Two Boxes, Three Trusts: The Legacy of Ethel Donaghue

by Barbara Donahue

ON THE COVER: The City of Hartford, as recorded by the Atlas of the City of Hartford, , the year Ethel Donaghue was born.

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thel Frances Donaghue died in December at the age of and left a for-tune to charity, most of it in the form of three carefully thought-out testamen-tary trusts. She had practiced law, traveled the world, and made friends in manycountries, and when she died her house at Prospect Avenue, West Hartford,

Connecticut was crammed with the collections of a full life: pictures, letters, scrapbooks, lawschool notes, journals of the many cruises she had taken. Today, most of that material is gone.

Four years after her death, when the Junior League of Hartford decorated and exhibited herhouse as its Show House, the boxes were still there, tucked into cabinets in the attic andbasement. Then the cabinets emptied. Some mementos went to the historical society inManchester, Connecticut, where her mother’s family had lived. One box was shipped to acousin. A second box turned up when the new owner of Prospect Avenue moved in.

The rest disappeared.So Ethel Donaghue’s life must be reconstructed from conversations with a few remaining

acquaintances, from her will, and from the extraordinarily miscellaneous contents of two card-board boxes. ◆

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Two Boxes,Three Trusts:

The Legacy of Ethel Donaghue

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he fortune passed on in Ethel’s will started to build in

with a few silver dollars slid across the counter at DonaghueBrothers, Wholesale Liquors, at State Street in the verycenter of fast-growing Hartford, Connecticut. The Brothers

had a convenient location for their shop, with grocers, hardware and drygoods stores, and hotels all around them, and the silver dollars stacked upwell. In one of the Brothers, Patrick Donaghue, began to invest alittle of his earnings in choice parcels of downtown Hartford real estate,and, as time went on, profits from those properties were in turn investedin the stock of the mighty banks and insurance companies that calledHartford home. What with one lucky thing and another, the Donaghuefortune had grown to million in the Spring of .

Then the bulk of it was returned to its source: the community fromwhich it came. In her will, Patrick Donaghue’s only daughter Ethel left avariety of minor bequests and created three trusts. The first of these set

aside ,, theincome to be used forMasses to be said forthe Donaghue familyand for flowers andmaintenance of thefamily plot in Mt. St.Benedict Cemetery inBloomfield. The sec-ond trust was the EthelF. Donaghue Trust forElizabeth Park. Fundedwith over million, itwas Ethel’s own me-morial and providedfor the continuingbeauty of the Park, just

a block from her home. The third trust was a memorial to her parents.The Patrick and Catherine Weldon Donaghue Medical Research Founda-tion was funded with over million “for the purpose of providing fi-

T “Bird’s-eye” view ofHartford as it appearedin 1877, two years afterPatrick Donaghue andhis brothers set up shopon State Street, just afew steps east of the OldState House (top centerin this view).

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nancial assistance for research in thefields of cancer and heart disease and/orother medical research to promote medi-cal knowledge which will be of practicalbenefit to the preservation, maintenanceand improvement of human life.” In itsfirst five years of operation, this founda-tion dispensed over million to Con-necticut institutions to aid them inhealth research. In March the fundamounted to over million.

The woman behind this benevolence was a paradox. Adornedwith orchids and jewels in her old age, she seemed to live fornothing but parties — but she had been the first female graduateof Hartford Public High School ever to earn a law degree. Shedispensed the minimum in Christmas tips — and won the life-long loyalty of her staff. She was a recluse at home — and a gener-ous, congenial friend everywhere else.

She was born in Hartford on Monday, July , . That day,the Connecticut Courant carried ads for “wash caps” and straw hats,mason jars and corset clasps, carriage mats and tanglefoot fly paper.Columns were filled with reports of the town’s Fourth of July celebra-tions, held the Saturday before. Colt’s Band entertained a crowd of,-, (the count was blithely vague) in Sigourney Square. Morerevelers listened to band music at the corner of Park and AffleckStreets, and down by the streetcar barn on Wethersfield Avenue.

More quietly, Ethel Frances Donaghue slipped into the world. Shewas Irish, clear through. Her father, Patrick, was born in County Armagh,Ireland, in , in the midst of the potato famine which caused thedeath of a million Irish and the emigration to America of twice as manymore. Patrick himself emigrated as soon as he was old enough. At hesailed to New York, one of three brothers who would eventually settle inHartford. He kept a fruit stand at the old Union Station, moved toMiddletown and managed a hotel with his brother William, then re-turned to Hartford, where he, William, and third brother Edward entered

Ethel’s parents,Patrick Donaghueand CatherineWeldon Donaghue .

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the wholesale and retail liquor trade in . The trio subsequently brokeup, with Edward and William moving their business to Union Place andPatrick continuing on State Street. He did well enough to marry, on June, , Catherine Weldon of Manchester, Connecticut. He was , hisbride .

