked her to go into the adjoining room, and in twenty minutes came in and said, 'It is all over! The President is no more!'"
Her family did not discover the letter's existence until the 1950s, Van Deusen said. She said her interest in this ancestor was sparked after she saw Chappel's painting in an illustrated biography of Lincoln her husband gave her in 2000.
"I thought this woman in the painting seemed to look a bit like my great-great grandmother from photographs I'd seen," Van Deusen said. "I thought, wouldn't it be something if that was her, but I didn't really think that would be the case."
As a "stab in the dark" Van Deusen telephoned the John Hay Library at Brown University, which owns a copy of the Chappel painting.
When the library representative checked and told her a key on the wall near the painting identified the woman as E.L. Dixon, "I nearly dropped the phone," Van Deusen said. "I was so excited to hear this news. I just couldn't believe that my ancestor was the woman in this painting.
"This news just kind of grabbed me," she said. "I thought, this is my ancestor, and I felt it was my duty to put all of the pieces together."
In an ironic twist, the Dixon's daughter, Clementine, later married James Clarke Welling, an editor with "The National Intelligencer" newspaper and an opponent of some of the actions Lincoln took during the Civil War, including the suspension of habeus corpus.
Although her family did not talk much about their ancestors, Van Deusen said they had donated items to museums, such as the letter discussing the emancipation issue Lincoln wrote to newspaper editor Horace Greeley and a lock of Lincoln's hair Robert Lincoln gave to Dixon in gratitude for the aid she gave his mother.
Memorabilia in Van Deusen's collection is now on display on the third floor of the Columbus Library's main branch on Grant Street.
The display includes the dress Dixon wore to Lincoln's funeral and the invitation the Dixons received to the funeral and other documents. The originals are kept in a safety deposit box,
Van Deusen said. Her great-great grandmother didn't actually attend the funeral, she said. "She stayed with Mary, comforting her," Van Deusen said. "Mary was too distraught to attend the funeral service."
Van Deusen will give a presentation Wednesday, Feb. 15, sponsored by the library and the Columbus Historical Society. The event will begin at 6:30 p.m. in the Larry Black auditorium at the main branch, 96 S. Grant St.
The presentation, "The Night Lincoln Died: The Untold Story of Elizabeth Dixon," is designed "to give a woman's perspective on the events of that night," Van Deusen said.
The display of Lincoln-related materials will be shown through the rest of the month, she said.
COLUMBUS DISPATCH
"At that night I had a great-great-grandmother who was sitting with Mary Todd Lincoln," she related. "And I had John Wilkes Booth* hoping that his confession would be delivered to my great-grandfather, her son in law."
Van Deusen's other ancestor was James Clarke Welling, editor of the National Intelligencer, a newspaper arguing at the time that Lincoln had overstepped his Constitutional bounds, by pursuing the course he did. He was also the person Lincoln sent his famous Horace Greeley letter, where he outlined his thoughts on the war, slavery and the Constitution. Welling later married Dixon's daughter, and that's where Van Deusen's East Hartford link comes from. Her mother, Harriet Ford, was born Welling-Brewer, and her own father was a scion of the Brewer family, born and raised at the Brewer house. She used to visit her cousin there, and play, as a young kid, and remembers an entirely different town.
"I was not born here," she said, "but I played in this house, because my father's brother family still lived here - they were all in the tobacco business."
Van Deusen grew up in Simsbury, and later moved to Ohio where she now lives with her husband and three children. And it was only when she left the state, she says, that she started really appreciating the history she left behind - and she discovered the Chappel painting about which nobody in the family knew.
"Living in New England and Connecticut, everybody has a relative who was somehow connected to either Independence, or the Civil War," she said. "We were always taught not to talk about that kind of thing. It wasn't until I went to Columbus, Ohio, and my children were in school, and they were looking through history books - and I had been told that my great grandmother was there when Lincoln died. And I was looking through history books and I saw this picture. And I thought 'Oh, my God, I wonder if this is my great grandmother.' And I called the where it was, and they looked up the key, and they came back to the phone, and they said 'Her name is E.L. Dixon.' And I just about fell of my seat. No one in my family had seen this picture, and it took my children to be school children 140 years after this occurred for us to find out. "
Her Connecticut and New England connection - and the Lincoln episode - is also why she was recently appointed state liaison for Ohio on the Lincoln Bicentennial Commission that prepares the events for next year's celebration.
But what really excites her, she confided, is the new understanding about her great-great-grandmother and her world that she discovered in family papers and memorabilia, which she now transcribes and catalogs.
"She left a wonderful legacy of letters and journals," she said. "She wrote beautifully, and left it all for us."
* Current day Lincoln assassination authoritative experts believe Booth's confession letter was intended for John Coyle not Dr. James Clarke Welling. For earlier reference to Welling letter see Surratt Courier article by James O. Hall.
