My girl Cornelia

I'm spending the next three months working as a curatorial intern at Grey Towers, a national historic site in Milford, PA. Grey Towers was the summer home and personal headquarters for Gifford Pinchot, the first Chief of the U.S. Forest Service and twice-elected governor of PA. You'll be hearing a lot about old Giff and his lovely home (and it is truly lovely) from me over the next three months, but for now I want to talk about my newest best friend: Gifford's wife, Cornelia Bryce Pinchot.

Cornelia Bryce was the type of girl people (generally old genial grandfathers with pipes and smoking jackets, at least in my imagination) would have referred to as a "firecracker" one hundred years ago. They would have said, gleefully yet still patronizingly, that she had "moxie." I'm free, however, to call her what she was: one bad-ass lady on a mission.

Born in 1881 during a time when women were elevated on pedestals of purity even as they were denied basic democratic rights, she resented her parents for denying her an education, talked politics and smoked cigars with the men, and refused to marry until she was 33. She was also a suffragette - on Friday my job was to sort through and scan old photographs of Cornelia, and one of my favorites is her at the front of an army of women carrying American flags and signs reading "Pennsylvania Woman Suffrage Association."

When she finally did marry it was to Gifford Pinchot, a man 15 years her senior who respected her intelligence and was more than happy to let her use their collective wealth (a great deal of it hers) to further her political and social goals. And further them she did. She campaigned heavily for her husband when he ran for governor, and as first lady of Pennsylvania she got involved in policy issues concerning child labor and sweatshops. In fact, during Pinchot's second term as governor (interrupted by a break because in PA governors were banned from succeeding themselves) she even traveled to New York to take part in a labor strike against a factory that refused to let its employees (mostly women and children) unionize.

Cornelia wasn't nearly as successful as she was enthusiastic. She ran for Congress twice, losing both times both because she was a woman but also because her campaign was more idealistic than it was political savvy. Still, a lady representative in 1925ish? Awesome. She also founded her own free experimental school for Pennsylvania's children, adamantly campaigned for child labor laws, and was the tackiest interior decorator ever. The majority of the Grey Tower interiors that we have conserved (or reconstructed to the best of our ability) in the house are interiors that she designed when she moved in, and man, are they silly. Every time I walk past the painted-marble treatment on the walls of the sitting room or duck under one of the enormous elk heads that she mounted at the entry, I giggle and imagine Cornelia crying out at the movers or painters in her posh East Coast accent, "NO, I want them to look MORE noble, more impressive - make them appear HUGE!" And then she probably kicked them out of the house in frustration and just did the job herself. She was delightfully tacky, and her heavy-handed approach to interior design pops up unrepentantly throughout the house.

So, Cornelia Bryce Pinchot. Feminist, rabble-rouser, unapologetically brash and unsubtle, and my favorite thing about Grey Towers (so far.)