The young Mrs. Donaghue was second-generation American andnicely established in the world. Her parents, Mary Campbell and ThomasWeldon, were both born in Ireland in and joined the great faminemigration to America. Thomas Weldon, a weaver, settled in Manchesteraround . Mary Campbell was also a weaver; she may have come toManchester to work at a mill in the Buckland area. The couple were mar-ried in the Union Village section of Manchester in and established afarm on Tolland Turnpike in an area nicknamed Boggy Stow, possiblyafter the Irish who settled there. The immigrant Weldons prospered, andwere able to send several of their seven children to the comparatively dis-tant Hartford Public High School. Their third child, Thomas, became adoctor and a leading citizen of Manchester. When he took an extended

The Donaghue home at 135 Capitol Avenue— Ethel’s birthplace — was a block south ofBushnell Park, a favorite place for leisurelystrolls. These views, from 1899, show theMemorial Arch and State Capitol, still inplace today, and the Park River, which is nowunderground. Patrick also owned real estatejust north of the park, on Asylum Avenue.

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trip to Europe in , he was greeted, on his return, by a band and, re-putedly, “thousands” of citizens. Catherine was their sixth child, born in.

Patrick and Catherine Donaghue produced their first child and onlyson, Thomas Weldon, on March , . Their second child and onlydaughter, Ethel Frances, followed five years later, on July , .

he family lived at Capitol Avenue in downtown Hart-ford, a few blocks west of Main Street. The neighborhoodwas pleasant, if not stylish. A step away from their housewas Bushnell Park, where baby Ethel was wheeled in her

pram. A few blocks to the east lay the local church, St. Peter’s, a few blocksto the south, the grammar school Ethel would attend. Patrick Donaghuecould walk easily from his house to his store, passing, along the way, theHotel Capitol and the splendid new Linden building. Crossingthe Park River, he might stop and admire the first of his majorpurchases, a brownstone warehouse and retail store, built betweenthe river and Wells Street sometime in the early th century. Fur-ther along, Patrick would pass the white-spired red brick Congre-gational Church and the ancient burying ground, then turn rightat the Old State House and head downhill to his store.

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Left: The view down StateStreet, looking east fromthe Old State House to theflooded Connecticut River,circa 1862. Patrick wouldestablish his wholesaleliquor business here in1875. His State Streetproperty is today part ofPhoenix Plaza (above,looking west).

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To the east, beyond thestore, the old immigrant neigh-borhood tumbled down to theConnecticut River. To thesouth lay Colt’s great factory;southwest, beyond BushnellPark and the still-new StateCapitol, was a pleasant residen-tial zone. Factories lined thePark River. Headquartered inHartford in this turn-of-the-century time were Pratt &Whitney, Columbia Bicycle,

Jewell Belting, and Capewell Manufacturing. Downtown, Aetna, TheHartford, Phoenix and Travelers led the insurance industry.

The city was on the move, and Patrick Donaghue kept pace with it.Asylum Street led west from downtown to the “Asylum” or school for thedeaf, which stood on the present site of The Hartford. From there, the

Main Street, Hartford, inthe 1860s, looking south

from Talcott Street. Thesite on the left would

later become G.Fox.Patrick’s purchase of 859

Main Street, south ofChrist Church Cathedral,in 1904 put him right in

the hub of Hartford’sbustling downtown

business district.

Front Street in 1906— theneighborhood just northof Patrick’s State Streetbusiness property.

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street led past fine homes and churches to the developing and increasinglyfashionable West End. To buy on Asylum Street was to buy the future. Soin Donaghue bought Asylum Street, on the south side of thestreet, just north of Bushnell Park. Fourteen years later, in , hematched that property with one on the opposite side, just east of andcatty-corner to it. On this second piece, Asylum Street, at the cornerof Ann and Asylum, was the Foster Building. Built just after the CivilWar, this was a monumental chunk of brick and brownstone, four storiescrowned with a tall mansard roof. It was clearly a major investment, anddemanded a name which would make it his. He rechristened it TheWeldon.

In , in the time between the purchase of the first Asylum Streetproperty and the second, he managed to buy a piece of Main Street aswell. Main is on the west side of the street, in the middle of what wasthen a growing retail district. Brown Thomson’s store was across the street,and a little farther north was G. Fox. With trolleys bringing shoppersfrom all over the city to downtown, this was clearly a sound investment, a

Patrick bought thisstately Asylum Streetoffice building in 1905,rechristening it TheWeldon. Today, theproperty (now a parkinglot) neighbors theHartford Civic Center.

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good spot for the shops and offices of innumerable businessesthat clustered around the two retail giants.

In Patrick Donaghue completed his string of pur-chases with State Street, to which he moved his liquor busi-ness. Each purchase was free and clear, it being Donaghue’scustom to pay cash for what he wanted, and avoid the encum-brance of a mortgage. By his real estate was worth anestimated , — not bad for an immigrant lad fromIreland.

