Distinguished Guests

Woodrow Wilson, the 28th President of the United States, was the most famous non-artist to stay at the Griswold boardinghouse. He came to Old Lyme along with his first wife, Ellen Axson Wilson, who was training to be an artist. During their first visit in 1905, the family stayed at another boardinghouse, but by 1909 Woodrow and his family were frequent guests at the Griswold House. Woodrow Wilson was the President of Princeton University during his first visits, after which he was elected Governor of New Jersey in 1910 and then President of the United States in 1912. Much of his political decision making happened while on holiday in Old Lyme between rounds of golf and communal meals enjoyed with the artists. The artists called him Colonel Wilson. About the artists Wilson remarked, “They are very easy to make friends with, -- and I hope I am.”

“At that moment, pervading the house was the sweet, penetrating odor of wild grapes cooking. Miss Florence, a slim figure with dark untidy hair and intense black eyes, was bent over the old coal stove busy with her yearly batch of jelly. All was quiet when a loud rap of the front door knocker jarred the stillness. In a moment, Miss Florence, wiping her hands on her dingy apron, entered the high, well-proportioned hall which ran straight through the house to a side porch at the rear. She pushed the heavy, wavy hair off her neck. Then, looking up, she stepped forward with hands outstretched as Woodrow Wilson, the President of the United States, adjusting his pince-nez, crossed the porch and came over the worn threshold.”

~ Biographer Carolyn Ranlet Wyckoff, 1917

In Old Lyme Ellen was treated more like an artist than the art student she was. Only professional artists were permitted to stay at the Griswold boardinghouse. Students and dilettantes could come for meals, but they needed to find housing elsewhere in the village. Her teacher, Frank DuMond also arranged for her to have her own studio, a luxury not available for most students. Despite her hard work, the artist William Chadwick remarked, “although Mrs. Wilson thought that she painted well, she was not really good.” Other artists staying with her at the boardinghouse commented that her work was “no longer that of an amateur” and that it was better than “a good deal of that in the exhibitions.”

“How Ellen (Axson Wilson), with her exquisite sense of order, endured ‘Miss Florence’s’ where we boarded is still an unexplained mystery. The house was literally tumbling about our ears; from month’s end to month’s end no scrubbing brush touched the wide boards of the century-old floors; the two bathrooms were old enough to be rated archeological specimens; the food was awful beyond words; and service was non-existent.”

~ Author Margaret Axson Ellion,
Woodrow Wilson’s Sister-in-Law, 1944

The Wilsons’ three daughters, Margaret, Jessie and Nell, often traveled with their parents to Old Lyme and became acquainted with the artists. One summer, Jessie posed for the sculptor Bessie Potter Vonnoh for a small bronze statue. The three daughters are featured together in a painting by George Burr titled President Wilson’s Daughters (c. 1910) that was quickly rendered during a picnic excursion in Hamburg just north of Old Lyme. They are shown drying their swimming clothes and hair around a blazing bon fire. Years later, Margaret would invite Miss Florence to Washington, D.C., to be an honored guest at her wedding. 

“I want to tell you that the summer we spent with you is one of the happiest I have ever spent and will always be a perfectly delightful memory. The informal life at your house is just the kind that suits me down to the ground. I do hope that we shall be able to go to Lyme and to ‘the Holy House’ very often. In fact I never should go to Lyme at all unless we could stay with you.”

~ Woodrow Wilson's Daughter Margaret, 1908

“No matter what new and delicious dishes were offered, Woodrow Wilson always wanted his shredded wheat. So one Sunday morning when it was my turn to wait on table, I selected a nice little bunch of excelsior from a newly arrived packing case, put it in a bowl, poured cream over it, and served it to the future President of the United States. But he didn’t detect it until he tried to force it apart with his spoon.” 

~ Artist and Author Arthur Heming in Miss Florence
and the Artists of Old Lyme, c. 1938

Meet the people of the boardinghouse by clicking choices below:

• Overview
• Miss Florence
• The Artists
• Distinguished Guests
• Domestic Staff
• Female Artists
• Non-Boarding Guests