‘From Wytheville to the White House’
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Updated: 14 hours ago
A town remembers its American First Lady
This is the second story of a four-part series to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States of America, and to celebrate stories that are a part of the nation's journey since.
By Fred Sauceman
Two million people lined up along the parade route across Paris, France, on Saturday, Dec. 14, 1918. French President Raymond Poincaré said the reception “stood alone among the welcome given any previous visitor to Paris.”
At its center were American President Woodrow Wilson and First Lady Edith Bolling Wilson. The president and his entourage had come to Paris a few weeks after the Armistice that ended World War I. “President Wilson’s whole effort will be directed at obtaining a just and lasting peace,” wrote United Press reporter Robert J. Bender.
It was the first visit of a sitting American president to the continent of Europe. “Vive Wilson,” the crowds shouted. “Vive l’Amerique.’”
Edith later recalled that “flowers rained upon us until we were nearly buried.” In her lap was a bouquet of orchids, her favorite flower, wrapped in a small American flag, given to her by the First Lady of France, Henriette Poincaré.
Edith felt, that day, the miraculous sweep of her life. Born in Wytheville, Virginia, in 1872, she did not leave the limits of that small town until she was 13 years old, when she accompanied her father, William Bolling, to Charlottesville, where he attended a board meeting at the University of Virginia, his law school alma mater. On that trip, she experienced her first in-person glimpse of the American presidency at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.
Later attempts to introduce Edith to the broader world were originally unsuccessful. A few months after the Charlottesville visit, she was sent to board at the Martha Washington College for Young Ladies in Abingdon, Virginia, 55 miles away from her Wytheville home. She was miserable at the college, complaining about the food, the personality of the headmaster, and the temperature in the music room — so cold, she said, that she could not move her fingers enough to play the piano.
Edith was the seventh of 11 children and was a direct descendant of Pocahontas. She was born to a family that had been financially ruined by the Civil War. Her biographer, Rebecca Boggs Roberts, describes Edith as “an Appalachian girl from dilapidated southern gentry without much formal education.”
Seeking to rebuild their lives, Edith’s father William and her mother Sallie moved from their eastern Virginia plantation to Wytheville in 1866, a year after the end of the Civil War. William was able to secure a circuit judgeship and began to try to restore the gentility his family had lost as a result of the war.
Edith described her family’s plight in her 1939 book My Memoir: “. . . the old order passed, and they found themselves, like thousands of others, with everything swept away, and unable to live on a plantation with no one to work it and no money.”
Her parents moved the family into what Roberts calls “a warren of cramped rooms above three storefronts on a commercial block of Main Street in Wytheville, Virginia.” Viewed from the street, the building is deceiving. Its top level is a false gable with false windows.
Life in that space, occupied by more than 20 people, was pure southern gothic. Edith’s paternal grandmother, Anne Wigginton Bolling, had a wardrobe consisting entirely of black clothing. With a permanent spinal injury from a riding accident, she rarely left the premises, spending her time learning French, crocheting, and rocking in a chair draped with the skin of her deceased dog. Grandmother Bolling kept canaries on the back porch — at one time 26 of them. It was Edith’s job to clean the cages, a job she abhorred. She was also the officiant at their funerals, placing the birds in coffins made from spool boxes and burying them out back beneath headstones constructed from marble chips.
From those beginnings, writes Rebecca Boggs Roberts, “She would go on to become the most powerful woman in the nation. She would go on further to pretend she was nothing of the kind.”
Edith’s path to international fame was an indirect one. On a trip to Washington, D.C., she met a jewelry store owner named Norman Galt. They married in 1896. In 1908, Galt died unexpectedly, leaving Edith a widow at age 36.
Edith continued to reside in Washington, and in March of 1915, a friend named Helen Bones, a cousin of President Woodrow Wilson, arranged for a White House limousine to take the two ladies to a local park. Afterward, protesting that her shoes were too muddy to enter the White House, Edith nevertheless agreed to go in for tea, since she was told that the President was away, playing golf. When the elevator opened, there Wilson stood, also with muddy shoes. After a general shoe-cleaning, Wilson, his doctor and golf partner Dr. Cary Grayson, and the two ladies sat down for tea. According to reports of the time, Dr. Grayson had likely arranged the “chance encounter.”
Wilson’s first wife, Ellen Axsom, had died of Bright’s Disease on Aug. 6, 1914, just a few weeks after the outbreak of World War I.
When Wilson met Edith, “The President fell in love at first sight,” according to Wilson biographer A. Scott Berg. Edith, however, rejected his first marriage proposal, saying she would marry Wilson if he were defeated in the next presidential election. But Wilson was determined to extract an unconditional “yes.” All told, over 250 love letters passed between them. Berg describes the letters as “the most romantic correspondence ever to emanate from the White House.”
