Marriage and Family Life
Sumner Welles married Esther "Hope" Slater of Boston, the sister of a Harvard roommate on April 14, 1915, in Webster, Massachusetts. She came from a similarly prominent family that owned a textile empire based in Massachusetts. An heiress, she was descended from industrialist Samuel Slater and granddaughter of the Boston painter William Morris Hunt. Sumner and his wife had two sons, Benjamin Welles (1916–2002), a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, later his father's biographer, and Arnold Welles (1918–2002). Mrs. Esther Slater Welles obtained a divorce from Sumner Welles in Paris in 1923 "on grounds of abandonment and refusal to live with his wife."
Welles occasionally gained public notice for his art dealings. In 1925, for example, he sold a collection of Japanese screens that had been on exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for several years.
Welles married Mathilde Scott Townsend (1885–1949), "a noted international beauty" whose portrait had been painted by John Singer Sargent, on June 27, 1925, in upstate New York. Until World War II, the Welles lived on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, D.C., in the landmark Townsend Mansion, designed by Carrère and Hastings, later the home of the Cosmos Club. She died in 1949 of peritonitis while vacationing in Switzerland with her husband.
Welles spent the bulk of his time a few miles outside of Washington in the Maryland countryside at a 49-room "country cottage" known as Oxon Hill Manor designed for him by Jules Henri de Sibour and built on a 245-acre property in 1929. He entertained foreign dignitaries and diplomats there and hosted informal meetings of senior officials. FDR used the site as an occasional escape from the city as well.
Welles married Harriette Appleton Post, a childhood friend, in New York City on January 8, 1952, in the bride's home on Fifth Avenue in New York City.
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