Personal Life
Edge married Lady Lee Phillips of Memphis, Tennessee on June 5, 1907. She died July 14, 1915, four days after the birth of their only child. On December 9, 1922, Edge married Camilla Sewall of Bath, Maine, the daughter of a close friend of President Warren G. Harding. Edge was forty-nine years old at the time, and his wife twenty-one. During Edge’s term as Ambassador to France, his wife was known as “the youngest ambassadress”. Walter and Camilla Edge had three children together.
In the early 1920s Edge lived in a cottage on States Avenue in Atlantic City that was near the Boardwalk. In 1923, he moved to a new beachfront home in Ventnor, New Jersey that was located between Oxford and Somerset Avenues. This was his official residence until the mid-1940s, and thereafter was used by him as a summer home.
In 1944, Edge purchased Morven, the historic Princeton, New Jersey home of Richard Stockton, from the Stockton family. The sale was subject to the condition that Morven would be given to the state of New Jersey within two years of Edge’s death. Edge transferred possession of Morven to the state in 1954, and he spent the last few years of his life living in a small house in Princeton.
Edge was an avid sportsman who enjoyed fishing and hunting, especially hunting quail. After World War I, Edge purchased land in northern Leon County, Florida with his longtime friend, Walter C. Teagle, Chairman of the Board of Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. They named the property Norias Plantation. In 1937 Edge sold his interests in Norias to Teagle and purchased the adjacent Sunny Hill Plantation, located in northern Florida near Thomasville, Georgia. Sunny Hill Plantation became Edge's winter home where he hunted and fished on the 15,000 acres (61 km2) grounds.
Edge also maintained homes in Maine and Washington, D.C.
Edge was a Presbyterian while young, becoming a member of the Pleasantville Presbyterian Church in 1889, but later was an Episcopalian.
Edge was an active supporter of the Boy Scout movement in Atlantic County. He was a founder of the Atlantic City Boy Scout Council, and was its first president, a position that he held for four years. In 1929 he donated money that the Council used to purchase Camp Edge, located in Alloway, New Jersey. Edge was also a member of numerous Atlantic City and Atlantic County civic, fraternal, social and business organizations, including the Atlantic City Hospital Association, the Atlantic City Country Club, the Atlantic City Elks Lodge, Trinity Lodge No. 79 and Masonic Belcher Lodge No. 180 of the Free and Accepted Masons, and the Atlantic County Historical Society.
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