Lena and Her Circle
                1862 - 1935

 

The Journey: Discovering Lena

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The search for Lena began in 1958 when I was in high school staying at our summer cottage in the Berkshires.  I can still remember exactly where I was standing when I happened to open an old Funk & Wagnalls Dictionary that was on a bookshelf.  My great-grandfather’s name, “Louis Stoiber,” was imprinted in the lower right-hand corner of the cover and directly across from the frontispiece was pasted part of a news clipping whose bold headline got my attention.  “Recluse Bequeaths $608,000 – Will of Ex-Denver Woman Disposes of Mining Riches.”  According to the newspaper, her name was “Mrs. Ellis”, and she had died in Stresa, Italy, on March 26, 1935. When I asked my mother if she knew what the clipping was about, she responded, “Oh that was Aunt Lena.”  And so the journey began.   

 

Louis had lived Lena’s story with her for many years, and I will be forever grateful to him for saving the correspondence that he did, and to my grandfather and father for continuing to preserve it.  Otherwise, the true story of this remarkable woman could never have been told.  I came to realize over the years that biographies are often based on copious diaries or correspondence that has been saved in an archive somewhere and are easily accessible to scholars.  This journey was very different.  I had a handful of stories about her that had been passed down the family that contained some good leads but also embellishments and misinformation.  I didn’t even have the correct name of her first husband when I began.  But slowly a picture began to emerge of her life -- full of adventure, wealth, and love, but also meanness, pain, and anger.  My family had few memories to share except to say that Louis had stood by her and my great, great uncle Edward when the Stoiber family was torn apart by her actions, and that he had remained supportive of her for thirty years after his brother’s death.  Although he died soon after her estate was settled, the generous bequest he received from his sister-in-law enabled his sons to lead very comfortable lives; and his grandson, my father, was enabled to travel all over the world with his wife, his two children, and his grandchildren, on a college professor’s meagre salary. 

 

But the inheritance Lena left to my family should not be measured in dollars and cents or even in the things it permitted us to do.  It is, rather, in the stories of her life and the journey to learn of them that have filled our imaginations, stretched our horizons, and inspired us in a million different ways.  

 

After reading the clipping about her death, my next encounter with Lena was when I was traveling in Europe with my family two years later.  My father had purchased a yellow Opel station wagon in Germany that allowed us to tour all over the continent on our own terms.  While we were in Northern Italy, we drove to Stresa just to see where she had spent her last years.  On the way into town, we pulled into a parking area in order to see beautiful Lake Maggiore below us. There happened to be a small Italian man parked next to us and my father went over to him to ask if he knew where a Mrs. Stoiber might have lived decades earlier.  He immediately exclaimed, “Ah, The Ameri-can”!  He pointed to her villa, which had since become a hotel, The Domus, and told us that his father had been a driver for Mrs. Stoiber and that he used to take her dogs for rides.  We proceeded to visit the hotel where we were greeted by the manager who showed us around.  My most vivid memory of it is the view from the terrace off the main living room that took in the lake and the snow-capped Alps behind.   My brother remembers a large brass bed, supposedly Lena’s, that they displayed in the foyer, saying they wanted their guests to understand how grand the villa had been thirty years ago when she had owned and lived in it.  It was a wonderful visit.

 

And there, the journey stood until ten years later when I was married, with two little boys, and teaching at Vassar College.  One morning Greg, said to me, “Why don’t you stop talking about her and start researching her.”  That was all it took. I went to the Vassar library and started looking.  Within an hour’s time I had discovered my first picture of her in a gigantic book entitled, The History of the Woman’s Club Movement.  Accompanying the photo was a brief description of the club of which she was president in Silverton, Colorado, and two photos on the facing page showing her silver mine and the mansion where she lived.  Then, I found her sister’s picture in the same book.  It seemed I was on a roll.  Little did I realize then that I had begun a lifetime of searching for clues and information about her.  My father gave me some miscellaneous papers related to her life that had been saved and a few letters she had written to my grandfather, but at the time they were more confusing than helpful.   

 

As my professional life evolved, I found myself grabbing opportunities here and there to learn something new about her.  There were no computers, so no opportunities to do research online.  We moved to Wisconsin shortly after my discovery at Vassar and I took advantage of the local library, the Wisconsin Historical Society Library in Madison, and the Family History Center nearby where I could order microfilm from Salt Lake City.  I also wrote a few letters of inquiry to libraries in Seattle and Denver, and I was fortunate to receive some information back.  But in those days before email and Google, correspondence was not easy and research slow.  I remember once when Greg and I had just landed in Minneapolis for a conference and were driving in a rental car to our hotel, he turned to me and said, “Do you want to go straight to the hotel or go to the cemetery first?”  Before our trip, I had never said a word about wanting to visit Lakewood Cemetery where Lena’s parents and half-sister and her family are buried, but he knew.  We went to the cemetery first.

