Wife of the Rev. Dr. Frank Montrose Clendenin. Daughter of Horace Greeley and Mary G. (Cheney) Greeley.
"MRS. CLENDENIN, DAUGHTER OF GREELEY, DEAD
Tribune Founder's Youngest Child Was 79, Widow of Episcopal Clergyman
Last of Family of Seven
Lived on Chappagua Estate, Wrote Life of Her Father
CHAPPAQUA, N. Y., March 5.-
Mrs. Gabrielle Greeley Clendenin, daughter of Horace Greeley, founder of The New York Tribune, died here today at her home, Rehobeth House. She was Seventy-nine years old and had been an invalid for several years.
Mrs. Clendenin, widow of the Rev. Dr. Frank Montrose Clendenin would have observed her eightieth birthday on March 26. She was the youngest of the seven Greeley children and the last to survive. Five of the children had died before Mr. Greeley's own death in 1872. Mrs. Clendenin's elder sister, Ida, died in 1883.
Mrs. Clendenin was born in New York City. The Greeley family lived in East Eighteenth Street at the time, but while Gabrielle Greeley was still a child, her parents moved to a summer home in Chappaqua, and she lived here most of her life.
Home on Greeley Estate
The present Rehoboth House originally was planned and built as a barn on the Greeley estate, but it was constructed with materials of great strength and permanence, and the owners decided to remodel and rebuild it for a dwelling after the first Greeley home had been destroyed by fire. It attracted much attention as the first barn in America to be built of concrete, the mixture being made with oyster shells.
The age-darkened desk on which Horace Greeley penned his fighting editorials stood in the reception room of the house, and many other Greeley relics were kept there.
Mrs. Clendenin was married to the Rev. Frank M. Clendenin, then rector of St. Peter's Church, 2511 Westchester Avenue, Westchester, the Bronx, on April 23, 1891. Dr. Clendenin held that position until his retirement, in 1917. After he had given up active church duties, he and Mrs. Clendenin interested themselves in civic and historical projects. The Horace Greeley Collection in the Library of Congress was their gift. It includes many books and pamphlets by or about the editor, bound volumes of "The New-Yorker" and "The Jeffersonian," periodicals which he edited, and sets of scrapbooks, lecture notes and letters in his handwritting.
Gave Church in Chappaqua
In memory of their daughter, Muriel and son Gabriel, both of whom died in childhood, Mrs. Clendenin and her husband gave to the Episcopal Diocese of New York the Church of St Mary the Virgin at Chappaqua. The structure built in 1916, is a reproduction of Monken Hadley, twenty miles north of London, and a 500-year-old window from the original church was sent to be used in the American building.
The church stands on a former part of the Greeley estate. Four acres of land accompanied the gift, the Clendenin family retaining a burial plot in the yard back of the chancel. There Dr. Clendenin was buried after his death on August 19, 1930. He and Mrs. Clendenin had planned to take a prominent part in a celebration that autumn of Chappaqua's 200th anniversary. Mrs. Clendenin did serve as official hostess for the occasion, but made only a brief appearance at the formal opening of a new bridge in the village.
The last public ceremony she attended was on February 3, 1932, in commemoration of the 121st anniversary of her father's birth. She was guest of honor when Typographical Union No. 6, which was founded by Horace Greeley, met to place a wreath on the editor's statue at Broadway and Thirty-third Street.
Active in 1928 Campaign
A few years earlier Mrs. Clendenin had taken an active interest in public affairs, in 1928 even undertaking a little campaigning for Herbert Hoover in the Presidential election. Mrs. Clendenin also was the author of "Greeleyana," an account of her father's life and career.
Her daughter Gabrielle was married in 1918 to Edward C. Stahl, son of Henry A. Stahl, of New York City. Mrs. Stahl died on August 4, 1920, a few months after the birth of a son. The grandson, Frank Canning Greeley Stahl, is Mrs. Clendenin's only surviving relative in the direct line.
Funeral services will be held at 11 a. m. Sunday in the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, at Chappaqua, with a requiem mass to be sung by the Rev. Emmons Parkman Burrill, rector. Burial will be in the churchyard."
"The Last Child of Horace Greeley
With the death of Mrs. Gabrielle Greeley Glendenin there passes the last child of Horace Greeley. His name was to be borne by hundreds, perhaps thousands, of men on whom it was bestowed by admiring parents in the days when the founder of The New-York Tribune was at the height of his fame and power; but of seven children of his own he was to see only two daughters reach maturity. Death dealt cruelly with Greeley. But Mrs. Clendenin, the younger of these two daughters, was to reach the age of seventy-nine before passing away at last, on that same famous farm at Chappaqua where most of her life was spent and which was to become so important a part of the Greeley story.
No book on Greeley, beginning with his own "Recollections of a Busy Life," fails to describe the farm at Chappaqua, where the great editor fled, when he could, for his Saturdays "of rest and exercise" at a time when commuting was in its infancy and the week-end habit was unknown. "My farm" he called it, lying "nine miles above White Plains and thirty-five N. N. E., of our City Hall," where "the Harlem Railroad, when nearly abreast of the village of Sing Sing, crosses a quite small, though pretty constant millstream, named by the Indians Chappaqua." There Greeley chopped his trees ("the ax is the healthiest implement that man ever handled, and is especially so for habitual writers and other sedentary workers"), fragmentarily pursued "that blessed calling whereby the human family and its humbler auxiliaries are fed," or brought occasional guests for a vegetarian picnic or to look at his barn-"built wholly of stones laid in a box with a thin mortar binding the whole into a solid mass.
There is a pleasant engraving in the "Recollections" of that early example of poured-concrete construction, which was to survive so well that it was ultimately converted into the main dwelling. There Mrs. Clendenin lived her own active life, at the same time gathering, with her husband, many Greeley relics, including the Horace Greeley collection presented to the Library of Congress. There she has now died, the last of Horace Greeley's children. But the concrete building stands, no less secure than the great name of her father who built it."
The Herald Tribune. 6 March 1937