The White House Wedding
A Solve-the-Mystery Blog Tour by Radha Vatsal
At 8:30 PM on Saturday, December 1915, President Woodrow Wilson married Mrs. Edith Bolling Galt. The new Mrs. Wilson would go on to become one of the 20th Century’s most powerful first ladies and shepherd the United States through turbulent times.
In the course of this week-long blog tour, I describe four different aspects of their wedding plan: The Location, Guest List and Attendants, Ceremony and Officiants, Dress and Flowers. The wedding went off as arranged, except for one significant last-minute change — which provides an insight into the future First Lady’s personality.
Your mission is to guess what changed and why. The answer will be revealed in the final blog post.
For more on the president and Edith Bolling/Wilson’s relationship, see the Introduction on Katherine’s Chronicle.
For more on the president and Edith Bolling/Wilson’s relationship, see the Introduction on Katherine’s Chronicle.
BLOG POST #2: LOCATION
Don’t let the title of today's blog post fool you. Was the wedding held in Mrs. Galt’s home at 1308 Twentieth Street, Northwest as originally planned? The house had been built by Edith Galt’s father-in-law, and she and Norman Galt lived there for two years before he died; Edith continued to live there afterwards.
According to reports, the house was small, only two rooms deep. The ground floor consisted of a drawing room with a bay window, a dining room and an entrance hall. A larger house stood on one side of it, and on the other, an empty lot used as a tennis court. It was considered to be on the edge of Washington’s fashionable district. Some homes nearby were occupied by “colored people.” Not faraway was the home of Chris Heurich, a prosperous brewer of German origins.
Did the house pose a security risk? Could it have been too small to accommodate both the guests and the president’s security detail? Did Mrs. Galt succumb to her friends’ entreaties: “Oh, you should be married in the White House; it would be so historic?” Did President Wilson not wish to be married in the home of his wife’s former husband?
Next up: Guest List and Attendants at Benjamin Clark!
The new First Lady and Woodrow Wilson make a dramatic appearance in Murder Between the Lines, the second novel in the Kitty Weeks Mystery series, which features the adventures of bold newswoman Capability “Kitty” Weeks, in World War I era New York.
For more historical surprises, sign up for the Kitty Weeks newsletter at radhavatsalauthor@gmail.com
Murder Between the Lines by Radha Vatsal
Series: A Kitty Weeks Mystery, #2
Genre: Cozy Mystery, Historical Mystery
Publication Date: May 2, 2017
Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark
Paperback: 320 pages
ISBN-10: 1492638927
ISBN-13: 978-1492638926
ISBN-10: 1492638927
ISBN-13: 978-1492638926
e-Book File Size: 1374 KB
ASIN: B01N6JA035
The Blurb
When Kitty Weeks’s latest assignment writing for the New York Sentinel Ladies’ Page takes her to Westfield Hall, a well-regarded girls’ school in New York City, she expects to find an orderly establishment teaching French and dancing--standard fare for schoolgirls in 1915. But there’s much more going on at the school than initially meets the eye. Kitty especially takes note of the studies of Elspeth Bright, the daughter of a scientist heavily involved in naval technology, who has inherited her father’s interest and talent for scientific inquiry.
Elspeth’s seemingly accidental death is a shock to the school community and to Kitty — and the more she finds out about Elspeth and her family, the more the intrepid reporter begins to believe that it may not have been an accident after all.
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