Today it is hard to find Donaghue’s once-grand pieces ofreal estate, as most of them have been buried under a sea ofasphalt. The family home at Capitol Avenue is now a park-ing lot, as are both properties on Asylum Street. The StateStreet liquor store fell victim to urban renewal in and isnow somewhere beneath the plaza surrounding the PhoenixBuilding, sometimes called the “boat building.” The Main

Street properties survive, in new forms. A brick office building replacedthe graceful warehouse by the Park River in , and the river itself wasforced underground. Further up Main Street, at , the Wise/Smith storewas built in . Now known as the American Airlines building, it hasheld a succession of stores and offices.

atrick Donaghue died of heart disease on June ,, at the age of , as his daughter Ethel was com-pleting her freshman year at Hartford Public HighSchool and his son Weldon was midway through Yale.

Hartford Public, founded in , was the school of choice for the sonsand daughters of the rich as well as the middle-class of the city. In Ethel’stime it occupied an enormous brick and brownstone castle at the cornerof Farmington Avenue and Hopkins Street. Like most of the Donaghueproperties, this, too, has disappeared. I- swept through the site in

and the school moved west to Forest Street.

The busy Patrick was ableto take his family on theoccasional vacation, as thispostcard of Ethel (approxi-mately age 10), made atWatch Hill, RI, attests.

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At Hartford Public, Ethel joined the Katherine Burbank LiterarySociety, as much a dramatic as literary group, and played the role of “ThePiper” in a production by the same name.Membership in the “KBLS” musthave been important to her, as shekept a framed picture of the clubmembers in her house allthrough her life.

Four small, neat copy-books stored at the Connecti-cut Historical Society in Hart-ford hold a few of Ethel’s highschool essays. They are worthreading. Apart from a speech onwomen’s rights written in the earlys, the high school essays are the onlyscraps left of what must have been mounds of text — letters, diary entries,essays, and legal documents — written during Ethel Donaghue’s long,well-educated, well-travelled life. There are no legal briefs preserved, noletters home from college, not even a postcard from a cruise to some ex-

otic place. So the high school output mustbe studied for clues to this woman’s person-ality.

What do they reveal? Surprisingly, a gooddeal. Even as an adolescent, she was puttingforth what she thought in a straightforward,logical way, her practical prose leavened witha dash of humor. Discussing the “Advantagesand Disadvantages of the Demerit System”in her sophomore year, she came outstrongly in favor of demerits: “…in case ofmisdemeanor, a teacher can give a demerit ina moment, instead of delivering a lecture tothe offender. This would not only waste hertime, but that of the class she is teaching.”

(Above) Ethel withpeers in the KatherineBurbank LiterarySociety during hersenior year at HartfordPublic High School.(Left) Playing the leadin “The Piper.” Ethelwould become the firstfemale graduate ofHartford Public ever toearn a law degree.

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On the dangers of motoring: “While not free from causalties [her spell-ing] neither is the railroad train nor the trolley and why not risk an acci-dent in the pleasantest way?”

She criticized the wealthy English gentry: When they moved fromcity to country, these “newcomers immediately destroyed the naturalbeauty of the scenery and erected stiff mansions with artificial land-scapes.” And she saw the roots of class conflict in the gap between Englishrich and poor: “A large part of the produce must now go to the ownerswho become very rich and the natives correspondingly poor…[Manypoor people emigrated from England and] Those who remained becamepractically slaves to their masters…an ill fed, discontented peasantry.”

The sinking of the ocean liner Titanic when it hit an iceberg shortlybefore midnight on April , must have prompted class writing as-signments across the country. Bruce Ismay, managing director of theWhite Star Line, was largely blamed for the disaster. He had urged thecaptain to sail at top speed, despite the danger from icebergs surroundingthe ship, so as to arrive in New York hours ahead of schedule. Ethel be-lieved he was not the sole culprit. She wrote, in a concise, lawyerlike way,

In every disaster the blame must rest on someone and, in that ofthe Titanic, Mr. Ismay offers himself as the handiest object. Ad-mitting, for the sake of argument, that there was somethingwrong at the foundation of this calamity and that someone wasresponsible, the question is who? It seems to me that the peoplehave brought this upon themselves through their insane desire forspeed…if those in authority had gone back and taken a moresoutherly and safer course, thereby losing considerable time, thevery people who are now holding up their hands in horror wouldhave been the first to criticize their lack of bravery.

She graduated in . Twenty-seven of the girls in her class — ahigh proportion for the time — earned bachelors’ degrees at colleges likeSmith, Mount Holyoke, Vassar, and Wellesley. Ethel Donaghue went toVassar, where she joined the debating club, then moved on after gradua-tion in to study law at the University of Pennsylvania. She chosePenn because it was one of the few highly respected eastern law schools toadmit women. It was also one of the earliest. In Carrie Burnham

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Kilgore, who already had a medical degree, sought admission to Penn.Eleven years later, in , she was finally admitted. By , of the

law schools listed in the U.S. Bureau of Education Directory admittedwomen, but the “top” eastern schools were among the last to do so. Yaleadmitted a woman in ; Columbia held outuntil and Harvard until .

