Marian Hooper Adams - Final Years

Final Years

The Adams' letters reveal their household to be a normal and happy one. In the beginning, he confessed himself "absurdly in love," and she spoke again and again of Henry's "utter devotion."

Clover and her husband hired architect H.H. Richardson and were in the process of having a new home built on Lafayette Square, which was adjacent to the Richardson designed house being built for John Hay, when her adored father died on April 13, 1885. After Dr. Hooper's death, she sank into bouts of overwhelming depression.

While awaiting the completion of the house, they rented one nearby on H Street. Clover documented the construction of the houses with her camera.

While alone in her bedroom on a Sunday in early December, 1885, she swallowed potassium cyanide, which she used in developing her photographs.

Clover Hooper Adams died at age 42 at her temporary home on H Street in Washington, D.C., and was found by her husband lying on the rug before her bedroom fire. The evening newspaper reported that she had suddenly dropped dead from paralysis of the heart.

Her husband commissioned sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens and architect Stanford White to create a memorial to mark her grave in Rock Creek Cemetery. The haunting Adams Memorial is probably the most famous of all monuments in the cemetery and is generally considered to be Saint-Gaudens' most famous sculpture.

In a letter to Henry Adams, John Hay wrote, "Is it any consolation to remember her as she was? That bright, intrepid spirit, that keen, fine intellect, that lofty scorn for all that was mean, that social charm which made your house such a one as Washington never knew before and made hundreds of people love her as much as they admired her." In a letter to a friend Henry James wrote, "poor Mrs. Adams found, the other day, the solution of the knottiness of existence."