Laramie Plains Museum

Wyoming

At ninety, the banker who built Laramie's grandest house married a seventy-eight-year-old widow, and the marriage lasted a few months.

historicalpeople

Edward Ivinson was ninety years old in 1921 when he married Augusta Haley, the seventy-eight-year-old widow of an old family friend and business partner. They lived together only a few months, then separated, and eventually divorced. He had been widowed six years earlier, when his first wife Jane died, and he spent the decade after her death giving his money away. He paid for a modern hospital in Laramie. He funded the completion of the city's cathedral. He put up a monument to veterans of the First World War, and handed over land to the Episcopal Church, most of it property that had been in Jane's name. Then, near the end, he put his entire remaining estate into a trust for a single purpose. Jane had wanted a place where women without money could live out their old age comfortably. Ivinson died in 1928, at ninety-seven, in a suite of rooms in a Denver hotel. The trust built the home after his death, and it still operates.

This is the first of 3 parts. The rest runs about 3 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.

What this was written from
He remarried in 1921 at the age of 90 to Augusta Haley, the 78-year-old widow of a deceased family friend and oft time business partner Ora Haley. The couple lived together for only a few months before they separated and eventually divorced.

Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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