Early Life
Born in Chillicothe, Ohio, the daughter of James Webb, a doctor, and Maria Cook-Webb, Lucy was descended from seven veterans of the American Revolution. Her father died when she was a child. With her mother, she moved to Ohio where in 1847 she met Rutherford B. Hayes. Later that year, she enrolled at Wesleyan Women’s College (now Ohio Wesleyan University) (class of 1850); she was the first first lady to have graduated from college and was a member of Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority. Hayes was by this time practicing law in Cincinnati, and the two began dating seriously. He proposed in June 1851.
Rutherford Hayes, aged 30, married Lucy Webb, aged 21, on December 30, 1852, at the home of the bride’s mother in Cincinnati, Ohio. After the wedding, performed by Dr. L.D. McCabe of Delaware, the couple honeymooned at the home of the groom’s sister and brother-in-law in Columbus, Ohio.
A vigorous opponent of slavery, Hayes contributed to her husband’s decision to abandon the Whigs for the antislavery Republican Party. During the American Civil War, she visited Hayes often in the field. While her husband was governor of Ohio, she helped establish the state Home for Soldiers’ Orphans at Xenia.
Read more about this topic: Lucy Webb Hayes
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Today’s pressures on middle-class children to grow up fast begin in early childhood. Chief among them is the pressure for early intellectual attainment, deriving from a changed perception of precocity. Several decades ago precocity was looked upon with great suspicion. The child prodigy, it was thought, turned out to be a neurotic adult; thus the phrase “early ripe, early rot!””
—David Elkind (20th century)
“Take a timber
That you shall find lies in the cellar, charred
Among the raspberries, and hew and shape it
For a doorsill or other corner piece
In a new cottage on the ancient spot.
The life is not yet all gone out of it.
And come and make your summer dwelling here....”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)