At the University of Pennsylvania Law School,Ethel won the Pemberton Morris Prize for “havingattained the highest standing for three years inevidence, pleading, and practice.” One newspaperaccount of the time credits her with being electedpresident of her class two consecutive times andbeing the first woman admitted to the law clubs ofthe university, but, apart from the PembertonMorris Prize, the University of Pennsylvania alumnioffice has no record of her achievements.

Sometime in the early s Ethel typed out apassionate speech on women’s rights for delivery tofellow Vassar women. “Because of her actions during the war and becauseof the efforts which she had made for enfranchisement for many years,woman was given the vote,” she stated, then went on to list injusticeswhich still prevailed, among them these:

A woman who marries an alien loses her citizenship…in somestates a woman cannot sell or mortgage her own property with-out her husband’s consent, whilst in others her property passescompletely under his dominion and no remedy is provided forhis mismanagement…

Equality for women would benefit society as a whole, she wrote:“When these disabilities…shall have perished in the flames of legislation,a new woman will spring forth…better able to render service to the com-munity…” And she pressed for a constitutional amendment to ensureequal rights. Attached to her script is a tattered carbon copy of one of themany drafts of an Equal Rights Amendment circulated in the s. It isheaded “TENTATIVE – CONFIDENTIAL– NOT FOR PUBLICITY.”

Ethel’syearbookpicture atVassarCollege,Class of1917.

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hortly after graduation from the University of Pennsylvania,Ethel was tapped for a job in the U.S. Justice Department.Her immediate supervisor, and possibly the man who se-cured the position for her, was Thomas J. Spellacy, who

had known her since she was ten years old. Spellacy, mayor of Hartfordfrom -, was Assistant Attorney General of the United States in, and Ethel Donaghue became a special assistant in charge of admi-ralty affairs. Defined as “the whole body of law relating to maritime af-fairs,” this was a major field in , when international business went bysea, not by air. Admiralty law was an unusual specialty for a woman, butEthel was an unusual woman.

How much time she actually spent in Washington is not known. Ifshe went to the Justice Department as the protégé of Democrat Spellacy,as was probably the case, she would have left in the spring of , whenDemocratic president Woodrow Wilson left office and Republican War-ren Harding came in. At any rate, between - she spent enoughtime in New York studying at New York University Law School to emergein the spring of with the degree of doctor of juridical science. Sixcandidates for that degree were listed in the NYU Commencement pro-gram that year; she was the only woman.

In she appeared in the Hartford City Directory as “EthelF. Donaghue, attorney at law,” with her address given as CapitolAvenue, her home. Then, in , she opened an office at Main Streetand announced her move with a half-page advertisement in the Directory.The Directory that year listed three women as practicing law in Hartford:

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Ethel earned a degree ofdoctor of juridical science

in 1922, and opened alaw practice in Hartfordlater that year. She was

admitted to practicebefore the U.S. Supreme

Court in 1926.

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Ethel, J. Agnes Burns, and Mary Hall who had been, back in the thcentury, the first woman to be admitted to the Connecticut Bar. Ethelherself was admitted to that bar on April , . She had already beenadmitted to the New York state bar in and admitted to practice be-fore the U.S. Supreme Court in March .

Ethel’s brother Weldon shared her Main Street office, with his busi-ness described as “real estate and insurance.” Weldon did not celebrate hisarrival on Main Street with the fanfare of an advertisement, and it can bewondered exactly how much time he actually spent on “real estate andinsurance.” He was a jazz age playboy who drove an outsize Cadillac withhis initials engraved on the engine block. He also drank, and drankheavily.

With Ethel’s official return to Hartford, the Donaghue family movedfrom their old house. The Capitol Avenue neighborhood, never very fash-ionable, had slid downhill in the years since Ethel Donaghue’s birth.Multifamily dwellings surrounded the old homestead; the elite of Hart-ford had moved west, to the Golf Club District and into West Hartford,and the Donaghues joined the parade.

The new house was a splendid -room Georgian brick mansion at Prospect Avenue, on the Hartford-West Hartford line. Built in

for Elizabeth Keeney Gordon and her husband Lewis E. Gordon, resident

Ethel displays one ofthe fruits of her legalcareer.

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manager of the American Mutual Liability Insurance Co., it was made forentertaining, with a large central hall, gracious living and dining rooms,and formal gardens. Directly across the tree-lined street was an equallylarge, equally Georgian house, built in for George C.F. Williams.That house has been, since , the official residence of the Governor ofConnecticut. (Williams’s name was George Clinton Fairchild Williams,but Hartford wits insisted that the C.F. stood for “Comfortably Fixed”which, indeed, he was, thanks to his position as president of a family busi-ness, the Capewell Horse Shoe Nail Company.)

Ethel’s mother may not have found the new home as congenial as herold one. The only hints to Catherine Donaghue’s identity are scatteredthrough two dozen letters she wrote Ethel in her freshman year at Vassar.In these she shows herself a woman family-centered and content in a

Ethel with unidentifiedfriend(s) at 995 ProspectAvenue. The Donaghuesmoved to the 30-roomGeorgian brick mansion in1926. Situated across thestreet from what is now theofficial residence of theGovernor of Connecticut,the house is just north ofElizabeth Park, for whichEthel would later become apassionate advocate andgenerous benefactor.

