The time-traveler Martha Lord Miller
To celebrate her 106th birthday, Martha Lord Miller gathered with a small group of friends at her home in Larchmont, New York, where she read Longfellow and other poetry to her guests. Then, she cut into a big birthday cake, “bearing one giant candle and six small ones,” and read her telegrams from friends around the world. She did not have a glass of champagne or even a coffee; she never did. To this she attributed her longevity, and to a general habit of simplicity, and to luck, and to her sleep hygiene. She was in bed by 9 p.m. every night.
Martha was born in Maine in 1836, during the presidency of Andrew Jackson. Her father was three years old when George Washington died. On the front page of the New Rochelle Standard-Star on April 13, 1942 — on what would turn out to be Martha's last birthday — was a six-column headline about the Japanese imperial war fleet taking control of the Bay of Bengal. Martha lived another nine months, long enough to co-exist with the Manhattan Project, the first two Meijer stores, and, for 70 days, with Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr.1
The story about Martha in the Standard-Star reported that she was living in Larchmont with her nephew, Charles Brady King. This name may sound familiar to the kind of person who reads this newsletter. Here’s the complete description of King’s life on findagrave.com, with my compliments to the poet:
“Mr King was a design genius. He was the first person to build and drive a car in Michigan. His own design. He invented the jackhammer.”2
King earned his star in the firmament on March 6, 1896, when he drove the first gasoline-powered automobile on the streets of Detroit, going five miles an hour up Woodward Avenue with Henry Ford trailing behind him on a bicycle, or so the story goes. King spent the next 20 years playing in the sandbox of the early automotive industry, helping out Henry Ford with his first designs and eventually founding his own company, King Motor Car Co., in 1910.
No doubt you’ve seen this picture of Charles Brady King (on the right) driving what is essentially a motorized wagon cart. When this picture was taken, Martha Miller was 60 years old. Here is a much older Charles Brady King, in Larchmont I think, regarding this image of his much younger self.
But after World War I — King served in the Signal Corps, building aviation engines — he felt “the fun was going out of it.” He left the Motor City and moved into the carriage house of a palatial estate in Larchmont, where he and his wife Grace could enjoy the waterfront views on Long Island Sound and King could play around at some of his many other hobbies: making art, building model ships and marine engines, writing his memoirs, and playing music. (King was most adept at the flute, but he also played the theremin, and had some carillon bells installed in a tower on the property that he would sometimes play at parties.) He called the place “Dolfincour,” and he lived there for most of the rest of his life.3
To Dolfincour around 1937 came Martha Lord Miller, by this time already a centenarian. She had lived most of her century on this earth in Detroit, where she had moved with her family after the Civil War to be closer to her sister Sarah, who had married, at 19 years old, a 37-year-old aspiring lumber baron named George Fletcher. Sarah and George’s youngest child, a girl named Grace, would have been about five years old when Martha arrived in Detroit.
But long after all of her family ties had slipped loose, Martha stayed in Detroit. Sarah died in 1889, just 58 years old. (Martha would always tell reporters that longevity didn’t run in her family.) George, 18 years his wife’s senior, outlived her by a decade, having realized his lumber barony, which by the way is Alpena. Little Grace grew up and got married4, and after the war she and her husband moved to an old carriage house on Long Island Sound. Martha, who had been living with the Kings, moved into the Albert Kahn-designed Garden Court Apartments on Jefferson Avenue, went to First Congregational three times a week (the church named her a “Deaconess for Life” on her 90th birthday), and avidly took the bus and the streetcar everywhere she needed to go.
Here she is in the Detroit Free Press celebrating her 100th birthday:
It is amazing enough to me that 106-year-old Martha Lord Miller — born when there were only about a thousand miles of railroad tracks in the entire continental U.S.; born 50 years before standardized time zones — lived, at the end of her life, with someone whose work changed the shape of the world we all live in now, as much as trains and time zones did. Then I learned that Martha Miller was on the transportation vanguard too, in her own way: At age 98, she began to make her annual summer journey to Larchmont by airplane.
A large crowd saw her off at City Airport on June 7, 1934. She declared that she was not afraid to die or to become air-sick. She had crossed the ocean four times, she told reporters, and was never sea-sick. As for a crash, “I’d just as soon as soon go that way as any other,” she said. Refusing an escort up the stairs, she took her own seat and huffed, “What a lot of fuss.” For years her love of air travel appeared in the papers over and over again, and each time Martha would say she didn’t understand what the big deal was. Lunch in Detroit, dinner on Long Island — why would you have it any other way?
Grace died in November, 1941. Because I was working on the time scale of Martha as I was writing this, I assumed Grace died young, but she was 81. I wondered a lot about the dynamic at Dolfincour after Grace passed away, Martha and Charles grieving — and maybe getting on each other’s nerves — as they lived out whatever was left of their lives in a sea-salty old house, now likely a little bit haunted.
But then I thought again about Martha’s last birthday party, seven months after Grace’s death. It’s easy to read a lot of joy and connection and life-affirmation into it, which I guess is all any birthday party is really about: A celebration of still being here. Charles welcomed the guests with a poem he wrote about Martha, and she was presented with a key to the city of Larchmont on a red velvet pillow. (Charles designed the key!) One hopes that Charles played the chimes in the tower when the party got loose.
When Martha died in January of the following year, her obituary ran in all the papers in New York and in Detroit. Her funeral was held at the church where she had known all but one of the ministers since its founding, and she was buried on the Fletcher family plot at Elmwood with her mother, her father, her sister, and Grace. She was an aviator, a time-traveler; she was 84 years old when women won the right to vote. (She did so every year after that, in Detroit and in New York.)
I think sometimes we want to read stories about centenarians for ideas about how to live forever, but reading about Martha I mostly feel a sense of awe that any of us are here at all, witnessing change that is sometimes seismic and obvious and sometimes so subtle it we do not notice it for years. All of us time-travelers, living bridges between a world that’s gone and a world that has yet to be born.
b. Nov. 20, 1942
Did Charles Brady King invent the jackhammer? I haven’t dug very deep on this (no pun intended) but some sources suggest that Charles Brady King bought someone else’s patent for the jackhammer while he was working at Russel Wheel & Foundry Co., but knowing King he probably made his own improvements to the thing. Idk. Jackhammer experts out there?
It’s lucky that Dolfincour was sold a few years ago because now we have abundant interior photographs and extensive historical background via this great post.
There was much more to of course her life than this! Initial research suggests that Grace was remarkable and a force in her own right! More to come about Grace, I hope.