Caroline Phelps Stokes, an American philantropist, who together with her sister Olivia contributed with great generosity to many different institutions and were engaged in welfare.
Background
Caroline Phelps Stokes was born on December 4, 1854 at Clifton Cottage, on the East River near 30th Street, New York City, New York, United States; the sixth and the youngest of the ten children of James Boulter and Caroline (Phelps) Stokes. Their father was a wealthy banker, real estate owner, and philanthropist; their mother was a daughter of Anson Greene Phelps. Two of their brothers were Anson Phelps Stokes and William Earl Dodge Stokes. The sisters were devoted to each other, were much alike in character and interests, cooperated on many philanthropic projects, and, since neither of them married, were seldom separated.
After their father's death in 1881 they traveled extensively in the United States and Europe, visited Palestine, and in 1896 made a trip around the world.
Education
She attended boarding school at Farmington, Connecticut at the same time as her second cousin, Grace Hoadley Dodge, who later became an important figure in the history of female education and reform.
Career
Both sisters had a taste for writing, Caroline producing a novel, Travels of a Lady's Maid (1908), Olivia the Letters and Memories of Susan and Anna Bartlett Warner (1925), an unpublished memoir of her sister, and three small books of devotion. From both sides of their family they inherited strong religious feeling and many active philanthropic interests. Out of their ample fortune they made innumerable gifts to religious, educational, charitable, and other public enterprises. Among their principal benefactions were St. Paul's Chapel of Columbia University, Woodbridge Hall at Yale University, the chapel of Berea College, Dorothy Hall at Tuskegee Institute, the chapel at Yale in China, the gymnasium at the Constantinople Woman's College, Caroline Cottage at the New York Colored Orphan Asylum, the Haynes Memorial Gates at the First Church Cemetery in Hartford, Connecticut, the open-air pulpit at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, and the public library at Ansonia, Connecticut and others. The welfare of the Indian, the negro, the poor whites of the South, and the slum-dwellers of New York were their most abiding concern, and with her residuary estate Caroline endowed the Phelps-Stokes Fund for their care. Olivia became the chief patron of the Fund. At the turn of the century Caroline's health began to decline, and she spent the rest of her life at Redlands, Cal. , where she died in 1909 in her fifty-fifth year. Olivia survived her by more than eighteen years, dying at her winter residence in Washington, D. C. , in her eighty-first year.
Religion
They were members of the Presbyterian Church but in later years felt drawn more and more to the liturgical worship and devotional life fostered by the Episcopal Church.
