Personal Life
In 1861 Fair married Theresa Rooney, who had been keeping a boarding house. She divorced him in 1883 on grounds of "habitual adultery" and brought up their four children on her own, with a very considerable settlement.
When his daughter, Theresa "Tessie" Alice Fair was married in 1890 to Hermann Oelrichs of Norddeutsche Lloyd shipping lines, in the grandest wedding San Francisco had seen, he remained in his hotel suite without an invitation. He gave her a million dollars as a wedding gift nevertheless (Ferguson 1977 p. 2)
Fair is buried in Holy Cross Cemetery in Colma, California. His will left $40 million in trust to his daughters, née Theresa "Tessie" Alice Fair, Mrs. Hermann Oelrichs, and Virginia Graham, later Mrs William Kissam Vanderbilt II and his surviving son, Charles Lewis Fair.
After his death, Mrs. Nettie Cravens came forward claiming to be his wife. She presented her evidence to the court trial, but lost the case. She moved to Iowa and lived in obscurity, spending her last days in a mental institution. Later, another woman, Phoebe Couzins, a women's-rights advocate, also claimed a relationship with Fair.
Read more about this topic: James Graham Fair
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“A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“The personal touch between the people and the man to whom they temporarily delegated power of course conduces to a better understanding between them. Moreover, I ought not to omit to mention as a useful result of my journeying that I am to visit a great many expositions and fairs, and that the curiosity to see the President will certainly increase the box receipts and tend to rescue many commendable enterprises from financial disaster.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“The girl must early be impressed with the idea that she is to be “a hand, not a mouth”; a worker, and not a drone, in the great hive of human activity. Like the boy, she must be taught to look forward to a life of self-dependence, and early prepare herself for some trade or profession.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)