Beautiful, smart, wealthy and vivacious, Nellie Crouse had her pick of suitors.
She revealed her choice in the most opulent of displays.
Wedding bells pealed June 16, 1897, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church at East Market and South Forge streets. The Rev. Charles W. Hollister, rector of the lavishly decorated church, performed the rites before “a large company of the most fashionable people of Akron.”
Former U.S. Rep. George W. Crouse, one of the city’s leading industrialists, walked his daughter down the aisle to the soaring strains of a pipe organ and 30-man choir.
Covered with a Venetian veil and carrying a bouquet of sweet peas, the bride was a vision in white silk and lace. The dashing groom, Samuel Emlen Carpenter, a real-estate baron from Philadelphia, received her hand at the altar.
“No lovelier or more inspiring scene was ever witnessed in this city; the brilliant gowns of the bride and maid of honor, the banks of varied colored flowers and green potted plants, the silent and interested group at the altar, the stillness through the church and the solemn tones of the rector’s voice all blended to make it an ideal wedding picture,” the Beacon Journal and Republican newspaper reported.
Afterward, the newlyweds boarded a horse-drawn carriage and traveled around the block for a reception at the Crouse mansion at 263 E. Mill St., across from Union Park.
There was no hint that the bride had entertained second thoughts in recent days.
According to family lore, Stephen Crane, author of The Red Badge of Courage, had traveled to Akron in a last-ditch attempt to talk the fair maiden out of getting married.
The wedding was her reply.
Crane and Crouse met in early 1895 at a tea party in New York City. He was 23, a New Jersey native whose first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, had won acclaim two years earlier, and whose new books, The Red Badge of Courage and The Black Riders, were about to be published. She was 21, a refined product of Mount Vernon College for Women in Washington, D.C.
Following an afternoon of polite conversation, Crane was smitten with the Midwest native. They parted company, but Crane couldn’t stop thinking about the dark-haired beauty.
Crane struck up a correspondence with Crouse and began to flirt with her shamelessly over a three-month span. Preserved in the Syracuse University archives, his seven existing letters are prized among scholars for their literary flair and glimpses into the author’s personal life. Although Crouse’s replies were not saved, her responses can be inferred from Crane’s later notes.
“I do not suppose you will be overwhelmed with distinction when I tell you that your name is surrounded with much sentiment for me,” he declared in his first letter.
Crane said Crouse reminded him of a girl he once saw during a trip to Mexico, a sight that “nearly caused me to drop dead.” Yes, it was a variation of the “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?” pickup line.
He asked Crouse whether she knew the address for Akron native Lucius L. Button, a mutual acquaintance who had introduced them at the tea party, then later admitted it was just a pretext to get her to respond.
In a second letter, Crane solicited constructive criticism while flattering the woman he had seen only once.
“I will be glad to send you things of mine,” he wrote. “Not because I think you will refrain from advising one either. But simply because I would enjoy it — sending them, I mean. I think your advice would have a charm to it that I do not find in some others.”
Crane mentioned that he might soon be headed west toward Buffalo, N.Y.
“This route leads through Akron, as I distinctly remember,” he wrote. “Furthermore … if you will please tell me that Akron is not far from Buffalo, I will make an afternoon — or possibly evening — call on you.”
In his third letter, Crane offered frank praise of Crouse as “charming,” “very attractive” and “a person of remarkably strong personality.”
“I would like to know you,” Crane wrote. “And when Akron becomes possible to me, I shall invade Akron. You will feel embarrassed. I’ll bet on it.”
In the fourth letter, Crane asked Crouse to send him a portrait of herself to reward him for showing “such reserved and unreserved, conditional and unconditional devotion.”
When Crouse mailed back a photo, Crane was overjoyed and thanked her profusely.
“Yes, indeed, I am awed,” he replied. “There is something in your face which tells that there are many things which you perfectly understand which perhaps I don’t understand at all.”
Things began to sour by the sixth letter. Crouse apparently had rebuffed Crane, saying she preferred “men of fashion” more than “other kinds.” Crane responded with a scolding diatribe against society leaders, calling them “barbarians, savages, beating little silly tom-toms and flourishing little carved wooden goblins.”
He ended the epic letter with a hint that he wouldn’t mind taking a boat trip someday to Europe with Crouse.
Not a good move. Crouse broke off the relationship.
“I am in despair,” a jilted Crane wrote in his final letter March 1, 1896. “The storm-beaten little robin who has no place to lay his head does not feel so badly as do I.”
Crane said he had succeeded “in making a new kind of an idiot” out of himself and he could not find the “joy of living.”
“I am simply a man struggling with a life that is no more than a mouthful of dust to him,” he wrote.
Over the next year, Nellie Crouse rekindled a relationship with Samuel Emlen Carpenter, whom she met a decade earlier at a college prom at Harvard. Carpenter was a football and baseball star who graduated from Harvard Law School in 1890.
Akron’s high society turned out for the 1897 wedding. The married couple settled in Ridgefield, Conn., where they had six children.
Crane worked as a newspaper correspondent in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. He met Cora Taylor, a twice-divorced proprietor of a seedy Florida hotel, who became his common-law wife. After he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, Crane’s health declined rapidly. He was only 28 when he died in 1900.
Nellie Carpenter’s life wasn’t a fairy tale, either. In 1914, she divorced her husband and moved the children to Philadelphia. She lived in Paris for a few years before returning to America, dying in 1943 at age 70 in Philadelphia.
Daughter Edith Carpenter Lundgren tied up a few loose ends for scholars in a 1953 letter to Syracuse University.
“It is difficult to say if Mother was actually considering marrying Crane or not,” Lundgren wrote. “She was so beautiful and vivacious and had so many admirers that possibly it would be safe to say she was considering marrying him, until my father came along and was more successful in sweeping her off her feet than Crane was.”
The Carpenter children were raised on stories about Crane’s love for their mother. According to one tale, the author finally did visit Akron.
Outrageously, he thought he could talk a bride-to-be into reconsidering a former suitor.
“Yes!” Lundgren confirmed. “Crane did visit her in Akron just before she married my father.”
She told him to get lost. Just like a novel, it was the end.
Beacon Journal copy editor Mark J. Price is the author of The Rest Is History: True Tales From Akron’s Vibrant Past, a book from the University of Akron Press. He can be reached at 330-996-3850 or send email to mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.