As their courtship progressed, Edith joined Wilson at Griffith Stadium for the opening day of the 1915 baseball season, when the president threw out the first ball before the Washington Senators defeated the New York Yankees 7-0. She even took golf lessons so she could join him on the links. On June 29, 1915, she consented to marriage.
“Mrs. Galt is regarded as a woman of rare beauty and charm,” wrote Washington’s Evening Star newspaper on Oct. 7, 1915. That fall, Wilson took his bride-to-be to the Army-Navy football game at the Polo Grounds in New York. They were married a few weeks later, on Dec. 28, at Edith’s home in Washington, amid sprays of purple orchids and a buffet table piled with Virginia ham. Wilson had been a widower for 18 months.
After their honeymoon in Hot Springs, Virginia, Edith saw to it that her piano, her rolltop mahogany desk, and her sewing machine were moved into the White House. “She hated the title ‘First Lady,’ preferring to be known by the name on her calling cards: Mrs. Woodrow Wilson,” Roberts writes.
When I first started visiting Wytheville about 20 years ago, I wondered why the town did not make more of this story. That has all changed now, thanks to the vision, generosity, and passion of two people, Farron and Bill Smith. Farron had operated a dance school on the first floor of the building where the Bolling family had lived. She and her husband, who bought the building in 1989, were the prime movers behind the creation of the Edith Bolling Wilson Birthplace Museum, a Main Street memorial to Wytheville’s First Lady. And in 2010, the Smiths purchased the building across the street, the former George Wythe Hotel. It is now the 30-room Bolling Wilson Hotel, and it opened in 2014 on Edith’s birthday, Oct. 15.
“After our children were grown, this was our way of giving back to a community that we love,” Farron Smith told me. She describes Edith as “a very independent woman,” and the walls of the museum underscore that point. In the collection is Edith’s driver’s license, which made her the first woman in Washington, D.C., qualified to operate an electric car. She was a friend to every American First Lady who succeeded her, and on display at the museum is a piece Edith called an “asparagus plate” that she used when hosting First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy.
The Edith Bolling Wilson Birthplace Museum is one of eight sites in the country dedicated to sharing the stories of America’s First Ladies and is the only birthplace museum dedicated to a First Lady in Virginia. It is included in the Southwestern Virginia section of the Virginia 250 Passport booklet, described as a guide, discount book, and keepsake featuring 70 participating museums and historic sites across five regions of the Commonwealth. The Museum of Virginia History and Culture invites Booklet holders to “explore the outsized role Virginians played in securing American Independence, and our journey since...”
Farron Smith says Edith redefined the role of the American First Lady. Edith was the first wife to stand behind the president while the oath of office was administered. During World War I, she became a national spokesperson for conservation and frugality, encouraging “wheatless Mondays” and “meatless Tuesdays.” On their way to and from the war in Europe, soldiers stopping for meals in the American Red Cross Canteen at Washington’s Union Station often did not recognize Edith, who dressed in thrift clothing as an example for the American people. At the White House, she used that old sewing machine to make pajamas and shirts for the Red Cross to give to soldiers.
In addition to the other demands on her time, Edith tended a flock of sheep. In 1918, the year after America’s entry into World War I, President Wilson purchased the sheep from a farm in Bowie, Maryland, and put them to work on the White House lawn. “The flock trimmed the grass, thus saving manpower; and at shearing time, they provided ninety-eight pounds of ‘White House Wool,’” writes A. Scott Berg. The wool was auctioned off and the proceeds were given to the Red Cross.
According to the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library and Museum in Staunton, Virginia, the sheep “contributed to the Wilsons’ carefully cultivated image as a rationing American family. The First Family went to great lengths to demonstrate their commitment to conservation. They stopped hosting receptions, organized war bond rallies, and occasionally rode in a carriage instead of an automobile to save fuel. The sheep became the most visible symbol of these efforts.”
The sheep story is the genesis of a restaurant name, Graze on Main, located inside Wytheville’s Bolling Wilson Hotel, where diners eat filet mignon named for Edith and drink “Jeweler’s Wife” martinis as well as cocktails like “The Orchid” and “The Canary.” And the bar menu offers a bourbon flight. “Edith did like her bourbon,” says Farron Smith.
Those drinks are best sipped atop the hotel, on the Perch, which affords a direct view of the building where Edith and her family once lived. Five church steeples are visible from there, and the Blue Ridge Mountains in the background are glorious any time of year.
Farron Smith and her sister, retired schoolteacher Joyce Covey, told the White House sheep story in a children’s book, President and Mrs. Woodrow Wilson and How the SHEEP Helped Win the War, published in 2016. That book is part of the elementary school curriculum in the Wythe County school system. The name Edith Bolling Wilson is now a familiar one among the county’s schoolchildren.
