News of Long Ago - "Stanford White's Burial In St. James"

News of Long Ago by Bradley Harris, Smithtown Historian

(I have been writing about the descendants of Judge John Lawrence Smith.  My most recent articles have been about Stanford White, Bessie Smith’s husband, and his affair with Evelyn Nesbit.  Last week’s article was about Evelyn Nesbit’s marriage to Harry Thaw and the events that led up to Stanford White’s murder on June 25, 1906. This article traces the aftermath of Stanford White’s murder.)   

“Stanford White’s burial in St. James….”

When Stanford White was murdered on June 25, 1906, the story made newspaper headlines around the world.  And when it became clear that a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania millionaire named Harry K. Thaw had shot him because, Thaw claimed, White had been responsible for the “ruination” of many young girls, the story became sensational.  The story of the murder became even more sensational when Harry Thaw revealed that his wife Evelyn Nesbit had been one of the young girls that White had seduced.  

There was never any question about Harry Thaw’s guilt, hundreds of people in the Madison Square Garden Casino Theater had witnessed the shooting, had seen Thaw’s arrest, and he gave statements to the press and police indicating that he shot Stanford White because the famous architect “deserved it” for ruining young girls.  Newspapers began calling the murder “The Crime of the Century” and coverage of the murder, the events that led up to it, the lengthy trials that followed with all their revelations, made sure that the murder did indeed become the Trial of the Century.

For Stanford White’s wife and son, his murder and the sensationalism surrounding it became an ordeal that they endured for the rest of their lives.  For Lawrence Grant White, Stanford’s only heir, the ordeal began the night his father was killed.  Lawrence had been with his father earlier in the evening when they had gone to dinner at the Café Martin.  Following their dinner, Lawrence and his Harvard classmate Leroy King had gone off to see a “George M. Cohan revue at the new Amsterdam” Theater.  Stanford White had decided to go watch the closing numbers of the musical “Mamzelle Champagne” that was playing at the Madison Square Garden Casino Theater.  So Lawrence was not with his father when he was shot that night.  Larry had just returned home to “his family’s townhouse on Gramercy Park at East Twenty-first Street,” when “near midnight” he received a phone call from Madison Square Garden” that “informed him of his father’s death.”  He immediately went to the Casino Theater.  (Michael MacDonald Mooney, Evelyn Nesbit and Stanford White, Love and Death in the Gilded Age, William Murrow and Company, Inc., New York, 1976, p. 231.)

Asked to identify his father’s body, Lawrence was escorted to the table where his father had been sitting and was now lying on the floor, “covered with a dressing gown soaked and stiffening with clotted gore.”  Nineteen-year-old Larry must have been “traumatized” by the experience and then mystified when he was asked about Harry Thaw, “a man he had never seen” and never “heard his father speak of.”  Sometime after seeing his father’s “unbearably still body” on the floor, Larry decided to retrieve his father’s electric hansom from his parking garage at Madison Square Garden and proceeded to drive home to Box Hill in St. James.  “He crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, went north to the Jericho Road, then east to Smithtown and to North Country Road.  It was about 2 A.M. when he finally arrived” at Box Hill in St. James.  (Michael MacDonald Mooney, op. cit., p. 231.)

“He roused his mother and told her his father had been shot.”  Bessie Smith White “seemed to take the news calmly.  She did not ask for details.…  His mother lay on her bed, just staring.”  Early “the next morning, Lawrence drove her to the city” and to the house on Gramercy Park.  “By the time they arrived, there were crowds of newspaper reporters waiting” and “they demanded to see the woman ‘Harry Thaw had made a widow.’”  The media circus surrounding the murder had begun.  (Michael MacDonald Mooney, op. cit., p. 231.)

