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Sisters Mary Baldwin Stephenson and
Theresa Baldwin took acting lessons in
1903 and set off on stage careers that
brought them together in Chicago on
December 30, 1903, at the Iroquois
Theater. Theresa was in the
audience and Mary in the chorus
performing Mr. Bluebeard.
Theresa Jane Baldwin, age twenty-one, had been
performing in the chorus of The Billionaire
in Chicago until the unexpected death of
the production's leading comedian,
Jerome Sykes, caused the production
to be cancelled. Rather than attending his funeral the
afternoon December 30, 1903, some of his fellow cast members,
offered free tickets, attended a Mr. Bluebeard matinee.▼1 For Theresa
the performance would have been especially fun because her
sister was in the cast.
Both sisters escaped from America's
worst theater disaster that afternoon;
the details of their escape are not
known. They were among the lucky
performers who found new positions in less that a month,
performing in Pittsburgh in Winsome Winnie.
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Mary E. Baldwin Stephenson (1871–1944) was married
to printer and newspaper linotype compositor Leonard L. Stephenson (1865–1943).
She and Stephenson divorced by 1910 and she married a
spinner in a mill, Alfred N. Law, with whom she had five
children. (In 1901 he'd completed a
two-year course in worsted spinning at the
Lowell Textile School in Lowell, Mass, a member
of the second class to graduate from the school.) She then
married William Craven, a widowed carpenter.
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Theresa
Jane Baldwin (1882–1962), married Rolland Rolla Lester Halsted (1877–1951) in 1914. He was an
optometrist. His first marriage to Nellie E.
Woodford in 1906 had failed. Sometimes Jane went by
Jane, other times by Theresa. In 1908 she was
performing as a comedienne in The Serenaders
in Cincinnati. Her stage career lasted until at least 1913 (see news story at
right).
Jane and Rolla spent
most of their lives in Pekin, Illinois. In
1920 her widowed mother lived there with them.
Theresa and Mary Baldwin Stephenson were
two of nine children born to English immigrants,
grocer Thomas Baldwin (1836–1917) and Anna Johnson
Baldwin (1843–___). Their siblings were Lottie,
Margaret, Herbert, Walter, Sarah, Ann and Joseph.
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1913 story in New York Clipper
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