Mary Lord Harrison, Springfield’s other presidential wife

Drawing of Benjamin Harrison and Mary Lord Dimmick, Illinois State Register, April 6, 1896 (Courtesy State Journal-Register)

Mary Scott Lord Dimmick Harrison wasn’t quite the First Lady of the United States. But she came close. She wasn’t quite a Sangamon County native, either. But, again, close enough.

Mary Dimmick (1858-1948) was 37 years old in 1896, when she married former President Benjamin Harrison (1833-1901); Harrison was 62 and had been out of the White House for three years. It was the second marriage for both. The new Mrs. Harrison, in fact, was the niece of the ex-President’s first wife, Caroline “Carrie” Harrison (1832-92).

The relationship and the age difference – and perhaps the suspicion that the love affair started before the death of the first Mrs. Harrison – apparently explain hard feelings that developed between Mary Dimmick Harrison and the two grown children of Benjamin and Caroline Harrison. The breach was never healed.

Mary Lord Harrison as a young woman (findagrave.com)

But then the ex-President’s young bride had seen trouble her whole life. The Illinois State Register explained in an article (apparently republished from another periodical) on April 6, 1896, the day of the wedding.

Her father, Russell B. Lord, and her mother separated when she was a small child. Her early life was embittered by domestic tensions which were only ended when her mother took the two little girls, Lizzie and Mary, back to Indianapolis, where the grandfather of the children, Dr. Scott (John Witherspoon Scott, 1800-92), a Presbyterian preacher, lived. Shortly after this sad homecoming, Dr. Scott was called to Springfield, Ill., and there the future Mrs. Harrison grew up. …

The two sisters attended a private school in Springfield kept by a Miss Corcoran, who for years after never tired of talking of Mamie Lord as the most mischievous scholar she had ever had, but the mischief was all of a healthy kind, the result of a vigorous vitality and a childish desire to be always doing something.

It was in 1875 that Mrs. Lord and the two girls moved from Springfield to Princeton, N.J. …

Lord met her first husband, Walter Erskine Dimmick (1856-82) , in Princeton. Dimmick was a son of the attorney general of Pennsylvania, and the wedding was delayed, according  to the Register, because of family opposition.

After another effort to reconcile their parents to the match had failed, the two took matters into their own hands and eloped. Their marriage took place in October 1881, and in the following January the young husband was stricken with typhoid fever and died after a brief illness. Mrs. Dimmick was a wife less than three months.

Mary then moved to Washington, D.C., where her grandfather, Rev. Dr. Scott, was living in the White House with his daughter Carrie and the Harrison family. There, “Mrs. Dimmick figured prominently in society and the affairs of the White House,” the Register story said.

“Her life there is said to have been somewhat marred by unfortunate misunderstandings with her aunt, Mrs. Harrison, but of this little need be said.”

Wikipedia continues the saga.

Sometime after Mrs. Harrison’s death in 1892, the former president and Mrs. Dimmick fell in love and late in 1895 announced their engagement.

At age 37, she married the former president, aged 62, on April 6, 1896, at St. Thomas Protestant Episcopal Church in New York City. Harrison’s grown children from his first marriage, horrified at the news, did not attend the wedding.

The Harrisons’ marriage resulted in one daughter, Elizabeth Harrison Walker (1897-1955), a lawyer who also published an investment newsletter for women. President Harrison died when his daughter was only four years old.

Mary Lord Harrison laer in life (findagrave.com)

Mary Lord Harrison remained active in civic and political affairs after her husband’s death. She moved to New York, where during World War I she directed the entertainment bureau of the Officers Service Department of the New York War Camp Community Service. She also served for more than 25 years as treasurer of the Committee of One Hundred, a Republican woman’s organization, and she helped start the Benjamin Harrison Memorial Home in Indianapolis.

The first Harrison family, however, never reconciled themselves to their father’s second marriage. Their dispute lasted for decades and went public twice, both times when Congress was considering whether Mary Dimmick Harrison was entitled to a pension as a presidential widow.

Russell Harrison, the president’s son, torpedoed the first attempt at giving Mary a pension. The second attempt made it into Drew Pearson’s popular “Washington Merry Go-Round” column in April 1937.

Something of a family row has been stirred up by the proposal to provide a pension of $5,000 for Mary Lord Harrison, widow of the late President Benjamin Harrison. …

Surviving relatives of the former President are blunt and outspoken in opposition. Their principal point is that Mrs. Harrison was never the first lady, and is not entitled to a pension on the same grounds as Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt, Mrs.  Woodrow Wilson and Mrs. Calvin Coolidge.

With Russell Harrison dead, Rep. Theodore Peyser of New York City had revived the pension idea. “Peyser emphasizes that she did not initiate the move,” Pearson wrote. “He also says that she is now in reduced circumstances and is entitled to a pension as much as other presidential widows.”

The pension apparently was finally granted. Mary Scott Lord Dimmick Harrison died in New York City and is buried in Indianapolis.

Miss Corcoran’s School for Young Ladies and Children

The private school Mary Scott Lord attended in Springfield was taught by Mary Ann Corcoran in one of the buildings near Sixth and Adams streets that also housed the mercantile ventures of Clark Moulton Smith, a brother-in-law of Abraham Lincoln.

Corcoran (1802?-1876) advertised the school in Springfield newspapers in the late 1860s and early 1870s. The school and Corcoran apparently were well known, because the ads usually stated only that “Miss Corcoran” would be starting a new school term in September. According to an 1871 advertisement, tuition was $5 per 10-week quarter for primary students, $6 for intermediate-level pupils and $7 for senior students.

Mary Ann Corcoran, who was unmarried, apparently boarded with C.M. Smith and his wife, Ann Maria Todd Smith. She died at the Smith home.

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