Friday 16 September 2022

1522) Frances Clara Cleveland

Frances Clara Cleveland Preston (born Frank Clara Folsom; 1864 – 1947). First Lady of the United States from 1886 to 1889, and again from 1893 to 1897 as the wife of President Grover Cleveland. Becoming First Lady at age 21, she remains the youngest wife of a sitting president.

She was originally given the first name Frank, in honor of an uncle, but later decided to adopt the feminine variant Frances. A long-time close friend of her father, Oscar Folsom, Grover Cleveland met his future wife when she was an infant and he was twenty-seven years old. Cleveland proposed marriage to Frances in the spring of 1885 and they were married the following year, in the Blue Room of the White House. Cleveland was aged forty-nine, Frances, twenty-one.
The Clevelands had five children: Ruth (1891–1904), Esther (1893–1980), Marion (1895–1977), Richard (1897–1974), and Francis (1903–1995). British philosopher Philippa Foot was their granddaughter through Esther.
After her husband's death in 1908, Frances Cleveland remained in Princeton, New Jersey. In 1913, at the age of forty-eight, she married Thomas J. Preston Jr., a professor of archaeology at her alma mater, Wells College. She was the first presidential widow to remarry.
 
- "First came her coif, lovely auburn hair swept up from the forehead..." https://www.washingtonpost.com/.../a4a9bdf4-dd4b-11e3...
 

 

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