New Lucy Lambert Hale pic? (picture heavy)

[Rsmyth]

I have been in contact with the gggrandaughter of Lucy and asked her to look at this thread. She just responded that the first pics are definately Harriet Lane. All the others are of Lucy except for the one that is Lizzie. The picture of Lucy with the dog belongs to the gggrandaughter (it is a tintype) and is on loan to the Woodman Institute.

[Jenny]

That's wonderful, Rsmyth! Thank you for having her check out this thread to confirm that Harriet Lane is the lady in the first pics, not Lucy!

[Gene C]

Alas, Harriet and Lucy
I knew them both so well
Lucy gave me a little ring
It made my finger swell

Alas, Harriet and Lucy
My love to Lucy I'll tell
You see she went away to Spain
And I went strait to .....

Well that's another story
We don't have time to tell
They tried to catch me in a barn
It didn't turn out well
(maybe?)

Caught dressed up just like a girl
Was our president ole Jeff
But me, I got clean away
Just ask my friend, Ray Neff

[Laurie Verge]

Boy, you are on a roll today, Gene! Nicely done.

[RJNorton]

Kudos, Gene!

[BettyO]

Fantastic, Rich!

And Gene -- wonderful poem!

Thanks!

[L Verge]

Months ago, when some of us were discussing the Lucy Hale photos, I was in touch with the director of the Woodman Institute, which is run out of the Hale home. I don't recall that he mentioned the photo with the dog, but it's nice to see another view of Lucy. Her photos in later years are so typical of fashionable ladies of the late-19th century.

[emma1231]

Richard J.S. Gutman once sold a bunch of books bearing Lucy's signature.

[Rsmyth]

The Hale family member that I have been emailing has the originals of these two pics.

[RJNorton]

Thank you to Art Loux for sending a photo of Lucy's tombstone.

[Rsmyth]

Lucy’s only marriage was to William Eaton Chandler who had first been married to Ann Caroline Gilmore, daughter of N.H. Governor Joseph Gilmore. William and Ann had three sons and then Ann gave birth to twin boys. Neither she nor the babies survived.
Lucy and William only had one child, John Parker Hale Chandler. Lucy was 44 at the time. There was a second pregnancy, but she miscarried and almost lost her own life.
I had heard somewhere that the marriage was not a loving one and that is why they are not buried together but there is possibly another reason. Lucy died in 1915 and was buried in her families plot. Her husband William went to live with his oldest son and died two years later. He was buried with his first wife. That would make total sense.
BTW – In her diaries, Lucy often talks of a little dog she was quite fond of while living in Spain. Although we do not know where the picture was taken, it may have been from then.

[Laurie Verge]

As a follow-up to our current discussions about speculations vs. documentable evidence, Bob Cook recently sent some of us a photo and description of Aquidneck Hotel, where JWB and "lady" signed the guest register. (Hopefully, Roger can help me post that e-mail).

I have never been convinced that "the lady" was Lucy Hale, even though most sources declare that it was. Even though Lucy was supposedly ahead of her time in being a liberated woman, I just don't see her being risque enough to travel and bed with Booth - especially because of her father's high profile - and the proper Victorian training that she must have had.

Any thoughts?

From Bob Cook:

CDV of the Aquidneck House hotel in Newport, RI during the Civil War. At the top of the CDV is written Aquidneck House Newport R.I. The caption underneath the photo of the hotel reads Accommodations for 125 People, with Rooms in Cottages near. Wm. Hodges Proprietor.

The hotel was one of the last known places John Wilkes Booth (with lady) stayed before he shot Abraham Lincoln at 10:15 PM on April 14th 1865. In 2008, Heritage Auctions sold the Aquidneck House guest register with Booth's signature dated April 5th (1865). Copied below is the fascinating account of Booth's stay at the Aquidneck and other pertinent facts from the Heritage Auction listing.

"J W Booth & Lady . . . Boston", written on a large folio leaf extracted from the guest register of the "AQUIDNECK HOUSE" hotel, the hostelry's name printed atop each side in ornate type, n.p. [Newport, Rhode Island], 5 April [1865]. Signatures of other guests fill both sides of the leaf, and a clerk has noted after each name the room number they were assigned and, by letter code, their time of check-in. These entries show that Booth "& Lady" were given "apartment" number 3 at "B" time (breakfast) but did not stay long, since at "L" time (luncheon) the same day their room was given to a Joseph Smith of Fort Adams. Interestingly, James Walker of Cambridge, Mass., the former president of Harvard, has signed the register only a couple of names below Booth. This piece has engendered much speculation as to the identity of Booth's "Lady", with most scholars concluding she was Lucy Hale, the daughter of abolitionist senator and one-time Presidential Candidate John P. Hale of New Hampshire, who Lincoln had just appointed American minister to Spain. His daughter's beauty and studied indifference had attracted the attentions, more or less serious, of Robert Todd Lincoln, John Hay, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., among others, but she had chosen John Wilkes Booth above them all. The couple were understood by intimates to be affianced, despite her dislike for his profession, his distaste for her familial politics, and her parents' opposition to the match. Lucy is supposed, through her father, to have supplied Booth with a pass to Lincoln's second inaugural on 4 March (which he reported to his little band of conspirators would have been an excellent chance to kill the president), and they may have attended the Inaugural Ball. On the day they visited the Aquidneck House, Booth and his lady friend took a long walk after signing in. He was despondent over the fall of Richmond, which Lincoln was visiting at that very moment. Upon returning to the hotel, Booth told the clerk his lady was not feeling well and that dinner should be sent to their room; they were gone by the time it came. Ten days later Lincoln was dead and Booth in flight. Once he, too, was dead, a heavily veiled Lucy Hale visited the Montauk with her father to view the body, from which she secured a lock of hair; her father soon took her to Spain, leaving any embarrassing questions an ocean away. Supposedly Lucy wrote Edwin Booth that she would have married John Wilkes "even at the foot of the scaffold". As it was, she wed William E. Chandler of New Hampshire, who served in the senate and as secretary of the navy, but the match seems not to have been very happy. Lucy's photo was one of five found tucked into Booth's diary when he died; she kept his letters until her death in 1915, directing in her will that they be burned.

[Rsmyth]

Laurie, here is a pic of the Aquidneck House.

I am not so sure of how pure Lucy was. This is from AB, pg 169 - Booth and Lucy "sometimes met for trysts in Baltimore, accompanied by Lucy's sister Elizabeth and John Mcullough." From my own research John and Letitia were married and had two children at the time, 15 and 5 years old. They are both John and Letitia) buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Phila.

[BettyO]

Interesting Rich and Laurie -

However I have to agree with Laurie about Lucy. I don't think she'd endanger her own reputation or her father's standing....I COULD very well be wrong, though! I feel that this lady may have been Ella Turner perhaps? Who knows....

[Laurie Verge]

I think John Wilkes Booth was like the proverbial "sailor in every port" when it came to women. As for Kauffman's mention of his and Lucy's "trysts:" again, it lacks solid documentation to me. I bet a judge would rule it hearsay.

I would say also that the word invites a variety of connotations. Holding hands in public was scandalous in 1865. We can assume that, if there was hanky-panky, it was done behind closed doors; therefore, how would either sister or John McCullough or anyone know what truly happened?