 

In Wisconsin, we were encouraged by our new friends to try camping.  Before we knew it, the four of us were exploring the mountains of Colorado and tracking down Lena at the same time.  From the time they were six and eight years old the boys knew her name and loved the days when we were “treasure hunting” for things we could learn about her during the time she had lived there.  One of the first such adventures was taking the famous historic narrow-gauge railroad from Durango to Silverton which Lena had taken many times – spring, fall, summer, and winter.  Cut into the San Juan mountains, high above the Animas River below, it was not a trip for the faint of heart, but it did help us begin to understand her decidedly Western temperament – bold, self-reliant, adventuresome.  Likewise, when it snowed on our campsite in June at 11,000 feet above sea level, we began to understand the nature of the place she and Edward had called home.

 

When we arrived in Denver at the end of that trip, we drove out to Fairmount Cemetery to see where Lena and my great, great uncle Edward Stoiber, were buried.  We stopped at the front desk for a map in order to locate their tombstones and the receptionist said, “Just a minute, let me get the vice president.  He has a key.”  He led us to an imposing granite mausoleum that he claimed was, in its time, one of the most beautiful in the United States. And when he opened the heavy bronze doors, we looked in at a shining white marble interior, with two large, very simple, sarcophagi and an altar.  On each side of the alter were two large marble busts, one of Lena and one of Edward.  Suddenly, they had stepped from behind hundreds of stories and handed-down history, and become real.  The Hill family monument that was located adjacent to the mausoleum was far less ostentatious or prominent.  For eternity, she had managed to upstage Alice and Louise, as well as her other society friends from her Denver days who were buried nearby.  

 

We also stopped in the city at her mansion on Cheeseman Park.  It had a bronze plaque on the pillar next to the entrance gate which identified the home as having originally been called “Stoiberhof” and informed the public that it was on the National Register of Historic Places.  A few years later my brother, Philip, arranged for us to visit the home, which was being put up for sale by the current owner who had been the director of the Denver Museum of Art.  He was out of town at the time, but a gracious colleague gave us a tour.  I particularly remember the barber’s chair, the vault, the bowling alley, and the swimming pool in the basement.  

 

One of the most prized pieces of the “Lena Collection” I have amassed over the years is a book about Stoiberhof written by the Verner Reeds' younger son, Joseph, entitled “A Shower of Gold.”  On one of my trips to Denver, someone put me in touch with Stan Olinger, an archivist at the Colorado Historical Society, who was at that time working on the Reed family collection of papers at the University of Denver.  He said he recalled that while he was at the Historical Society, he had personally watched Joseph Reed’s wife take her husband’s book off the shelf and walk out of the building with it.  Apparently, she did not like some of Joseph’s descriptions of her father-in-law, Verner. Mr. Olinger, volunteered to contact the family and to my great surprise, one day I received in the mail a brand new copy of the book with a business card and an inscription from Joseph Verner Reed, Jr. who had been Under-Secretary General of the United Nations, and was living in Greenwich, Connecticut.  It reads, “With good wishes from the grandson of V.Z.R. and the beloved son of J.V.R.”

 

I have a few photographic images of Lena and a sketch of her that was done from a photograph.   But apparently she was not eager to have pictures taken of her, even when done by a professional studio.  The best I have -- a press photo that had been used in the Seattle newspapers to announce her marriages and death – came to me on eBay.  For years I have been watching for items related to Lena that come up for auction.  They have been few and far between, but remarkable in their historic value. As much as she avoided portraits of herself, she loved having the interiors of two of her magnificent homes, Waldheim and Stoiberhof, taken by Charles S. Price. Some of those taken of Stoiberhof are in the Denver Public Library Western Collection and have been included in a number of books that have been written about the home.  But I had never seen any professional photos of the interior rooms of Waldheim until a set – again taken by Price -- landed on my lap from eBay.  They have Lena’s handwriting on the front of each and typewritten descriptions on the back by someone who had once worked there.  I found a pair of silver candlesticks from an antique dealer at the Pierre Hotel in New York.  Each has the name “L. A. Stoiber” and a family crest engraved on it.  They stand on the mantel in our home in Baltimore today. And, most recently, I was able to purchase the Otto Mears Silverton Railroad Pass that was given to Edward in about 1895 and has his name inscribed on it. 