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small circle of friends and relatives who were mostlyIrish, like herself. She also appears to have had verylittle to occupy her time, and could make a day’sactivity out of going downtown to buy a napkinring for Ethel to use at college. Moving from herold, familiar home to her new one, she found her-self flanked by members of the city’s old-line Yankeeestablishment and may have felt a bit lonely.

Down in her office at Main Street, Ethelworked at the law. Only one case survives, in theConnecticut Supreme Court Reports, but it is an in-triguing one, originating from a decision of theSouthington Probate Court. At issue was whetherthe estate of one Jane L. Donovan should pass tosome first cousins or to one Bridget Donovan ofBoston, who claimed that she was the decedent’saunt and therefore next-of-kin. The case hinged on a statement by yetanother cousin, that Bridget Donovan’s brother (Jeremiah Donovan) andJane Donovan’s father (James Donovan) were one and the same person,who left wife and family behind in Ireland, skipped merrily across theAtlantic, and assumed a new name, wife and family in America. Thestatement was hearsay, because the cousin who made it was already dead

The Prospect Avenueproperty, with its largecentral foyer and formalgardens, was made forentertaining — but Ethelsocialized rarely inHartford.

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when the case was argued. The lower court had declared it inadmissible,but attorneys Lawrence A. Howard and Ethel F. Donaghue convinced theAppeals Court that, had the garrulous cousin been alive, he would havebeen summoned as a witness and that, by reason of his relationship to thefamily and the timing of his remarks (before the will was challenged) hisstatement would have been admissible under a recognized exception tothe rule excluding hearsay. They won their case.

In , Ethel moved her office to a family property, the brand new“Donaghue Building” at Main Street. She began taking long cruiseswith her mother and brother aboard the luxury ships of the Cunard andWhite Star lines. The first one may have been in -, as she kept aprinted list of the “stores” carried aboard the R.M.S. “Carinthia” for theenjoyment of passengers on its round the world cruise that winter. In-cluded were , ducklings and jars of pâté de foie gras. Other ship-

Ethel took many long cruises in the’20s and ’30s, sometimes with hermother and brother. At right, theBerengaria pulls into Chelsea Docksin Manhattan.

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board souvenirs show that sheand her family were again onboard the “Carinthia” for a“Round Africa” cruise inMarch , then on theR.M.S. “Berengaria” in April.Later, she cruised on the“Britannic,” the “Aquitania,”the “Franconia,” the“Homeric,” for a tour of theGreek Isles in , and the“Franconia” again in .She always traveled first class.

Shipboard entertainment featured parties, almost every night, andEthel hosted many of them. The menu for a dinner given March ,

listed her as one of the “Troupe of Trained Seals” giving the party. Theother seals bore names like Daphne Warren-Wilson and Count W. VanLimburg Stirum. Despite a worldwide depression, there was still a mon-eyed leisure class able to cruise the world, wear funny hats for shipboardparties, and list such forwarding addresses as “Morgan Bank, PlaceVendôme, Paris.” Ethel Donaghue, one generation removed from theimmigrant neighborhood of Hartford’s lower State Street, was part of it.

atherine Weldon Donaghue died, at home, after a longstruggle with cancer, on November , . Patrick Dona-ghue’s fortune in real estate had passed directly to his children,subject to his widow’s life use, but since Patrick’s death in

Catherine had amassed a fortune of her own: ,, most of itin the stocks and bonds of Connecticut companies. She owned bondsissued by, among others, Cheney Brothers, whose silk and velvet millsemployed most of her native Manchester, and the New York, New Haven& Hartford Railroad Company. She owned stock in the parent compa-nies of today’s Aetna, CIGNA, Travelers, and Hartford Steam Boiler In-

The Palladian Lounge onthe Aquitania. It wascommon for designersand decorators of the bigliners to imitate the greatshoreside palaces andmansions.

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spection and Insurance Company, in eight banks (with cash deposits insix more) and in Connecticut-based manufacturing companies like theBigelow-Sanford Company, a major carpet maker in Thompsonville. Thestocks, bonds, and bank deposits she left in trust for her two children,with the income divided between them. Ethel received her mother’s jew-elry, the house on Prospect Avenue, with all its furnishings, and the oldWeldon homestead in Manchester. Catherine hoped that her son Weldonwould continue to live in the Prospect Avenue house, but, if he choseinstead to move out, she stipulated that her executors build or buy him ahouse of his own, for a sum “not to exceed ,.” The Prospect Av-enue mansion was then valued at ,, so , would have se-cured Weldon rather a nice little home. He did move out within a fewmonths and at his own death in owned a house on Ridgefield Av-enue in Hartford.

With a fortune to manage, Ethel turned her considerable brain andlegal talent to its supervision. She retired from the Connecticut Bar inJanuary , perhaps to care for her failing mother. Despite the declara-tions of independence in her speech on women’s rights, Ethel was, first ofall, a dutiful daughter. In January , with her powerful father dead, herdependent mother ill, and her dissolute brother absorbed in his own con-cerns, she was needed to hold family and fortune together. Already shehad proved her point: She could master the law as well as any man.

