Eva Ingersoll

September 22, 2012

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On this date in 1864, Eva Ingersoll (later Ingersoll-Brown) was the first of two daughters born to freethought great Robert G. Ingersoll and Eva Wakefield Ingersoll. Both Eva and her younger sister Maud shared the same middle name: Robert. Ingersoll, who was a celebrated family man, recorded in a diary in 1875 during a trip abroad: "Today my darling Eva is twelve years old. We all gave her twelve kisses a piece and one to grow on. We gave her the same number of slaps and told her how dearly we love her." The girls were gently tutored. When the family moved to Washington, D.C., from Illinois, they received lessons in music, art, German, French and Italian, piano and singing. Young Eva, a pleasing soprano, who, like her father, enjoyed public performance, toyed with a concert career. As a young woman, she was described by the St. Louis Globe-Democrat as "a most decided beauty, being of that fresh, dewy-eyed and virginal type that the English painters depict" (March 31, 1881). In 1889, Eva married Walston Hill Brown, a well-to-do builder of railroads, and an agnostic. His wedding gift to Eva: a spacious estate known as Castle Walston on the Hudson River at Dobbs Ferry, New York. It was a measure of the family devotion that before the marriage, all parties arranged that the newly-weds would live with the Ingersolls six months, and the Ingersolls would live with the Browns for six months. Homesick Eva cut short her honeymoon after two weeks. Eva, a feminist and suffragist, became a prominent humanitarian in New York, working with the Advisory Board of the New York Peace Society, the Women's Trade Union League, the National Child Labor Committee and its New York chapter, the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and the Society for the Advancement of the Colored People. She was one-time president of the Child Welfare League. D. 1928.

“Tell them that they are my Holy Trinity comprising the only Deity I worship.”

— 1870 letter from Robert G. Ingersoll to his wife, about her and their two daughters. Source: American Infidel: Robert G. Ingersoll, by Orvin Larson.

Compiled by Annie Laurie Gaylor - www.ffrf.org