- Louise Taft
Louisa “Louise” Maria Torrey (
11 September 1827 -8 December 1907 ) was the second wife ofAlphonso Taft , and the mother of U.S. PresidentWilliam Howard Taft .Background
She was born in
Boston, Massachusetts , the first daughter of Samuel Davenport Torrey (1789-1877) and his second wife, the former Susan Holman Waters (1803-1866). Her three sisters were Delia Chapin Torry (who married geologistEdward Orton ), Anna Davenport Torrey, and Susan H. Torrey. She graduated fromMount Holyoke College (then "Mount Holyoke Female Seminary") in 1845.Marriage and family life
She married
Alphonso Taft , widowed in 1852, on26 December 1853 inMillbury, Massachusetts , becoming step-mother to his two living sons by his first wife, Fanny Phelps,Charles Phelps Taft , who became the publisher of the "Cincinnati Times-Star " and was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1895 to 1897, and Peter Rawson "Rossy" Taft.They had five children, four of whom lived to adulthood. The first, who died aged 14 months of pertussis, was Samuel Davenport Torrey Taft. The second was President William Howard Taft; next was Henry Waters Taft, who became a lawyer in New York City; fourth was
Horace Dutton Taft , founder of theTaft School inWatertown, Connecticut , and the last was Frances Louis "Fanny" Taft, who married surgeon William A. Edwards.The family lived in Cincinnati during her husband's tenure as judge of the Superior Court of Cincinnati, in
Washington, D. C. when he was, successively, Secretary of War andAttorney General and inAustria-Hungary andRussia when he served as U.S. ambassador there.Death
Louise Taft died at
Millbury, Massachusetts aged 80 years, and was interred atSpring Grove Cemetery , in Cincinnati, Ohio.References
*Gary Boyd Roberts, "Ancestors of American Presidents", First Authoritative Edition, 1995, p. 60.
*Ishbel Ross, "An American Family: The Tafts 1678 to 1964", World Publishing Co., Cleveland, 1964.External links
* [http://www.mtholyoke.edu/~dalbino/torrey.html Louisa Torrey Hall, Mount Holyoke College]
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