She managed her own money, working with trust officers at her bank,the Hartford-Connecticut Trust Company, which later became The Con-necticut Bank and Trust. One bank officer, now retired, recalls her cominginto the bank with a stack of dividend checks and borrowing one of thebank’s adding machines to add them up. Why buy her own machine whenshe could use the bank’s? Such thriftiness and practicality were typical.

She maintained the Prospect Avenue house and a Hartford office butkept a suite at the elegant Hotel Carlyle in New York, continued her ship-board life, and spent her summers at the New Ocean House, Swampscott,Massachusetts, or at Wentworth-by-the-Sea, Portsmouth, New Hampshire.Both were rambling Victorian resort hotels designed for people who ar-rived with their trunks and servants around the Fourth of July and stayedthrough Labor day, the seasonal homes of a quietly wealthy, privileged class.

Ethel kept a suite at TheCarlyle in New York.

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Wadleigh Woods, who was thetennis pro at Wentworth-by-the-Sea for years, remembers EthelDonaghue as “very generous. Sheput on great parties — they weretops,” he says. “She would playtennis with me. ‘Hit it as hard asyou can,’ she would say, and she’dtry to return the ball…She liked togo shopping in Ogunquit [a nearbytown] then rush back and dress fordinner. Guests always dressed for dinner and Saturday night was superdress.” Ethel kept her jewelry in the hotel safe and part of the ritual ofdressing for dinner was going down to the desk and selecting her jewelryfor the evening.

Single, without any known romantic interest, Ethel Donaghue madea family of the friends with whom she danced, played tennis, and ex-changed party invitations. She saved dozens of notes thanking her forcocktail parties, for gifts of flowers, perfume, travel souvenirs, and such.One example shows how vital were her links to friends:

Dear Ethel: Last Sunday’s party is still “lobby talk.” I wish youcould know how much happiness you brought to the ormore present, especially those who for one reason or another arenot invited to many affairs…a friendship such as yours is one ofthe real rewards of life…

As time went on the circle of friends grew smaller. Ethel outlivedmany companions, and fewer and fewer people were left to spend wholesummers by the sea. She was often depressed. Like many other lonely,aging women, she turned to the Arthur Murray Studios for dancing part-ners, chitchat, and companionship. On a trip abroad she let payments tothe studio lapse and received a crisp note canceling her membership. Shebegged to be reinstated, but the Murray people were adamant. With allher millions, she could not buy her way back in.

The summer parties continued, with themes like Christmas in July,

Ethel spent severalsummers at Wentworth-by-the-Sea, on the NewHampshire coast, whereshe earned a reputationfor hosting sensationalparties.

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for which her chauffeur hauled special decorations to The Wentworth.Rose Walsh, Society Editor of the Boston Herald American, described herarrival at one of her galas in :

One of the leading hostesses is tall, slender -year-old Miss EthelDonaghue of Hartford, Ct. who has spent summers at TheWentworth and given her full share of glamorous fun parties.This year…Ethel broke her hip. (And Ethel loves dancing.) Itwas natural to expect that the party would be canceled. Not sowith this valiant knowledgeable witty woman…Accompanied bytwo nurses, Ethel was in a wheelchair, beautifully gowned informal pale gold silk adorned with twin white orchids and jewels— a nosegay of matching orchids in her dark hair…the bandswung into “Hello Dolly.”

he broken hip, the wheelchair, the two nurses: These signaledthe beginning of the end. Although Ms. Walsh chronicledanother Donaghue party at the Wentworth in , Ethel’sdays and nights of travel and dancing were at an end. Soon

she would retreat to Hartford.Since her mother’s death, she had not spent much time in her native

city. And when she was in town, she was not gregarious. She kept to her-self. Neighbors recall that she gave an occasional fundraising party forVassar College, belonged to an association of women lawyers and gave aparty or two in honor of women who had been appointed judges. Twonotes reveal her as part of the neighborhood, but emotionally distant. Acard from Governor and Mrs. John Lodge invites her, not to a party offriends, but to a “Neighbors Tea” in December , and a letter fromHartford civic leader Beatrice Fox Auerbach thanks her for congratula-tions on one of the many awards Mrs. Auerbach had won. It is addressed“Dear Miss Donaghue,” not “Dear Ethel.”

Rev. Charles W. Daly, a priest of the Archdiocese of Hartford was, likeEthel Donaghue, a graduate of Hartford Public High School. He was incharge of raising funds for the school’s th anniversary celebration and,

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noting her name in the list of alumnae, wrote to her, asking for a donation.“The next morning the limousine was out in front and she walked

into the Chancery Office with her check — just what we’d asked for,” heremembers. “She was so pleased to act on this immediately…but she didn’t come to the reunion.”

She gave to a few local charities, chief among them Eliza-beth Park, just down the street from her Prospect Avenuehome. Her generosity was at all times practical. Asked whyshe was so generous to the Park, she explained by observingthat support of the Park was, of course, helping her ownproperty value.