 

I have also searched for husbands Rood and Ellis on eBay and, to my great good fortune, I was able to purchase a beautiful silver box, one of fewer than a dozen that were ever made commemorating the launching of the Horace C. Henry in Glasgow on June 8, 1909.  In some respects, the most remarkable of all my e-Bay was a leather-bound book I entitled, The City That Made Itself, by Welford Beaton, published in Seattle in 1914. Only 300 numbered copies were ever published, and this was Number 31.  The inscription on the frontispiece reads, “Saturday Jan 30 1915 1932 2nd Ave Seattle Washington, Mrs. Hugh Roscoe Rood” – all in Lena’s distinctive handwriting.  But that was just the beginning.  When I inquired about how the seller had ended up owning the book, he explained that it had been part of a lot that he had bought many years before that had been rescued from a fire, and he had had it rebound in leather with gold lettering.  Opening up to the dedication page I found in a librarian’s handwriting, “gift of Mr. Louis Stoiber 2/39” and on the final page of the book the stamp, in red ink, “Free Public Library, Newark, N. J.,” where my great grandfather had been living at the time.  In fact, he made the gift to the library the year before he died.  A few years later the building and its contents had been ravaged by a fire but the book somehow survived.  He could never have imagined the journey it subsequently took to arrive at his great-granddaughter’s doorstep in Baltimore many decades later. I also found two special items related to Gus and Laura Stoiber on eBay.  One is a humidor with a sculpture of a whippet on top.  Laura was a dog lover who won prizes at dog shows in Denver and in New York, and may even have owned whippets at one time.  The other is a postcard of the Iowa-Tiger Mine in Silverton that I had never seen before, so I bought it.  When it arrived, I was stunned to find that the card had been written by Laurs’s daughter Helen Stoiber to her cousin, Alice McIlwee.  

 

Several treasured possessions did manage to pass all the way down the Stoiber line to me.  One is a gold pocket watch from Tiffany and Company with Edward’s initials engraved on the cover.  The other is a loving cup, made of silver from Lena and Edward’s mine.  Our family has a tradition of filling it with flowers at weddings and funerals.  We also have a few intact pieces of the gold enameled Japanese tea set that Edward sent to Lena as a gift while on his trip around the world.  Although she never used it – in fact, said that she never looked at it -- my great grandfather and grandmother certainly did, as the cups in the set show signs of frequent use. 

 

I am forever grateful to our sons, Andrew and Erik, who spent many of their childhood days following Lena’s trail with extraordinary patience and perhaps, some pride.  Greg and I have visited many of the cities and places where Lena lived, including Minneapolis, Litchfield, Denver, Silverton, Pueblo, Grand Junction, Hawaii, Seattle, Charleston, Mare Island, Fayetteville, Mesa Verde National Park, San Diego, Paris, Stresa, and London.  Her childhood home is now the location of Minneapolis City Center; the Webster farm in Litchfield still stands beside the road to Chestnut Hill.  The archivist in Grand Junction shared an actual photograph of the home where she had lived with Fred and Major Cobb.  In Silverton one can still see the “Green House” on Reese Street and the much more elaborate home of Gus and Laura a few houses away.  Sadly, nothing is left of Waldheim to see except its location and the enormous Silver Lake Mill’s terraces marching up the gulch up from the river.  With my brother, Phil, who lives in Seattle, we visited The Moore Theater, and were able to get inside to see the elaborate balcony and all the electric lights that remain for theatergoers to still enjoy today.  The Perry Hotel is gone and only hints remain of the beautiful murals in the lobby of the New Washington Hotel, which is now an office building.  One year Phil also took us to a traveling exhibit of artifacts from the Titanic on display in Seattle. That is where we encountered the only photograph we have ever seen of Hugh Rood.  

 

I have always enjoyed dining and staying at the Brown Palace Hotel when I am in Denver and searching through the registers they hold in their archives.  (My son and his wife actually gave me a bath robe from the Brown Palace for my 50th birthday.  The hotel had not been inclined to sell one until they heard the story). The M. D. Thatcher residence in Pueblo no longer exists, but his brother’s house, “Rosemount” still does as a museum.   Greg and I were able to tour it and get a much better picture of Lena and Edward’s friendship with Mahlon and Luna Thatcher as a result.

 

On Mare Island the historian very generously shared with us information related to the ordnance explosion in 1917.  We enjoyed the ambiance of the palm court of the Palace Hotel in San Francisco and the rooms open to the public at the Del.  Unlike the Brown Palace, neither of these hotels seemed to know where we might find their old registers, but at least we had the local papers to find some information, which helped in our search.  

