Antoinette Polk, Baroness de Charette was an American Southern belle in the Antebellum South and French aristocrat in the Gilded Age.
Background
Antoinette Wayne Van Leer Polk was born on October 27, 1847 in Nashville, Tennessee. Her father, Colonel Andrew Jackson Polk, was a planter who served in the Confederate States Army. Her mother, Rebecca Van Leer, was an heiress to an iron fortune from Cumberland Furnace.
Polk grew up at Ashwood Hall, a mansion in Ashwood near Columbia in Maury County, Tennessee with her parents and brother, Vanleer Polk.
Her paternal great-uncle, James K. Polk served as the 11th President of the United States from 1845 to 1849.
Bishop Leonidas Polk, who served as a General in the Confederate States Army, was her uncle. She was also a descendant of William Penn, the founder of the state of Pennsylvania, and General Anthony Wayne, a Commander-in-Chief in the American Revolutionary War.
Career
Born into the planter elite, the great-niece of the 11th President of the United States James K. Polk, and an heiress to plantations in Tennessee, she was a "Southern heroine" who saved Confederate States Army personnel during the American Civil War of 1861-1865. After the war, she moved to Europe, where she took to foxhunting in the Roman Campagna of Italy and the English countryside, and later became a Baroness and socialite in Paris and Britanny. During the American Civil War of 1861-1865, while visiting Mary Polk Branch, the wife of Confederate Colonel Lawrence O"Bryan Branch, she saw Northern forces on their way to Ashwood.
Polk got on a horse and rode there before the Northerners to warn the Confederate soldiers of their arrival.
As a result, she is credited as a "Southern heroine" for saving Confederate personnel. She also participated in fox hunting in the English countryside.
She died on February 3, 1919 at her Château de la Basse-Mothe in Brittany, France. Her son Antoinette inherited her Southern plantations.
Her miniature portrait was exhibited alongside others as part of a special exhibition of the Peter Marié Collection showing socialites of the Gilded Age from November 11, 2011 to September 9, 2012 at the New York Historical Society in New York City.
