After the wedding, they settled in Jamestown, where John was co-owner of a grocery store dealing in tea, fruit, molasses and salt, among other products. John and Sarah Grant’s lives probably did not turn out exactly as they envisioned. I’m angry when there’s a line at Starbucks.” I can’t imagine what it was like just to make breakfast. I’m sure there were struggles just to get by. Her brother David Marshall Grant, an actor you might recognize from “The Devil Wears Prada" or his Tony-nominated performance as Joe Pitt in “Angels in America,” said: “I would guess, looking at those portraits, that it was a less joyful time.
See the announcement in the first issue of The New-York Daily Times. When I explained my reason for calling, she said she had no idea the Grants had appeared in the newspaper’s first wedding announcement. Haskell to inquire about John and Sarah Grant, she was flummoxed I think she thought I was trying to sell her a Times subscription.
Haskell said, adding that the portraits were probably painted soon after the wedding. “I think they are trying to project importance, status and prestige,” Ms. Each is wearing black, and a similarly dour and humorless expression, as if they had whispered to each other beforehand, “Don’t smile!” Today, oil portraits of John and Sarah hang side by side in the New Haven family room of Wendy Grant Haskell, 63, who is a psychotherapist and the Grants’ great-great-granddaughter.
Grant, then an Army lieutenant, who would go on to become a general and president. The bridegroom was a cousin of Ulysses S. He eventually became a State Supreme Court justice. He grew up on a farm in Vermont, the oldest of 13 children, and made his way to Fredonia, where he became a self-taught lawyer (such a thing was possible in those days). The bride’s father, James, epitomized upward mobility. So why were John and Sarah the chosen ones?īased on old newspaper clippings and census reports, it appears that the Mulletts were a prominent family in Fredonia. Kermit Roosevelt of 9 Sutton Place,” after the ceremony at the Little Church.Įmily Yellin is a longtime contributor to The New York Times, and the author of the book “ Our Mothers’ War: American Women at Home and at the Front During World War II.” Roosevelt Is Wed To Artist" (June 9, 1945)Īnd in another nod to wartime austerity within this privileged family, “a small reception was given at the home of the bride’s aunt, Mrs. The Times reported that the couple had “dispensed with attendants” in a ceremony “witnessed only by immediate relatives.” The bride wore “a brown faille suit, and straw hat with brown veiling,” instead of a typical wedding gown. She was the granddaughter of former President Theodore Roosevelt, and a cousin of Eleanor Roosevelt. Ray presided at Theodora Roosevelt’s wedding to an artist. Hall & Son/New-York Historical Society, via Getty Images The Episcopal Church of the Transfiguration, affectionately known as the Little Church Around the Corner, on East 29th Street. The few weddings at the Little Church that were notable enough to be written up in The New York Times reflected that shift. Stories abounded throughout the country of small wedding cakes baked with rationed ingredients, and of brides wearing modest, nontraditional dresses, some even made of silk from the parachutes that had saved their grooms in battle. While wartime romance continued to win out, the pomp of the ceremony was rarely the point. In 1944, he even wrote, “Marriage Is a Serious Business,” a book for young couples in which he warned, “The hasty marriage, caused by glamour and excitement rather than by genuine affection, is one of the evil products of war.” Still, the rector tried to apply some prewar standards to the thousands of wartime marriages he sanctioned. Read “June Weddings Up by 50% At Church Around Corner” (June 30, 1943) Randolph Ray, said that three ceremonies in the morning and three in the afternoon represented a “quiet midweek schedule” for him. In 19, more than 2,000 weddings were performed at the Church of the Transfiguration, the Little Church’s official name. And two-thirds of those brides were marrying men newly enlisted in the military.įew places epitomized this wartime rush to the altar more than the affectionately named Little Church Around the Corner, on East 29th Street, between Madison and Fifth Avenues in Manhattan, where couples would line up in the Episcopal church’s ivy-covered courtyard, awaiting their turn. In 1942 alone, 1.8 million weddings took place, up 83 percent from 10 years before. Once the United States joined World War II, the urge to get married among many young couples proved too compelling to resist.