Alice Claypoole Vanderbilt
Vanderbilt family member (1845-1934)
Alice Claypoole Vanderbilt (née Gwynne; November 11, 1845 – April 24, 1934) was the wife of Cornelius Vanderbilt II and reigned as the matriarch of the Vanderbilt family for over 60 years.
Early life and relatives
Alice Claypoole Gwynne was born on November 11, 1845, in Cincinnati, Ohio. Alice, who was also raised in Cincinnati, was a daughter of lawyer Abraham Evan Gwynne and his wife, Rachel Moore Flagg. After her father's death in 1855, her mother remarried to Albert Mathews, who wrote under the name Paul Siegvolk. Alice's siblings included David Eli Gwynne, Abram Evan Gwynne, Cettie Moore (née Gwynne) Shepherd, and Edith Olivia (née Gwynne) Gill.
She was a granddaughter of Henry Collins Flagg, a former mayor of New Haven, Connecticut, and a great-great-granddaughter of Major Ebenezer Flagg, who served in the 1st Rhode Island Regiment during the American Revolution and was killed during the Battle of Pine's Bridge in 1781. Her maternal uncles were George Whiting Flagg, a painter, and Jared Bradley Flagg, a real estate developer and also a painter. Through Jared Flagg, she was a first cousin of architect Ernest Flagg.
Alice was from an old Rhode Island family and among her ancestors was Roger Williams, who founded the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, and Samuel Ward Sr., a former Rhode Island Governor. Many Flagg family members are buried in Newport's Island Cemetery.
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This entry incorporates text from “Alice Claypoole Vanderbilt” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.