Mention Edith Bolling Wilson to the breakfast crowd at Grayson Restaurant in Wytheville or to those who seek red-dyed hot dogs at Skeeter’s downtown, in the very building where Edith grew up, and you quickly hear about “America’s First Woman President” or the “Secret President.” When President Wilson suffered a serious stroke in 1919, Edith stepped in to run many of the daily affairs of the White House. She called it a “stewardship,” an unofficial assignment that lasted until President Wilson’s second term ended in March of 1921.
In her book Untold Power, Rebecca Boggs Roberts writes that “for some months at the end of 1919 and the beginning of 1920, Edith Bolling Galt Wilson held the most political power of any First Lady in history.” During his convalescence, she was the President’s gatekeeper, controlling access to her husband and meeting regularly with his cabinet secretaries. Before his stroke, Wilson had even taught her how to read secret wartime code.
After President Wilson’s death in 1924, Edith dedicated the rest of her long life to preserving his legacy as a peacemaker. On Jan. 8, 1949, she donated over 9,000 of her husband’s books to the Library of Congress.
“We had been looking for a recording of Edith’s voice,” says Dr. Adam Manuel with the Edith Bolling Wilson Birthplace Museum. “In the summer of 2025, Judge Eddie Hulsey from Tallapoosa, Georgia, contacted the museum and said he had done research during his undergraduate years and remembered a footnote saying Edith was at the Library of Congress in 1949 donating books, and it was recorded. So, I instantly jumped on it, contacted the Library of Congress, and they sent the recording.”
Edith, then 77, describes in the recording the significance of President Wilson’s books: “I feel confident that this library represents the source from which he drew much of his courage and inspiration for the high ideals he gave to the world in such abundant measure.”
It is the only known recording of Edith’s voice.
The former First Lady remained active until her very last days. She was the first Honorary President of the Girl Scouts of America. And she was a constant advocate for the American Red Cross.
Journalist Bascom N. Timmons recalled one of his visits with Edith to a Sunday Gridiron Club reception at the Statler Hilton Hotel in Washington. “When she was a spry 85, I was guiding her to an elevator to take her to the second floor hall when we passed a hotel stairway. ‘What’s wrong with walking up?’ she asked.”
Edith’s last visit to Wytheville was in April of 1960. She had come home to dedicate a stained-glass window, “The Blessing of the Children,” in memory of her parents at St. John’s Episcopal Church, where she had been baptized, confirmed, and married her first husband.
“A child insists on sitting beneath that window during every service,” retired school psychologist and church member Penny Smith tells me as she prepares the sanctuary for Wednesday worship on May 6, 2026.
During that final trip to Wytheville, Edith stayed at the George Wythe Hotel and had dinner across the street at Durham’s Restaurant, directly beneath the area where she and her family had lived. “She climbed the steps one last time to the Bolling home,” says Farron Smith.
Edith attended the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy on Jan. 20, 1961, despite a winter storm that had dumped eight inches of snow on Washington, D.C., the previous day and evening. The temperature at noon on Inauguration Day was 22 degrees with winds at 19 miles per hour. Edith confessed to stashing a flask of her beloved bourbon in each coat pocket “to stay warm.”
That fall, Edith accepted President John F. Kennedy’s invitation to the White House to attend the signing ceremony for a joint resolution creating the Woodrow Wilson Memorial Commission. Edith was the guest of honor at the Oct. 4, 1961, event. It was to be one of her last public appearances.
Just hours before she was scheduled to attend the dedication of the Woodrow Wilson Memorial Bridge, over the Potomac River, on Dec. 28, 1961, Edith died at home at the age of 89. It would have been President Wilson’s 105th birthday. Still today, members of the United States military place orchids on the graves of Thomas Woodrow Wilson and Edith Bolling Galt Wilson in Washington’s National Cathedral.
In Wytheville, Edith’s Oct. 15 birthday is treated like a townwide holiday. And in an alleyway perpendicular to Main Street, a 100-foot mural, painted by regional artists, tells the story of Edith’s journey, “From Wytheville to the White House.” The mural, part of the town’s Heritage Walk, was commissioned by Edith’s champions Farron and Bill Smith.
“Part of our mission and vision,” says Farron, “is to use our Edith’s life as inspiration to young people here and across the country to pursue their goals and to use Mrs. Wilson’s life as a roadmap, of a little girl from Wytheville, Virginia, who grew up to be First Lady of the United States.”
Fred Sauceman has written numerous books about food in Appalachia. He is a radio broadcaster, podcast host, newspaper columnist, and a professor of Appalachian Studies at East Tennessee State University.
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