She gave often to hospitals, says Joseph Flood, now Di-rector of Social Services for Hartford Hospital, who was ap-pointed conservator of her person for the last five years of herlife. And she had medical research in mind for almost years before she signed the will which created the Foundationas it exists today. On December , she set up a smalltrust to be administered by the Hartford-Connecticut TrustCompany. The trust provided that, during her lifetime, shewould receive the income. At her death it would become aperpetual trust whose income would be used “for research for the causeand cure of cancer.” If the Trustee (the bank) decided that such researchwas no longer needed, the income would be used “for other forms ofmedical research as it shall deem wise.”

In , perhaps pondering uses for her substantial estate, EthelDonaghue created a foundation with broader scope and described it inmore detail. In an agreement with the bank, which by this time was orga-nized as The Connecticut Bank and Trust Company, she defined thefoundation as existing “solely for the purpose of providing financial assis-tance for research in the fields of cancer and heart disease and/or othermedical research to promote medical knowledge which will be of practicalbenefit to the preservation, maintenance and improvement of humanlife.” Recalling the heart disease which had taken her father’s life, andhaving seen many of her friends grow ill and die, she wished to conquer ahost of afflictions.

Ethel established a$1 million trust forElizabeth Park in herwill. Located just southof her Prospect Avenuehome, Elizabeth Park isinternationally knownfor its rose gardens.

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Her last will, signed December , ,used exactly the same words to define her foun-dation and its purpose. Her charge to the Trust-ees remained clear: The fortune was to be usedto promote “medical knowledge which will beof practical benefit…” She had always favoredthe practical and her will was sprinkled withreferences to practicality and common sense.The Ethel Donaghue who signed that docu-ment was the same person who believed ateacher should hand out demerits and notwaste time lecturing a culprit; who urged herVassar classmates to stand up then and there for

women’s rights; who hopped out of her limousine to deliver a check. Shewas a woman of simple, direct action.

The appearance at the Wentworth gala in late summer was pos-sibly her last one. Like her brother before her, she had a problem withalcohol. In addition, her eyesight was dim, her mind was failing and shecould no longer handle her affairs. In January she was placed underthe care of conservator Joseph Flood.

A few loyal friends continued to call, one from Greenwich, anotherfrom Hartford, each driven to Prospect Avenue by their chauffeurs. Ethelsuffered a series of strokes, but Flood found she could still be charming.When prompted, she would respond. Otherwise, she was silent.

“Do you know me, Miss Donaghue?” he would ask.“Why, yes,” she would answer.“Then who am I?”“Oh, you’re the handsome young gentleman who comes to visit me,”

which was answer enough, all things considered.She would occasionally be driven to Manchester to see her first

cousin, Nan Weldon Flanagan, daughter of Dr. Thomas Weldon. Thetwo old ladies would go out to lunch together, accompanied by Ethel’sretinue of chauffeur and nurse, and have a fine time talking about the olddays on the Weldon farm. “She became quite lucid then,” Nan Flanagan’sgranddaughter Susan Lyons recalls.

Portrait of Ethel, paintedin 1978 by MarianWilliams Steele.

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thel Donaghue died December , , and was buriedin Mount St. Benedict Cemetery with the rest of her fam-ily. The Prospect Avenue house was emptied, the furnitureand linens and rugs auctioned. The house stood unsold

and empty for three years. In the Junior League of Hartford enlisteda crew of decorators and gardeners, made it beautiful again, and opened itto the public for the month of May as a fundraiser for communityprojects. Several months later, it was sold.

Meanwhile, through her own memorial trust, Ethel’s Trustees and anadvisory committee of friends and neighbors set to work carrying out herwishes for Elizabeth Park. Trees were pruned, guides were trained to givetours of the Park and its beautiful gardens. Members of the ConnecticutValley Garden Club pitched in to help create a Sunrise Overlook in thePark, near the corner of Prospect and Asylum Avenues, not far fromwhere Ethel Donaghue lived and died.

The medical research foundation created by Ethel Donaghue’s willwas funded in May and is governed by Fleet National Bank andRaymond S. Andrews, Jr., as Trustees. As the Foundation has developed,it has focused on what Trustee Andrews termed

bridging the gaps…between the gaining of new knowledge andits effective application to meet human needs…between the hardwork of our scientists and the hard lives of many of our people,for whose benefit Ethel Donaghue charged us with pursuingpractical benefit to human life.

