New Wytheville exhibition highlights Edith Bolling Wilson’s involvement in White House affairs.
President Woodrow Wilson seated at desk with his wife Edith Bolling Wilson, 1920.
Photos courtesy of Library of Congress
Portrait of Edith Bolling Wilson (née Gait), 1915.
Watch worn by President Woodrow Wilson during the Paris Peace Conference and while signing the Treaty of Versailles (Private Collection, David and Sandy Baker).
Edith Bolling Wilson loved orchids. When guests arrive at Wytheville’s Edith Bolling Wilson Birthplace Museum, they may notice that she wears an orchid corsage, an almost-daily gift from her husband, in many of the photographs on display. But this soft femininity was just a part of the only Appalachian-born first lady’s character: she was also heavily involved in political affairs and served as a model for wartime sacrifice, observing meatless Mondays and wheatless Wednesdays in support of federal rationing.
From Wytheville to the White House .… and Abroad, the museum’s first “large-scale, thematic exhibition,” according to executive director and exhibition curator Shiloh Holley, tells the story of Wilson’s tenure as first lady during the tumultuous years of World War I. It examines her involvement in peace negotiations at the end of the war and takes a close look at the White House duties she assumed—studying state papers sent from senators, for example—following her husband’s stroke in 1919.
Relying on input from scholars Robert Enholm, former executive director of the President Woodrow Wilson House, and Lynn Rainville of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, which supplied a grant to fund the exhibition, it also features artifacts on loan from private and public collections. On view through February 2019. Admission is free. EdithBollingWilson.org
