Marjorie Ludlow was the only child of Anna Lititia Ford (1870-1946) and the late Andrew Watson Ludlow (1860-1899) of East Orange, NJ. Her mother remarried ten months before the Iroquois Theater fire, to Richard Fletcher (the hospital founder described above), a second-generation physician and graduate of the University of Alabama.‡
Anna Ford Ludlow Fletcher had grown up in Rochester, NY. Her parents were English immigrant, William Martin Ford, the grandfather who saved Marjorie at the Iroquois, and Letitia Stout Ford (1846-1919).

In the years after the fire

When the emergency hospital was two years old, in February, 1907, Richard Fletcher proposed to the Chicago city council that the city take over ownership of the hospital. He called attention to the 6,000 patients treated since its inception as evidence of the need for such an albeit unprofitable facility in the Loop, and offered to turn it over to the city for the original cost. He was willing to remain or retire at the city's wishes.†

Nothing was published as to the council's response to Fletcher but a shortage of funds was evidenced by a benefit given nine months later to raise operating monies for the facility. Volunteer performers from a half dozen Chicago theaters assembled for a matinee at the Illinois Theater. There was a good turnout but nothing was reported as to the funds raised and six months later Fletcher filed for bankruptcy with $22,523 in liabilities and $250 in assets.

Note to Fletcher's ghost: Thanks for trying, dude. RIP.

The Fletchers left Chicago soon after Richard's bankruptcy and relocated to Huntsville, Alabama where Richard took over his late father's medical practice. Like his father, he also worked as a county health officer. According to the 1910 U.S. Census, Anna and Marjorie lived in Huntsville then too but may have been traveling. See footnotes.

After Richard's death in 1912, Anna and Marjorie reportedly moved briefly to Washington DC, traveled in the tropics then returned to Chicago.§

In 1913 Marjorie married London native Charles Timson, manager of U.S. operations for William Cooper & Nephews. The pair would have three children. They spent most of their lives in Deerfield, Illinois, a village twenty-five miles northwest of Chicago, on a luxurious fifty-acre estate.

In 1955, the Timson's donated the first thirty acres of land near Ashville, North Carolina to the Episcopal church for development of the  Deerfield retirement community, named after the Timson's hometown in Illinois. Another hundred acres have been added over the years but Timson Hall still stands. Charles and Marjorie spent their last years there and are buried in a nearby cemetery.

Grandpa William Ford died in Birmingham, Alabama in 1910. His wife Letitia maintained a residence in Chicago until her death two years later so it seems likely he was in Birmingham visiting the Fletchers. A year prior to his death, in December, 1909, his company filed for bankruptcy in Chicago, despite optimism twelve months prior.

Discrepancies and addendum

* 1903 newspapers inaccurately reported William's age as seventy and his middle initial as C rather than M. Nothing was reported as to where the pair were seated in the Iroquois so the difficulty of their escape is not known. I failed to learn anything about Marjorie's body size, but even a small teenage girl would have weighed around a hundred pounds. Her mother, as an adult, was 5'5". Either the story of their escape from the Iroquois was exaggerated, grandpa was very fit or his adrenalin surge was extraordinary. Various birth years were reported for William in official documents, sometimes 1842 and on his death certification 1845.

† The Illinois Theater Fire Memorial Association considered funding Fletcher's facility, but some of the association's early financial leaders had lost enthusiasm for building a hospital. Interest was later rekindled and the association established a  hospital on Market St.

‡ Richard's father,  Richard Matthew Fletcher Sr, was a noted Huntsville, Alabama physician, civil war surgeon and interesting character. (See his obituary and notation at right.)

§ On April 6, 1913, it was announced that Marjorie Ford Ludlow was engaged, wedding date not yet known. 'Turned out to be two months later, on June 4, 1913. The engagement notice included the tidbit that she had spent the better part of her life in Paris. That may have come as news to her high school friends and newspapers who covered her pre-deb social activities in Chicago 1906-1909. I looked for evidence of a European tour 1910-1913 in immigration records but found no record of Marjorie traveling outside the country prior to 1913. Her mother applied for a passport in 1900 and Marjorie traveled after marriage but if she left the country prior to 1913, I didn't find evidence of it. Not wanting to jump to conclusions, I checked social notices for news of pre-1913 travels and found a May, 1912 newspaper blurb reporting that Anna and Marjorie had just returned to Chicago after a two-year world tour and would soon be headed for their summer home in Marblehead. No mention of Huntsville, Alabama where lived husband Richard Fletcher and where Anna's father was visiting and dying in December 1910, in the middle of that two-year tour. No evidence either of the family in Marblehead. Even for an eighteen year old, two years is not "the better part of a life" but Anna and Marjorie may have gotten away with a very spotty story. Majorie certainly snared a better husband than did the heroine in James Cameron's Titanic when her mother set about selling her for a slice of Security pie. In fairness, Anna's father and husband had both bankrupted 1907-1909, her husband and their provider died in 1912 and she was only forty-two years old. Her mother Letitia was still living, thus apt to go through much of whatever remained of William Ford's estate after the bankruptcy. Anna and Marjorie may have analyzed the situation and concluded their best alternative to taking in laundry was to find a prosperous husband for Marjorie.

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