Character and Legacy
Speidel describes Lou Graham as "regal",
…about five feet, two inches...and at chest height, she was about three feet thick. She went for plumed hats and smart carriages… Lou stood for integrity in her field...and a kind of class that couldn't be matched outside of the other major cities of the world like San Francisco, New York, London, Paris. She was a first-rate businesswoman… invested heavily and profitably in the stock market.The fortunes of many of Seattle's leading families were founded on loans from Graham. When banker Jacob Furth was approached with a loan request for a business idea that he thought was good, but which he did not think his board of directors at Puget Sound National Bank would approve, he would send them on to Graham, who would make a loan at higher interest, but with less formality. Graham may have been instrumental in saving Furth's bank from a bank run during the Panic of 1893 by ostentatiously making a large deposit. After she died a Puget Sound National Bank employee became administrator of her estate.
By the time she succumbed to syphilis in San Francisco in 1903, Graham had become a wealthy landowner, one of the largest in the Pacific Northwest. She owned one of Seattle's great mansions (2106 E. Madison Street, demolished in 1966) and "contributed liberally" to projects sponsored by the Seattle Chamber of Commerce. She contributed more money to the education of the city's children than the rest of the city's prominent early citizens combined. After the Panic of 1893, her loans saved some of the city's most prestigious families from bankruptcy. At least one source says she left her estate to relatives in Germany, but according to Bill Speidel she died intestate, and her supposed relatives from Hamburg turned out to be frauds. Her estate went to support the common schools in King County, the county in which Seattle is located.
Speidel wrote in his last book that traditional forms of documentation consistently underrate the contribution of women in general, and particularly of less respectable women such as Graham. He credits Henry Broderick and Joshua Green with corroborating Graham's importance and her business relationship with Jacob Furth, but he notes that both insisted that their names could not be cited in this connection until after their deaths.
Read more about this topic: Lou Graham (Seattle Madame)
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