Louis Mc Henry Howe - Early Life

Early Life

Howe was born in 1871 in Indianapolis, Indiana to wealthy parents, Eliza and Edward P. Howe, who owned a store and part of a wholesale business. Edward P. Howe, originally from Cincinnati, Ohio, had been a captain with the Union Army in the Civil War and made an unsuccessful run for the Indiana State Senate as a Democrat before Louis' birth. Louis had two stepsisters, Maria and Cora, from his mother's previous marriage. Howe was sickly and fragile as a child, suffered from asthma, and was generally kept home by his parents; he would never grow to more than five feet tall.

Edward speculated heavily in real estate, and gradually lost the family's wealth in the depression that followed the Panic of 1873, and when Louis was seven, the family lost their home, moving to Saratoga, New York, with help from Eliza's family. Edward's health collapsed, but he nonetheless took a job as a reporter for a Saratoga newspaper, later purchasing a small Democratic paper of his own, The Saratoga Sun. Louis's health, in contrast, improved during his teenage years, allowing him to leave the house more often and consider attending Yale University. During this time, he suffered a bicycle accident in which he fell into gravel, permanently scarring his face. Ultimately, the obstacles of his health and finances caused him to abandon his university ambitions and instead take a job with his father's paper.

In 1896, he met Grace Hartley, a well-off twenty-year-old who was on vacation with her mother at one of Saratoga's sanitariums. Though she was initially unimpressed with him, Howe courted her assiduously for two years, and the couple became engaged in 1898, marrying the following year. The pair had three children, one of whom died in infancy.