S.R. Durand: "My father's mother was born on November 2, 1838 in New York City, the fifth and youngest child of Dr. Benjamin Moore McVickar and Isaphene Catherine (Lawrence) McVickar. As a small child, she lived in Westchester County on her parents' estate, and in their New York City home. Both her mother and father had several married brothers and sisters, and my grandmother had many close friends among the many cousins of her age; these friendships she kept up all her life. When she was only 8 years old, in 1846, the family moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. When I was young, my grandmother often told me about large Indian encampments that arose each year in Milwaukee, at what is now the vicinity of Juneau Avenue and Milwaukee Street - only a short distance from her home. She told me, too, about the hard work that young ladies of her age did during the Civil War, making bandages and knitting scarves for soldiers. Along with other young ladies, she visited encampments of the Union army to distribute packages of special food and clothing. She was also one of a group of ladies who organized a soldiers' hospital. After the war, this hospital became a home for disabled veterans, and is still a veterans' home at Wood, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee. My grandmother was a very handsome young lady, quite tall and slim, with dark hair and eyes. She and her two older sisters, Cornelia and Anna, were considered to be among the few most cultured and lovely young ladies in Milwaukee. My grandmother was married to Loyal Root Durand on September 3, 1866 in St. Paul's Episcopal Church. My father was born March 31, 1868, and his brother, Samuel Benjamin Durand, was born August 21, 1870. My grandfather died on November 19, 1871. He had only recently purchased a home for his family, but after his death my grandmother sold it. She instead built a house facing Cass Street, in back of her father's house, which faced Van Buren Street and lay at the southeast corner of Van Buren Street and Juneau Avenue. Her mother had died on September 18, 1868; so it must have been nice for her father, a widower living with servants in a large mansion, to have a daughter and two small grandsons next door. Along with her father, my grandmother was very active in the work of St. Paul's Episcopal Church and the diocese of Milwaukee. She was one of the founders of St. John's Episcopal Home for the Aged and of the Women's Club of Wisconsin, and served on the governing boards of these organizations for many years. She entrusted for investment her inheritance from her husband of $60,000 in life insurance to his younger brother, William Timothy Durand, who made some land speculations without success. The result was that most of the money was gone by the time my father and his brother had finished their college educations at the University of Wisconsin. When Dad's brother entered the University of Wisconsin in 1887, his mother gave up her home in Milwaukee and bought a home at the bend on Langdon Street in Madison. This enabled her to economize somewhat in providing college educations for her two sons, as well as providing a home for them during their university years. Her home became a meeting place for the Sigma Chis, and a place where many parties and dances were held. She spent summers with her two sons at Nashotah Lake, renting a home on the Nashotah Seminary grounds. In 1900, my father's brother, Samuel Benjamin Durand, died at the age of 30 in Denver. He had been afflicted with lung trouble from silicosis, and unknown disease in those days. My grandmother and his wife were with him for many months during his attempt to recuperate in Denver, and it must have been very sad for my grandmother to have lost a son of about the same age as that of her husband at his death. My grandmother came to live with us when we moved into the Lake Drive home [in 1906], and Dad became her sole support. Each summer from the time I was about 7 until about 16 years of age, we spent several weeks in the country in cottages rented on one of the lakes west of Milwaukee...my father spent the week in Milwaukee, where his mother with the servants maintained our home. All of her life after her husband's death, she wore only black mourning clothes. However, until very old age and very poor health, she was always a cheerful and pleasant person. She became quite deaf in the last years of her life. Among my earliest remembrances of my grandmother were the times she took me and my brother on the hour-long streetcar ride to the Soldiers' Home. These were exciting adventures for us, because we could stand on the streetcar alongside the motorman and pretend we were helping operate it. While my grandmother was having tea with friends including Mrs. Sharp, the wife of the commander of the home, General Sharp, we wandered about talking to old Civil War soldiers and hearing accounts from them of battles they had fought in. My grandmother had friends come in for tea most every afternoon when we were very young. We were allowed to come in for a cookie or a small piece of cake, and very weak tea with lots of warm milk. Tea, when guests were invited, was served in what we called the reception room instead of in the large parlor. This room was sort of considered my grandmother's special room until my parents purchased a piano and Victrola, when we called it the music room. When we were very young, my grandmother spent part of each year visiting relatives in the East. She had several very wealthy Lawrence and McVickar cousins who had summer homes at Newport, Rhode Island and Bar Harbor, Maine. She also visited her Hillhouse cousins in New Haven and her Wells cousins in upstate New York, at Constableville. And after 1910, when my father's aunts Jane and Louise Durand left Milwaukee to live with their widowed younger sister Hannah (Durand) Gould, she would stop in to see them in Rochester, New York, too. Occasionally my grandmother would go on Sunday picnics with us, but she never seemed to belong in the country; with her long black dress, black coat, and black bonnet tied under her chin, she seemed ill-suited to the gaiety of a picnic. Sometimes we would leave her for most of the day to visit her old friends in their country homes, returning late in the afternoon to pick her up. Much of the beautiful antique Lawrence and McVickar furniture, silverware, and china that graced our home had been inherited by my grandmother from her parents. Some of it she purchased from her sister Anna (Mrs. McCarter), at a time just before World War I when this widowed sister left the United States to make her home in Eastbourne, England, with her only daughter (Mrs. William Pond). This sister died in a bombing raid by zeppelins on Eastbourne in 1915. Many of the books in the large built-in bookcases on either side of the fireplace in our parlor were inherited by my grandmother from her father. My grandmother was named for her mother's sister, Maria Elizabeth, who married the Right Reverend William I. Kip, who from 1853 until 1893 was the Episcopal Bishop of California. He was my grandmother's godfather, and I have some letters and some books that he authored and sent to her. One outstanding characteristic of my grandmother was her intense love and devotion to her family, relatives, and friends. She was truly a lady of the highest culture of her day and age. She died at the age of 82, on January 29, 1920."

Facts about this person:

Burial 1920 Milwaukee, Milwaukee Co., WI