Romance and Marriage
She first met James Garfield in 1849 when they were classmates at Geauga Seminary in Chester, Ohio, and followed him to the Eclectic Institute, where he began courting her. She was somewhat plain in appearance, but Garfield was attracted to her keen intellect and appetite for knowledge. While Garfield went on to Williams College, she taught school in Cleveland, Ohio and Bayou, Ohio. They had planned to marry on his graduation in 1856, but decided to postpone the wedding for a couple of years until he was earning more money.
Both James and Crete were 26 when they married on November 11, 1858 at the home of the bride's parents in Hiram. Although both were members of the churches of Christ, the nuptials were performed by Henry Hitchcock, a Presbyterian minister. The newlyweds did not take a honeymoon but instead set up housekeeping immediately in Hiram.
His service in the Union Army from 1861 to 1863 kept them apart. But after his first winter in Washington as a freshman Representative, the family remained together. With a home in the capital as well as one (Lawnfield) in Mentor, Ohio, they enjoyed a happy domestic life.
In Washington, D.C. they shared intellectual interests with congenial friends; she went with him to meetings of a locally celebrated literary society. They read together, made social calls together, dined with each other, and traveled in company until by 1880 they were as nearly inseparable as his career permitted.
Read more about this topic: Lucretia Garfield
Famous quotes containing the words romance and/or marriage:
“Twenty years of romance makes a woman look like a ruin; but twenty years of marriage makes her look like a public building.”
—Oscar Wilde (18541900)
“Adultery is the vice of equivocation.
It is not marriage but a mockery of it, a merging that mixes love and dread together like jackstraws. There is no understanding of contentment in adultery.... You belong to each other in what together youve made of a third identity that almost immediately cancels your own. There is a law in art that proves it. Two colors are proven complimentary only when forming that most desolate of all colorsneutral gray.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)