Early Life and Scandal
She was born April 27 near Louisville, Kentucky to William Croghan, Jr. and Mary O'Hara, who was the daughter of frontier Pittsburgh businessman James O'Hara. As her mother's only heir, she eventually inherited large tracts of land amassed by her maternal grandfather, James O'Hara.
As young girl she was a quite the romantic. While in boarding school in Staten Island, New York at the age of 15, she met, fell in love, and promptly eloped to England with 43-year-old Captain Edward Wyndham Harrington Schenley of the British Army. It was the Captain's third elopement. The ensuing scandal sparked coverage in many American newspapers.
When her father, a widower, heard of the elopement of his only child, he fainted, according to one Pittsburgh paper. He demanded that the federal government in Washington, DC intercept the ship and that the Pennsylvania General Assembly in Harrisburg take action. He prompted church ministers and newspaper editors to make denunciations. Even in England, Queen Victoria for many years would refuse presentation of the couple at court because of the scandal.
Though the couple's boat was not intercepted, Mr. Croghan was successful in March 1842 in getting the state legislature to "confirm the title of the whole of the property to the father of Miss Crogan, now the wife of the youthful captain, and places the same after his death, in the hands of trustees who are to pay at their discretion for her support." At least the large estate was in trust.
Newspapers also revealed that at the time of his elopement Capt. Schenley was AWOL from his post as Her Majesty's Commissioner of Arbitration in a mixed court for the suppression of the slave trade in British Guiana. Therefore, when Schenley and his bride arrived in England, his superior, Lord Palmerston, ordered him back to his post in South America. Schenley's work there to free the slaves was exceedingly unpopular with the European minority; eventually they forced his reassignment to England.
There the Schenleys were without means. Mary's father now had a change of heart and visited them in England. He bought them a house in London, arranged for a living allowance, and urged the couple to come to Pittsburgh to live with him. The Schenleys did come to Pittsburgh, but did not stay on, and returned to England. Her home, Neill Log House, which she inherited from James O'Hara, is now preserved in Schenley Park.
Croghan later died in 1850 in Pittsburgh. Mary Schenley then received her full inheritance.
Mary and Capt. Schenley had seven children together.
Read more about this topic: Mary Schenley
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or scandal:
“Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“Television ... helps blur the distinction between framed and unframed reality. Whereas going to the movies necessarily entails leaving one’s ordinary surroundings, soap operas are in fact spatially inseparable from the rest of one’s life. In homes where television is on most of the time, they are also temporally integrated into one’s “real” life and, unlike the experience of going out in the evening to see a show, may not even interrupt its regular flow.”
—Eviatar Zerubavel, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life, ch. 5, University of Chicago Press (1991)
“Gossip isn’t scandal and it’s not merely malicious. It’s chatter about the human race by lovers of the same. Gossip is the tool of the poet, the shop-talk of the scientist, and the consolation of the housewife, wit, tycoon and intellectual. It begins in the nursery and ends when speech is past.”
—Phyllis McGinley (1905–1978)