Caroline Scott Harrison was the wife of the 23rd United States President Benjamin Harrison, and thus a First Lady of the United States of America. She secured funding for an extensive renovation of the White House and oversaw the work.
Background
Caroline Lavinia Scott was born on October 1, 1832, in Oxford, Ohio, the second daughter of John W. Scott, a Presbyterian minister, and Mary Potts Neal Scott. Reverend Scott was founder of the Oxford Female Institute, where Carrie later studied, and where, after graduating, she briefly taught piano classes. Her father was a longtime professor at Miami University in Oxford. He was teaching there at the time of Caroline’s birth and was still there eighteen years later, teaching the physical sciences, when Benjamin Harrison arrived.
Career
An accomplished pianist and painter, Caroline “Carrie” Harrison blended her interest in the arts with the growing sense of national history that accompanied her husband’s presidential administration. Benjamin Harrison was called the “centennial president,” having taken office one hundred years after the first American president, George Washington.
Carrie Harrison supported the founding of the Daughters of the American Revolution, a group that helps preserve items and places of historical significance, and she served as the group’s first president. She applied its historical service to the White House: Among other accomplishments, she designed the china pattern used for place settings during her husband’s presidency and she gathered examples of dinnerware from past administrations. The china collection she started has since grown into one of the more visually informative displays on exhibit at the White House.
The White House had undergone alternating periods of grandeur and neglect. It was described as “barracks” just ten years earlier by President Chester A. Arthur, who introduced many improvements. Under Carrie Harrison’s direction, the executive mansion was transformed into its modern status as a stately manor filled with historically significant artifacts and artworks. As the nation moved into a second century of Constitutional government, an especially appropriate symbol of progress was introduced to the White House when Carrie Harrison supervised the installation of electricity.
Views
Quotations:
“We have within ourselves the only element of destruction, our foes are from within, not from without. Our hope is in unity and self- sacrifice. ”