Welcome to the fabulous, fierce and feisty women in history.
Don't forget to subscribe and please be sure to give us likes and yes we do want your comments!
It's all greatly appreciated and helps our channel to grow.
Now onto today's video, The True Life Story of Carrie Astor
In episode 6 of HBO's The Gilded Age, we get to see how Carrie Astor (played by Amy Forsyth) is
just as much under her mother's thumb as Gladys. Carrie Astor is a nickname for Caroline Astor but
since that was her mother's name as well, we will stick to calling her Carrie to avoid confusion.
So far in the show we haven't seen much of Carrie,
who is 21 years old in The Gilded Age's 1882 timeframe.
Carrie was first seen in episode 1 during a picnic party held by Mamie Fish, which also included
Larry Russell and Oscar van Rhijn. The Gilded Age episode 2 was the second time we saw Carrie after
Mrs Astor watched an excessive display of George Russell's wealth at a charity fair. In this scene,
Carrie wondered if the Russells were worth formal befriending, but her mother disregarded the idea.
Like the other young people in the show, Carrie does not hold to the idea that the new money
families should be excluded from the old money society of which Carrie is a part. We don't know
this yet, but Carrie has more than one reason to want the new money families to be accepted.
In episode 6, we are starting to get more of a sense of Carrie and her life in shall we say,
a gilded cage, when we come upon her crying at another of Mamie Fish's party in the
scene where Larry and Gladys Russell approach Carrie as she wipes away tears from her face.
In conversation with Gladys, Carrie reveals that her tears are over a man but the man's
name is not spoken. One thing we can be sure of at this point is that Carrie's love interest
is not Larry Russell as some fans had hoped. If he were the man Carrie spoke of,
then he would linger longer by her side rather than go off to meet other friends at the party.
Instead, Carrie and Gladys commiserate with one another over the fact that
they both have domineering mothers whose plans for
their daughters have nothing to do with what their daughter's may feel or want.
Now, we can look into history and get a glimpse of what is ahead in Carrie Astor's storyline.
If the TV production follows history accurately,
then Carrie Astor will marry the man she is crying over but not just yet.
It will take a couple of years before Carrie Astor would marry a man who would be from a
new money family. A man her mother is entirely against because he is the son of a Southerner
and Civil War profiteer whose reputation was as tainted as all the robber barons of that era.
His name was Marshall Orme Wilson and they married on November 18, 1884 at
the Astor mansion but not without some effort on Carrie's part to get her mother's approval.
In the book, John Jacob Astor: America's First Multimillionaire by Axel Madsen, it is said
that Carrie "starved herself into bulimia until her mother gave in and agreed to the marriage."
Another account of Mrs Astor's attempts to stop Carrie from marrying new money said that
Carrie Astor begged and begged her mother, so Mrs. Astor came up with a devious plan.
She said, "Okay. You can get married. If they can match your $500,000 dowry."
Mrs Astor was sure that would never happen since the Wilson family patriarch was said
to have lost a great portion of his fortune. What was once a multi-million dollar empire
was reduced to around a million dollars when Mrs Astor made her conditions known.
So Who Were These Wilson's of New York's Gilded Age?
At the time of Carrie's growing love interest in Marshall Orme Wilson,
he was a banker in his father's firm of R. T. Wilson & Co. which would seem,
on the surface, respectable enough to warrant entry into old new york society.
R.T.Wilson, the patriarch of the nouveau riche Wilson family, was the son of a Scottish tanner.
Before he made his riches, R.T. was born in Georgia and spent time as a traveling
salesman until the Civil War brought him the opportunity to strike it rich.
First serving on the staff of the Commissary-General of the Confederate
States of America., Wilson was later sent to London by the Confederate Government to dispose
of the cotton crop. At the end of the war, he was said to have returned to America, $500,000 richer.
After the war ended, Wilson began buying up defunct railroads. He moved to New York City
and purchased a mansion at five eleven 5th Avenue that placed him squarely in the sphere of Old New
York society. Wilson then opened the banking firm of Wilson Galloway & Co., which would
later become R. T. Wilson & Company which brings us to R T Wilson's son, Marshall Orme Wilson.
Marshall Wilson graduated from Columbia University in 1882 before joining his father's firm as a
banker. Two years later after his marriage to Carrie, the couple moved into a new home at 414
Fifth Avenue purchased and furnished by her father for them as a wedding present.
After that Carrie and Marshall built a mansion that was completed in 1903
at 3 East 64th Street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City.
So, if the HBO show The Gilded Age follows history, we can expect that Carrie will indeed
marry the man she loves sooner or later. From history, we know that Carrie married Marshall
Orme Wilson in the Astor mansion on the afternoon of November 18, 1884. The New York Times called
it the principal social event of the season and reported that the ceremony was witnessed
by hundreds in the art gallery ballroom and nearly a thousand more at the reception.
The Times article spent copious column space describing room after room of floral decorations
including such detail as the chandeliers being covered in masses of large pink roses,
rose foliage, and Japanese ferns.
It was reported that Carrie's gown was bedecked with diamonds and orange blossoms
acompained by a $75,000 necklace draped across the bride’s bodice. Every opulent gift was on display
for everyone to admire and not a prominent name was missing from the assembled guests.
Carrie's Legacy
In the fall of 1906, Carrie’s mother showed signs of a nervous breakdown.
After that, her condition continued to decline and she was rarely seen
in public. Two years later on October 30, 1908 Carrie Wilson was summoned to her mother's house
nearby where where Mrs Astor had slipped into unconsciousness. Caroline Schermerhorn Astor
died at 7:30 that evening, with Carrie as the only family member at her side.
The reign of the old money was ending. The turn of the century brought changes even though the
matrons of high society did their best to hold on but as far as Carrie was concerned,
she was not interested.
Unlike her mother, Carrie's lavish entertainments were used in the service of charitable causes.
In the new mansion that she and her husband had built at 3 East 64th Street in Manhattan,
Carrie would hold creative and elaborate functions such as the one in January 1913.
The event was for the support of a district nurse in the babies' ward of the New York Post
Graduate Medical School and Hospital. On that day, Carrie presented entertainment from recruited
wealthy socialites and their children who posed as reproductions of paintings by famous masters.
When World War I broke out, Carrie turned her
focus to war causes including an event for the benefit of a group of students
and their families attending the National School of Fine Arts in Paris.
A stage was constructed in the Wilson’s ballroom. The first part of the program was
a concert and in the second part, there was a theater presentation of a one-act comedy.
In January 1919, Carrie had some of her friends over on a Thursday afternoon to
hear a captain of the British army tell of his experiences in German prison camps
in which he was confined fourteen months.
After the war, Carrie became interested in the construction of the Cathedral of St. John the
Divine. She brought architect Ralph Adams Cram to her house to give a lecture talking about the
cathedral. The construction project became one of Carrie Wilson’s favored causes and she would host
the sewing class of the Fresh Air Association of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine for years.
Marshall Orme Wilson died in their house on East 64th Street on April 1st, 1926.
Carrie continued to live in the house alone with her staff,
ultimately resuming her charity teas and entertainments. Among her later interests
was the New York Women’s League for Animals which met regularly in the Wilson mansion.
Carrie lived another twenty-two years after her husband's death and died on September 13th,
1948 at the age of 87 at the home of her son Richard at 1 Sutton Place.
At the time of her death, she was the last surviving child of her parents. After a funeral
at Trinity Church, she was buried alongside her husband at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.