Speaking to Vassar classmates some years earlier, Ethel Donaghuesaid that when women were truly emancipated, they would be “betterable to render service to the community.” If wealth alone could emanci-pate a woman, Ethel was most certainly free and through most of herlong life she enjoyed whatever her wealth could buy. Still, as she hadknown all along, freedom imposes its own limits. Power, rightly used,implies concern. And Ethel turned that concern — for family and friends— into a legacy that would put her fortune to generous good use and“render service to the community” for ages to come. ◆

E

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Acknowledgments

THANKS TO the following, who have granted interviews, led us to sources, or loaned material for this biography of Ethel F.Donaghue: Susan Lyons; Milton and Jeanne Adams, of the Manchester Historical Society; Joseph Flood; Joel Lang, ofNortheast Magazine; Kenneth Savino; Wadleigh Woods…Also, Susan B. Aller; Robert Bolgard; Rev. Charles W. Daly;James F. English, Jr.; Wilson H. Faude, Executive Director of the Old State House, Hartford; Georgette AuerbachKoopman; Janice Matthews, Curator of the Hartford Collection, Hartford Public Library; Anne Louise Price; WilliamWood; the alumni offices of New York University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Vassar College; and the staffs of theConnecticut Historical Society, the Connecticut State Library, and Hartford City Hall…The author is also grateful forinformation contained in “What Really Happened to Miss Donaghue?” by Joel Lang, which appeared in the first twoissues of Northeast Magazine (March and March , ) and articles by Thomas D. Williams and Mark Stillman,which appeared in The Hartford Courant during -.

AUTHOR: Barbara Donahue, of Farmington, CT, is not related to Ethel Donaghue, but would have enjoyed knowing her.

GRAPHIC DESIGN: Jeffrey H. Mills, J.M. Communications, Ellington, CT.

Authorship of this document was made possible by a contribution from the Trustees of the Donaghue Foundation.

Illustration Credits

Cover Map: Atlas of the City of Hartford, CT. L. J. Richards & Co., : The Hartford Collection, Hartford PublicLibrary, Hartford, CT. Photograph of Ethel Donaghue: Manchester Historical Society, Manchester, CT.

Manchester Historical Society. The City of Hartford, , Archives, History and Genealogy Unit, Connecticut State Library. Manchester Historical Society. Photographs: Hartford Illustrated PhotoGravures. Brooklyn, NY: Albertype Co., . Map: Atlas of the City of

Hartford, CT. L. J. Richards & Co., . Both: The Hartford Collection, Hartford Public Library. Top: Phoenix Home Life Mutual Insurance Company. Bottom: Samuel Taylor Collection, The Connecticut

Historical Society, Hartford, Connecticut. Top: Original photograph by Thompson, Samuel Taylor Collection, The Connecticut Historical Society. Bottom:

The Connecticut Historical Society. Meyers Studio photo: Old State House, Hartford, Connecticut. Photo: Courtesy Susan Lyons. Drawing: Owl Annual: Yearbook of Hartford Public High School, : The Hartford

Collection, Hartford Public Library. Courtesy Susan Lyons. Owl Annual: Yearbook of Hartford Public High School, : The Hartford Collection, Hartford Public Library. Vassarion : Vassar College. Drawing from Ethel Donaghue’s certificate of admittance to practice before the Supreme Court of the United

States, . Courtesy Susan Lyons. Courtesy Susan Lyons. Courtesy Susan Lyons. Photo: Courtesy Susan Lyons. Drawing: Site plan from Show House , program book of the Junior League of

Hartford, Inc. Invitation: Courtesy Susan Lyons. Photo: Berengaria: Picture History of The Cunard Line, -, by Frank O.

Braynard and William H. Miller, Jr. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, . Photo: Aquitania: Picture History of The Cunard Line, -. The Carlyle Hotel: Courtesy Carlyle Hotel, NY. The Boston Globe, February , . Courtesy Wadleigh Woods. Courtesy Donna Fuss. Manchester Historical Society. Photo: Elizabeth Park archway. Courtesy Donna Fuss.

© Copyright 1997 by the Donaghue Medical Research Foundation.

D O N A G H U E

T H E P A T R I C K A N DC AT H E R I N E W E L D O N

M E D I C A L R E S E A R C H

FOUNDATIONFor more information about the Donaghue Foundation, contact:

Director of OperationsDonaghue Medical Research Foundation

Gillett StreetHartford, Connecticut

Telephone: -Fax: -

Email: Office@Donaghue.Org

About the Foundation

The Patrick and Catherine Weldon Donaghue Medical Research Foundation is a charitable trust created pursuant to the Will of Ethel F. Donaghue, late of West Hartford, Connecticut. The Foundation, which began operations in , is governed by Fleet National Bank and Raymond S. Andrews, Jr., Trustees.

Its Purpose: “The Foundation established hereunder is created and shall be operated solely for the purpose of providing financial assistance for research in the fields of cancer and heart disease and/or other medical research to promote medical knowledge which will be of practical benefit to the preservation, maintenance and improvement of human life.” — From Article Fourteenth of the Will of Ethel Donaghue

Its Vision: “We shall be an exemplary philanthropic participant in the ongoing conduct and continuing advancement of useful health research across the spectrum of health institutions and organizations in Connecticut.”

Its Mission: “To benefit human life and the individual lives of people as an active and collaborative supporter of useful health research in Connecticut — and thereby to honor the memory of Ethel Donaghue and her family.”

The Donaghue Foundation is exempt from federal income tax under Section (c)() of the Internal Revenue Code of and is under the jurisdiction of the West Hartford, CT Probate Court.