 

Where the Charleston Naval Training Camp once stood, there is now a memorial park honoring the men’s service to our country.  It is a beautiful setting, and we were very surprised to see etched into the memorial stone, a picture of Lena and Mark handing out medals after a sporting event at the base.  It captures a moment in time that could never happen again, and it illustrates a happy, fleeting moment in a marriage that soon went terribly wrong.

 

Greg and I visited Stresa in 1989 and saw the villa, which appeared to be in pristine condition and had been converted from a hotel into condominium apartments.  We stayed at the Hotel Bellagio in Lena’s honor, where we had learned she liked to entertain her guests.  

 

In Paris, we strolled on the Champs-Élysées past number 93 and felt how close their apartment was to the Arch de Triumphe.  The building is now being used for offices, but we were able to get a glimpse of the grand staircase that would have taken the Stoibers and their guests to their sumptuous apartment with its view of the Arch, just a few blocks away.  Fortunately, a few photographs of the interior and of their balcony are archived at the Denver Public Library.  Not surprisingly, the furnishings resemble those of Stoiberhof in many ways.

 

Although we have travelled to London and Hawaii, we have not yet visited the locations there that are unique to Lena’s story, including the Ritz Carleton and the Moana hotels.  Perhaps, some day.  As our friends have said, facetiously, you can always write a second edition. 

 

I only ever met two individuals who had met Lena in person.  All the other memories are from people who had known her but had passed away before we started this journey.  The one was my great uncle Arthur Stoiber, Lena’s grandnephew.  When I asked him in 1976 if he had ever met Lena, he said he had, but the only recollection he would share with me was, “She was a domineering woman.”  That was it.  I never broached the subject with him again, although I wish now that I had pushed him harder.  

 

The other person I met was Esther Allen Jobes Holmes, the granddaughter of Lena’s sister, Etta.  My father had mentioned once that Lena had written to him from Italy when he was a student at Dartmouth and told him that she had a niece who was attending a women’s junior college outside Boston. She hoped that he would go down to the city and take her out -- which he did.  As I recall, he got the name of the college wrong, but with some sleuthing I was able to figure out which one it was, and someone in the alumnae office graciously gave me Esther’s current name and address in Walnut Creek, California.  I am quite sure that would be prohibited today.  In any case, when I contacted her, she said she was eager to meet me, and that she had always had a fascination with the stories about her great aunt.  We corresponded for quite a while, and then she wrote that she was sailing on a cruise around the world in spring of 1970 and would be arriving in New York Harbor on a certain date at a certain time.  We were living close by, in Poughkeepsie at the time.  When I called the docks, a young man told me not to bother to come at the appointed morning arrival time since the ships were always late and didn’t dock until the afternoon.  When I arrived in the afternoon, everyone was gone.  Somehow, I managed to track Esther down and met her at the Regency Hotel where she was staying.  I am not sure I would have been as gracious and forgiving as she was.  I still think of how foolish it was of me to have listened to the recommendation.  But we had a beautiful lunch together at the hotel and shared our stories.  As it turned out, she had visited Lena at Villa Vignolo with her grandmother, just a few years before they both died.  I think she had found her to be a very strange person, indeed.  And, if first impressions count, she had never gotten over the fact that when Lena arrived to greet them, she had appeared to be a ghost, all dressed from head to toe in beige.  The heartbreaking part of the luncheon in New York was that Esther confessed that she had recently given all of Lena’s letters to her daughter who had promptly thrown out all the “vitriolic” ones.  She said she would have given them all to me if she had known of me and my interest at the time.  Although I later tried to obtain them from her daughter, I never succeeded.  Perhaps this story would have been written somewhat differently if we had had that information. 

 

Thanks to the San Juan County Historical Society Archives and the generous help of Archivist Casey Carroll, we have been able to see photos of Gus and Laura’s family while they lived in Silverton, and photos taken when the Silver Lake Mill burned in 1906 that we would otherwise never would have seen.  Both the archivists at History Colorado and the Denver Public Library have been extremely generous over the years, leading me to manuscript collections I might otherwise never have found.  Years ago, the Denver Public Library sent me photocopies of articles about Edward and Lena from Colorado newspapers in their collection.  But they were produced with such strong chemicals at the time that most of the originals have faded or crumbled in the decades since.  

Fortunately, they stapled typed citations to each photocopy, many of which can now be accessed online.  And I still have the notecards prepared for me fifty years ago by Jai Balkisoon, a student of mine at Vassar who used Soundex to look up names in the National Archives.

 

Christine Stoiber Fahlund

February 11, 2022