Evelyn Nesbit - Early Life

Early Life

She was born as Florence Evelyn Nesbit on December 25, 1884, in Tarentum, a small town near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her actual year of birth remains unconfirmed; her real year of birth may have been 1886. In later years, Nesbit confirmed that her mother at times added several years to her age in order to circumvent child labor laws. She was the daughter of Winfield Scott Nesbit and his wife, née Evelyn Florence McKenzie, and was of Scots-Irish ancestry. Legend has it that so beautiful was the newborn little girl that neighbors came for months after her birth to gaze at and admire her. Two years later, a son Howard was added to the family.

Nesbit had an especially close relationship with her father striving to please him with her accomplishments. Mr. Nesbit was a man who did not subscribe to the sexist prejudices harbored by many of his male contemporaries towards women. He recognized his daughter's intellectual interests and encouraged her vivacious curiosity, and innate self-confidence. Cognizant of her love of reading, he chose books for her to read and set up a small library for her pleasure. It was diverse material, fairy tales, fantasies, and uniquely included books regarded as of interest to boys only—the “pluck and luck” stories so popular in that era. When Nesbit showed an interest in music and dance, he influenced her to take lessons in those areas. Although Mr. Nesbit displayed no outward favoritism of either of his two children, Nesbit knew she was her father’s “star.”

The Nesbit family moved to Pittsburgh around 1893. By all accounts, her father, an unambitious attorney, was an affable man and a feckless manager of the family’s finances. Her mother, Evelyn Florence, was an example of the Victorian cloistered woman, content to dedicate her adult life to the domestic responsibilities of running a household and raising children. Winfield Scott Nesbit died suddenly at age forty when Nesbit was eleven years old. Nesbit, her brother and mother were left penniless. They lost their home and watched as all their possessions were auctioned off to pay outstanding debts. Mrs. Nesbit, an unworldly woman, without the experience or inner resources to navigate the world, found herself and her children in desperate circumstances. Unable to find work that would enable her to earn money using her estimable dressmaking skills, a protracted period of time followed where the family existed solely through the charity of family and friends. All three lived a nomadic existence, invariably sharing a single room in a series of boarding houses. To ease the financial burden, Nesbit's brother Howard was often sent to live with relatives or family friends for indeterminate periods of time.

Eventually, Mrs. Nesbit, again with donated funds, rented a house with the intention of running her own boarding house as a profitable business enterprise. Loath to collect the rent from the boarders herself, she handed that responsibility over to twelve-year-old Nesbit, relying on her daughter’s pre-pubescent charm, markedly in evidence, to collect money from the traveling salesmen and other transient males who constituted the establishment’s core clientele. Many years later in 1915, Nesbit described this period in her family’s misfortunes: “Mamma was always worried about the rent…it was too hard a thing for her to actually ask for every week, and it never went smoothly.” Even at such a young age, Nesbit recalled her discomfort with being the rent collector; instinctively she sensed it was somehow inappropriate. Ultimately, lacking the temperament, or savvy to make the boarding house endeavor a success, Mrs. Nesbit’s attempt to provide her family with financial stability proved a failure.

Under continuous financial distress, which showed no prospect of improvement, Mrs. Nesbit moved to Philadelphia in 1898. She had acted on the encouragement of a friend who advised her that relocation to Philadelphia could open opportunities for her employment as a seamstress. Nesbit and her brother Howard were sent to an aunt, and then transferred to a family in Allegany whose acquaintance their mother had made some years earlier.

Mrs. Nesbit obtained employment not as a seamstress, but as a sales clerk at the fabric counter of Wanamaker’s department store. She sent for her children, and subsequently both the fourteen year old Nesbit and twelve year old Howard also became Wanamaker’s employees, working twelve hour days, six days a week. It was at this time that Nesbit's modeling career began by a serendipitous encounter with an artist who was struck by the teenager’s beauty and evocative charm. The artist asked Nesbit to pose for a portrait, and after verifying the artist was a woman, Mrs. Nesbit agreed to let her daughter pose. Nesbit sat for five hours and earned the sum of one dollar. This led to introductions to other artists in the Philadelphia area, and she became the favorite model of a group of respected, reputable illustrators, portrait painters, and stained glass artisans. In later life Nesbit explained: “When I saw I could earn more money posing as an artist’s model than I could at Wanamaker’s, I gave my mother no peace until she permitted me to pose for a livelihood.”