RICH TRIBUTES PAID TO FIRST LADY OF NILGIRIS

The Nilgiris Documentation Centre (NDC) remembered the first lady of Nilgiris here on Friday on the eve of International Women's Day.

Hill veteran Dharmalingam Venugopal, director of NDC, said that two centuries ago, on February 2 1820, Henrietta Cecilia Harington married John Sullivan, the founder of modern Nilgiris, who was the collector of Coimbatore then which included Nilgiris. Henrietta was born in Madras on January 19, 1803, and baptized on January 25, 1803, at Vepery Madras. Henrietta was the child of William Harington and Anne Collet. A popular road in Chennai is named after the Haringtons.

The marriage took place in St George's Cathedral in Chennai.

Sullivan was then 32years-old and Henrietta was only 17. The witnesses to the marriage included Eldams and Greenways, both of whom have roads named after them in Chennai.

Sullivan and the First Lady of Coimbatore district, which included Nilgiris then, spent a week at the Dimbatty camp in Kotagiri near here, which had been set up a year before on Sullivan's first visit to the hills. The Sullivans set up family at Stone House, which is part of Government Arts College in Ooty now, after it was completed in 1823. The Sullivans shifted residence from Stone House to Park View at Missionary hill and to Fair Lawns (presently Smyrna Home) to finally Richings Lodge at Lovedale.

It was there tragedy struck the Sullivans when Henrietta and her first daughter Harriat died within weeks in 1838. The cause of death is unknown and remains a mystery. Both are buried in the same spot in St Stephen's Church, Ooty. Thus ended the life of the First Lady of Nilgiris at the age of 35, remembers Venugopal.