“On Tuesday afternoon Mrs. White announced through” her husband’s partner “Charles McKIm that funeral services would be held on Thursday at Saint Bartholomew’s at Madison and Forty-fourth Street and the Reverend Leighton I. Parks would officiate.”  But on Wednesday, “the family announced that plans had been changed” and the funeral services “would be held at the Episcopal church in St. James, Long Island, where Mrs. White’s family maintained pews.”  And so at 8 a.m. Thursday morning, “a hearse and two carriages drew up to the door” of the Smith family home at Gramercy Park, Stanford White’s casket was loaded into the hearse, and “Mrs. White’s relations” climbed into the carriages.  “Mr. James Clinch Smith, brother of Mrs. White; Charles S. Butler, nephew of Mrs. White; Mr. and Mrs. Connolly, cousins of Mrs. White; Mr. and Mrs. Barent Lefferts, a daughter of Mrs. Kate Wetherill, another sister of Mrs. White” rode in the carriages.  “The hearse and its two carriages were driven to the East Thirty-fourth Street ferry, then passed to the Long Island side, where a special train was waiting. The casket was placed aboard the train in a combination baggage-smoker, banked by floral tributes, and the car occupied by members of the family. Some 200 hundred friends” of the Whites “filled three day coaches, and when steam was up, the train departed Long Island City, at about 9:15 A.M.  Mrs. Stanford White was not aboard because her son Lawrence had driven her from the city by auto to avoid reporters.”  (Michael MacDonald Mooney, op. cit., pp. 233-234.)

The funeral train arrived at the St. James railroad station about 10:30 where it was met by “about fifty people from the village.”  Local Undertaker Clinton Darling “and six assistants lifted the casket from the train to a hearse, and the funeral cortege started for the” St. James Episcopal Church.  At the corner of Lake Avenue and North Country Road, Lawrence White, driving Mrs. White, wheeled the electric hansom into line at the head of the procession.  “Behind them the road was crowded with every kind of conveyance – hackneys and carriages and autos driven up from the summer colonies in Southampton, or Westbury, or Wheatley Hills.” (Michael MacDonald Mooney, op. cit., p. 234.)

In the Episcopal Church “more than two hundred fifty friends were crowded into straight-backed rows, six pressed into pews designed for five.  Flowers hung everywhere –wreaths of roses, orchids, sweet peas, and calla lilies.  They were set against the simple altar and hung along the plain painted walls and were even suspended from the organ loft at the rear.  From the loft a choir of fourteen voices from Saint Bartholomew’s led the hymns. The Reverend Park, assisted by the Reverend Holden, archdeacon of Saint James, read the services of the dead.  There was no sermon or eulogy.” (Michael MacDonald Mooney, op. cit., p. 234.)

Once the simple service was over, “the six undertaker’s men did their part as pallbearers, hoisting the casket to their shoulders, and the procession formed” for the march to the gravesite in the cemetery.  “The march led from the church down a vista shaded on both sides by rows of yew trees.”  The procession stopped at the freshly dug grave which “stood ready to receive the casket.  At Mrs. White’s request there was no pile of earth visible beside the six foot trench.  The gravediggers had carried it away, concealing the earth behind the privet at the graveyard’s edge.  They had placed evergreen boughs over the discolored soil beside the pit.  When the procession had assembled beside the grave, the coffin was let down into its place, ‘Dust to Dust, Ashes to Ashes’ was said, and a few handfuls of dirt were tossed to complete the ceremony.  The choir led the mourners away, singing ‘Abide with me.’”  (Michael MacDonald Mooney, op. cit., pp. 234-235.)

As the mourners departed, “Mrs. White and her son, Lawrence, lingered a while, as did James Breese and Charles McKIm.  They stood near the head of the open grave, beside a stripling Scotch pine that had been planted there.  Then they too turned back toward the church.  Three gravediggers appeared and bent to their spades.  Stanford White was fifty-two.”  (Michael MacDonald Mooney, op. cit., p. 235.)

Stanford White’s life had come to a shocking end.  It would take a long time for the shock and horror that young Lawrence Grant White experienced the night his father was killed to fade into painful suppressed memory.  In an autobiography that Lawrence White wrote for his children in 1932, he made this comment:  “My father’s tragic death at the end of my sophomore year [at Harvard] changed all our plans.”  That is the only reference he made to the tragedy of that night in his autobiography.  Clearly the memories of that night of June 25, 1906 were still painful and still being suppressed 26 years later.  But you will have to wait until next week to find out how Stanford White’s death “changed all our plans.” (Lawrence Grant White, Memoirs of Lawrence Grant White, 1932, Volume I, “Before the War, 1887-1914,” on file in the Long Island Room of the Smithtown Library.)