Early Life and Marriage
She was born Abigail "Abby" Greene Aldrich in Providence, Rhode Island, the daughter of the influential Senator Nelson Wilmarth Aldrich, chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, and the former Abby Pearce Truman Chapman, a distant descendant of the fourth signer of the Mayflower Compact.
Her sister, Lucy Aldrich, who was nearly completely deaf (at the time thought because of a childhood bout of scarlet fever, now believed to be the result of waardenburg syndrome, a genetic anomaly found in several generations of the Aldrich family), would be one of her closest friends throughout their lives, and is believed to have fostered Abby's interest in American folk art.
Her early education came at the hands of Quaker governesses. In 1891, aged 18, she enrolled at the Miss Abbott's School for Young Ladies in Providence, Rhode Island. While there she studied English composition and literature, French, German, art history and ancient history, gymnastics, and dancing. She graduated in 1893 and made her debut in November 1893. On June 30, 1894, she sailed for Liverpool, beginning a lifetime of extensive European and later Asian travel. The aesthetic education she gained from abroad, initially fostered by her father, helped to inform her future discernment as an art collector. This initial four-month sojourn included the countries of England, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, and France.
In the fall of 1894 she met her future husband, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the sole son and scion of the wealthy oil industrialist and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller, at a friend's house in Providence. They went through a protracted engagement, during which they were invited for a trip to Cuba in 1900, on President William McKinley's yacht. They finally married on October 9, 1901, in the major society wedding of the Gilded Age, in front of around a thousand of the elite personages of the time, at her father's summer home in Warwick Neck, Kent County, Rhode Island.
They settled in 13 West 54th Street from 1901 until 1913, when the construction of the nine-story mansion at 10 West 54th Street, the largest in New York city at the time, was completed by her husband. They resided at Number 10 until 1938, when they moved to a 40-room triplex apartment at 740 Park Avenue. They became the parents of six children, including the famed five "Rockefeller Brothers" - and established the renowned six-generation-strong business/philanthropic/banking/real estate dynasty:
- Abby Rockefeller Mauzé (November 9, 1903 – May 27, 1976)
- John Davison Rockefeller III (March 21, 1906 – July 10, 1978)
- Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller (July 8, 1908 – January 26, 1979)
- Laurance Spelman Rockefeller (May 26, 1910 – July 11, 2004)
- Winthrop Rockefeller (May 1, 1912 – February 22, 1973)
- David Rockefeller (born June 15, 1915)
Read more about this topic: Abby Aldrich Rockefeller
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early, life and/or marriage:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“In early times, before the floods swept across the world, there was life, albeit odd, as one can see from the fossils of mammoth bones, and there was the regime of Prince Metternich.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“Human contacts have been so highly valued in the past only because reading was not a common accomplishment.... The world, you must remember, is only just becoming literate. As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“It appears that ordinary men take wives because possession is not possible without marriage, and that ordinary women accept husbands because marriage is not possible without possession; with totally differing aims the method is the same on both sides.”
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)