[X455M-F]

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Part Of: Miller Family Papers

[X455M-F] Edison, Theodore Miller -- Correspondence (1924)

[This folder has not been completely edited. Two documents have recently been added, and these documents do not have images or complete database information. In addition, the information in the folder target (editorial description) may not be up-to-date.]

These documents consist primarily of letters, telegrams, and postcards from Mina Miller Edison to her youngest son, Theodore. Also included is one letter from Mina to Anna Maria (Ann) Osterhout, whom Theodore met in January 1924 and to whom he became engaged in July, along with a few letters and telegrams by Theodore. The first thirty-four items were written while Theodore was living in Boston, completing his graduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The next eleven items, dating from late June through late July, are addressed to Theodore at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where he was vacationing with Ann and her family. One letter encloses a clipping from the Newark Evening News announcing the engagement. Mina's last ten communications to Theodore, addressed to him in West Orange, were written from upstate New York and from various locations in New England, where the Edisons were vacationing in August with the Ford and Firestone families. The notations "Save" or "Scrap" in Theodore's handwriting appear on most of the envelopes.

The five letters from January discuss plans for the Edisons to join the Fords in a celebration at Longfellow's Wayside Inn—an historic tavern and lodge in Sudbury, Massachusetts, that Henry Ford had purchased a year earlier. Mina's resentment at Ford for planning such events without taking her own schedule into consideration is evident in the correspondence. "I don't think that I can stand any more of the Fords without exploding," she complains in one letter. "I feel like saying to Father dear, take either me or the Fords. This thing of our just moving as they say is getting on my nerves." (The event was subsequently postponed until August because of Mrs. Edsel Ford's appendix operation.)

A letter from February 29, written two days after Mina and Thomas arrived at Seminole Lodge, their winter home in Fort Myers, Florida, contains the first mention of Ann Osterhout. There is also a reference to Julia McGregor McGuire, a young lady whom Theodore had previously been dating and whose mother had grown up with the Miller children in Akron. The same letter includes remarks, both positive and negative, about Mina's house guests at Seminole Lodge—Hal and Grace Miller Hitchcock, Will and Mary Miller Nichols, Edith Edison Potter, and Elizabeth Miller. There are also references to Harvey Firestone, who arrived at Fort Myers in mid-March with company vice president Amos C. Miller and two rubber experts, and to Henry Ford, who could not come down to Florida because of a lawsuit in which he was involved.

The last letter from Fort Myers, as well as the two letters written while Mina was in Washington, D.C., in mid-April, discuss her intention to resign as chaplain-general of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR). Mina had been elected to a three-year term in 1923 with the understanding that it would be largely an honorary position. However, she grew frustrated by the amount of time her duties were taking, with the annual Congress in April forcing the Edisons to cut short their vacation in Florida. As Mina explained to Theodore, "it cuts right into our time down here and father dear does not like it. His years are too short to have separations of this unnecessary kind. When he plays I like to play with him." In a letter written the day after their return to West Orange, Mina notes how happy Thomas looks now that she has given up the DAR, adding "I guess he thinks that I have neglected him." Despite her claim that she was now a "retired lady" and that "home is to be my field from now on," the letters indicate that Mina remained active in several organizations after

Chautauqua Institution Archives, Chautauqua, N.Y. -- Oliver Archives Center

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