sixty-eight years old, received her $5,000 in cash, plus accrued interest. Pardon Gray, the old livery driver who had driven poor withered Sylvia on that shaded seven-mile ride from New Bedford to Round Hill, began to receive his modest stipend from the $10,000 placed in trust for him. Widows around town, those who lived to see thewill enacted, saw their lives grow a measure more secure in their old age. In recognition of her $100,000 gift for the New Bedford Free Public Library and other educational purposes, the city erected a marble tablet praising Sylvia’s “enlightened liberality” in “extending to the children and youth of the city the means of wider and more generous culture.” The library placed a bust of Sylvia on its second floor.
Two decades later the city built a red brick schoolhouse and named it Sylvia Ann Howland School. The $50,000 she had left “to be divided among the poor, aged and infirm women of New Bedford, to the most neediest cases,” was used by the trustees to found a private charity. The New Bedford Orphans’ Home found itself with $20,000, and the City of New Bedford received $100,000 to pipe water into the city. Twenty thousand dollars went to establish a sailors’ home, to care for the men whose toil and risk had helped make the fortune possible. Sylvia, who spent so much of her life shut away from others, taking refuge from her tortured body in the pages of romance novels set worlds away from New Bedford, became a benefactress and public figure in death that she had never been in life.
Dr. Gordon, already receiving thousands of dollars each year in commissions as trustee, received a lump sum of $100,000 plus $15,000 for his wife and children, along with 6 percent accrued annual interest. Thomas Mandell, the head trustee, took home $200,000 plus interest. For all those lump payments, there remained a $1.3 million chunk of principal—enough to supply Hetty with an income of $65,000 a year for life. She also received a large up-front payment. Mandell had invested much of the estate in U.S. government 6-percent gold bonds, and reinvested both the interest and dividend. When the estate battle was settled, Mandell handed Hetty’s lawyer, William Crapo, a stack of bonds worth $600,000 face value. Their value on the market was worth considerably more than that. Crapo, who transferred the bonds to Hetty, noted dryly in his introductionto William Emery’s
The Howland Heirs
, “Mrs. Green apparently had not suffered by the long delay and expensive litigation.”
On January 7, 1871, thirty-five-year-old Hetty gave birth to the Greens’ second child, a girl, named Hetty Sylvia Ann Howland Green. The girl would always be known as Sylvia, rather than Hetty, and Hetty would point to her daughter’s name as proof of the love that had existed between Hetty and her aunt.
When the children were old enough, she took them for walks around London. Hetty prided herself on the Quaker traditions of home healing, and on her own abilities as a nurse. Years after returning to the United States, she recalled an incident that occurred one day as she walked with Ned and Sylvia on Prince of Wales Terrace, a small street on the south side of Kensington Road, near Kensington Gardens. The driver of a passing cart suddenly fell from his vehicle, Hetty told reporter Leigh Mitchell Hodges of
The Ladies’ Home Journal.
As Hetty told it, the man went into seizures and the small crowd that gathered had no idea what to do. Hetty told Ned to watch Sylvia carefully and stand next to a tree. “Mrs. Green sent one man for water and another for a doctor. Then with her handkerchief she washed out the cuts received in the fall, and bandaged them, and ordered the man carried into the shop nearby.”
“‘It wasn’t any more than I would have done for anyone,’” Hetty told Hodges. “‘But those simple folk would have let him bleed to death while they wondered what to do. You can imagine my surprise when, as I started
Two decades later the city built a red brick schoolhouse and named it Sylvia Ann Howland School. The $50,000 she had left “to be divided among the poor, aged and infirm women of New Bedford, to the most neediest cases,” was used by the trustees to found a private charity. The New Bedford Orphans’ Home found itself with $20,000, and the City of New Bedford received $100,000 to pipe water into the city. Twenty thousand dollars went to establish a sailors’ home, to care for the men whose toil and risk had helped make the fortune possible. Sylvia, who spent so much of her life shut away from others, taking refuge from her tortured body in the pages of romance novels set worlds away from New Bedford, became a benefactress and public figure in death that she had never been in life.
Dr. Gordon, already receiving thousands of dollars each year in commissions as trustee, received a lump sum of $100,000 plus $15,000 for his wife and children, along with 6 percent accrued annual interest. Thomas Mandell, the head trustee, took home $200,000 plus interest. For all those lump payments, there remained a $1.3 million chunk of principal—enough to supply Hetty with an income of $65,000 a year for life. She also received a large up-front payment. Mandell had invested much of the estate in U.S. government 6-percent gold bonds, and reinvested both the interest and dividend. When the estate battle was settled, Mandell handed Hetty’s lawyer, William Crapo, a stack of bonds worth $600,000 face value. Their value on the market was worth considerably more than that. Crapo, who transferred the bonds to Hetty, noted dryly in his introductionto William Emery’s
The Howland Heirs
, “Mrs. Green apparently had not suffered by the long delay and expensive litigation.”
On January 7, 1871, thirty-five-year-old Hetty gave birth to the Greens’ second child, a girl, named Hetty Sylvia Ann Howland Green. The girl would always be known as Sylvia, rather than Hetty, and Hetty would point to her daughter’s name as proof of the love that had existed between Hetty and her aunt.
When the children were old enough, she took them for walks around London. Hetty prided herself on the Quaker traditions of home healing, and on her own abilities as a nurse. Years after returning to the United States, she recalled an incident that occurred one day as she walked with Ned and Sylvia on Prince of Wales Terrace, a small street on the south side of Kensington Road, near Kensington Gardens. The driver of a passing cart suddenly fell from his vehicle, Hetty told reporter Leigh Mitchell Hodges of
The Ladies’ Home Journal.
As Hetty told it, the man went into seizures and the small crowd that gathered had no idea what to do. Hetty told Ned to watch Sylvia carefully and stand next to a tree. “Mrs. Green sent one man for water and another for a doctor. Then with her handkerchief she washed out the cuts received in the fall, and bandaged them, and ordered the man carried into the shop nearby.”
“‘It wasn’t any more than I would have done for anyone,’” Hetty told Hodges. “‘But those simple folk would have let him bleed to death while they wondered what to do. You can imagine my surprise when, as I started
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