life before the white house

Edith’s journey from Virginia girl to powerful president’s wife

Edith wasn’t always an independent, wealthy Washington woman. She was born on 15 October 1872, in Wytheville, Virginia, raised in a family which had grown prosperous on the back of the slave trade but experienced a change in circumstances following the American Civil War and the outlawing of slavery. One of nine surviving children, Edith, the daughter of circuit court judge William Holcombe Bolling, was the favourite grandchild of her paternal grandmother Anne Wigginton Bolling, who she spent most of her hours with, attending to chores including washing and ironing her grandmother’s clothes and looking after her 26 canaries. The future First Lady’s education was patchy. She learnt French, English, poetry, music, and dressmaking at home – and attended a finishing school and a school for girls for a short time – but her brothers’ education was the priority. Edith could trace her family history back to Pocahontas and her husband John Rolfe, and historians have commented on the irony of her public pride in her Native American heritage when her general views on race left much to be desired. So on the one hand Edith celebrated her lineage as First Lady in naming some of a new fleet of naval ships after Native American tribes, but on the other she told stereotypical stories in conversation and made prejudicial comments in her memoir. Edith went on to marry Norman Galt, whose family owned a successful jewellery business. It seems this marriage was not the match that her second would prove to be. Their only child together, a son, died a few days after his birth. Seven years after Galt’s death in 1908, Edith caught a certain president’s eye and the rest was history.