Resident named to serve on Lincoln bicentennial council
Thursday, February 9, 2006By ALAN FROMAN ThisWeek Staff Writer
Photo By Tim Norman/ThisWeek
Van Deusen, whose great-great grandmother Elizabeth Lord Cogswell Dixon was a friend of Mary Todd Lincoln and comforted the First Lady during the night of the assassination, will participate Monday in a meeting of the council.
One of the council's main tasks is to gain passage of legislation to create a commemorative coin in 2009, the bicentennial year of Lincoln's birth.
"I'm really honored to have been selected by Gov. Taft's office to be Ohio's representative," Van Deusen said. "I'm anxious to meet the other representatives and find out more about their connection or interest in Lincoln. It should be fascinating."
Elizabeth Dixon is depicted in "The Death of Lincoln," an oil painting by Alonzo Chappel that includes 47 people who visited the room Lincoln was taken to in his final hours after being shot. She is shown sitting next to a weeping Mary Todd Lincoln, who kneels by her husband's side.
Chappel's painting enlarges the actual size of the small room in order to include all of the night's visitors.
"My family always knew my great-great grandmother had been there the night Lincoln was shot," Van Deusen said. "But it was never something that we talked a lot about."
Dixon was married to James Dixon, an anti-slavery senator from Connecticut. The Lincolns and Dixons may have met and became friends during Lincoln's single term in Congress in 1847-48. As Whig Republicans, the two men were political allies, she said.
The friendship was renewed when Lincoln returned to Washington as president, and the two wives often went together to army hospitals to visit wounded soldiers.
"As a result of the friendship, on the night his father was shot, Robert Lincoln called for Elizabeth to come to the scene to help and be at Mary's side," Van Deusen said. "His mother was hysterical, as you can imagine."
Dixon stayed with Mary Lincoln throughout the night, consoling her between visits to Lincoln's bedside, she said.
In a letter to her sister, Dixon later "described this night in vivid detail," Van Deusen said.
"At that hour, just as the day was struggling with the dim candles in the room, we went in again," Dixon wrote. "Mrs. Lincoln must have noticed a change for the moment she looked at him, she fainted and fell upon the floor. I caught her in my arms and held her to the window which was open, the rain falling heavily.
"She again seated herself by the President, kissing him and calling him every endearing name, the surgeons counting every pulsation and noting every breath gradually growing less and less," the letter continues. "Then they asked her to go into the adjoining room, and in twenty minutes came in and said, 'It is all over! The President is no more!'"
Her family did not discover the letter's existence until the 1950s, Van Deusen said. She said her interest in this ancestor was sparked after she saw Chappel's painting in an illustrated biography of Lincoln her husband gave her in 2000.
"I thought this woman in the painting seemed to look a bit like my great-great grandmother from photographs I'd seen," Van Deusen said. "I thought, wouldn't it be something if that was her, but I didn't really think that would be the case."
As a "stab in the dark" Van Deusen telephoned the John Hay Library at Brown University, which owns a copy of the Chappel painting.
When the library representative checked and told her a key on the wall near the painting identified the woman as E.L. Dixon, "I nearly dropped the phone," Van Deusen said. "I was so excited to hear this news. I just couldn't believe that my ancestor was the woman in this painting.
"This news just kind of grabbed me," she said. "I thought, this is my ancestor, and I felt it was my duty to put all of the pieces together."
In an ironic twist, the Dixon's daughter, Clementine, later married James Clarke Welling, an editor with "The National Intelligencer" newspaper and an opponent of some of the actions Lincoln took during the Civil War, including the suspension of habeus corpus.
Although her family did not talk much about their ancestors, Van Deusen said they had donated items to museums, such as the letter discussing the emancipation issue Lincoln wrote to newspaper editor Horace Greeley and a lock of Lincoln's hair Robert Lincoln gave to Dixon in gratitude for the aid she gave his mother.
Memorabilia in Van Deusen's collection is now on display on the third floor of the Columbus Library's main branch on Grant Street.
The display includes the dress Dixon wore to Lincoln's funeral and the invitation the Dixons received to the funeral and other documents. The originals are kept in a safety deposit box,
Van Deusen said. Her great-great grandmother didn't actually attend the funeral, she said. "She stayed with Mary, comforting her," Van Deusen said. "Mary was too distraught to attend the funeral service."
Van Deusen will give a presentation Wednesday, Feb. 15, sponsored by the library and the Columbus Historical Society. The event will begin at 6:30 p.m. in the Larry Black auditorium at the main branch, 96 S. Grant St.
The presentation, "The Night Lincoln Died: The Untold Story of Elizabeth Dixon," is designed "to give a woman's perspective on the events of that night," Van Deusen said.
The display of Lincoln-related materials will be shown through the rest of the month, she said.
COLUMBUS DISPATCH
Ancestor's letter speaks to readers across the years
By JOE BLUNDO Columbus Dispatch Columnist
Photo By Eric Albrecht/Dispatch
