The Boarding House Era: Cincinnati and Married Life

Daguerreotype of Stephen Foster, c. 1859. Foster Hall Collection, Center for American Music, University of Pittsburgh Library System. 

     The early nineteenth century saw a boom in transportation improvements (steamboats, canals, railroads, turnpikes) and communication (the telegraph in particular) that facilitated a market revolution that led to a huge increase in population in American cities. As a result of this, new waves of middle-class workers in a multitude of trades took up residence in places formerly reserved for sailors, apprentices, new settlers, and immigrants—the boardinghouse. The 1830s and 1840s saw a massive rise and widespread proliferation of “boarding out,” as the domestic practice was referred to by contemporaries. People of many cultures, trades, and religions came together under a single roof to eat, sleep, and live for a monthly (or weekly) fee agreed upon by the house’s owner. They were, in essence, convergence places that reflected what David Faflik refers to as a new “restless urban” America. [i]

     The boardinghouse did not conform to the Victorian standards of home or the Cult of Domesticity—rather, it seemed in some ways a sort of anti-home. Historian Wendy Gamber writes that women “washed, cleaned, and cooked for money, services that elsewhere they would have provided out of love.” The boardinghouse went against the grain of what was considered the ideal domestic situation because it provided hearth and home—the quintessential institution of familiarity, repose, and shelter—to all manner of strangers for financial gain. [ii]

Figure 1 Dunning McNair Foster. Foster Hall Collection, Center for American Music, University of Pittsburgh Library System. 

     Between 1846 and 1860 Stephen Foster lived in several boardinghouses, starting in Cincinnati where he worked as a clerk in his brother Dunning’s (Fig. 1) firm Irwin & Foster, a commission merchant shipping agency on the Ohio River. (Fig. 2) Irwin & Foster represented one of the fundamental transformative vehicles of the Market Revolution—the steamboat—and was in the business of filling them with items manufactured or farmed by local producers who sent their goods down and up the river to destinations such as Louisville, Nashville, Memphis, and New Orleans. Two of the primary resources that were shipped were cotton and hogs. Cincinnati, the “Queen City” of the West as it situated itself, was also known as “Porkopolis” because of the hundreds of thousands of pigs that were slaughtered yearly in the city—400,000 alone in 1849. Business was competitive on Cassilly’s Row—a series of Federal-style river-front buildings that housed several firms of which Irwin & Foster was part, all vying for customers on the river boat trade. [iii]

Figure 3 The Cincinnati neighborhood where Stephen lived, c. 1850. Foster Hall Collection, Center for American Music, University of Pittsburgh Library System. 

     Stephen first lived with his brother at the Broadway Hotel, and soon after took a room at a boardinghouse owned and operated by a widow named Jane Griffin on tree-lined Fourth Street (Fig. 3)—a “good neighborhood” that was within walking distance of Irwin & Foster and the river where he could also view, across the water, the slave state of Kentucky. It would have been a noisy place to live, in proximity to the steam whistles of the boats and the busy shipping traffic. Yet it seems to have been a clean and moderately affluent area. A picture painted during the 1850s in Cincinnati of Broadway Street near Fourth Street portrays a vista of Federal, Georgian, and Renaissance Revival houses interspersed with trees, carriages, coaches, and well-dressed men and women parading down paved sidewalks and streets. [iv]

Figure 7 A Victorian parlor, complete with piano, c. mid-19th century. Foster Hall Collection, Center for American Music, University of Pittsburgh Library System. 

     Stephen left Cincinnati after three and a half years, moving back to Allegheny City in 1850. Leading up to the time of his return he had forged relationships that would become central to his life over the next decade. One was with the music-publishing firms Firth, Pond & Co. of New York and F.D. Benteen of Baltimore who would publish many of his songs and furnish the bulk of his income as a songwriter. The second was with Jane Denny McDowell—a Pittsburgher; and daughter of a local physician whose family lived on Penn Ave and were friends with the Fosters. Thus, Stephen had known Jane for years before he began to court her, first in Cincinnati, and later in the parlor of her home in Pittsburgh. The McDowells were affluent, and their parlor and drawing rooms (Fig. 7) most likely contained some of the contemporary adornments and luxuries popular at the time, as described in an 1850s issue of Godey’s Lady’s Book:

                                —there was splendor of the modern style; for a Turkey
                                 carpet, so elastic and thickly woven that it seemed to raise
                                 the walker by an impulse of its own, covered the ample floor.
                                 Large mirrors, reaching from the ceiling to the terminus of
                                 the walls, richly carved and superbly gilt, four in number,
                                 repeated, in magic reflection, the gorgeous tints of the orie-
                                 ntal carpet, the living flowers in the alabaster vases, and
                                 the various adornments of that sumptuous apartment . . .
                                 here a marble bust, there a living picture . . Instruments
                                 of music were here . . . a piano, open, with its white keys
                                 and massive proportions.

Stephen had competition for Jane—most notably an old friend, Richard Cowan. Cowan was a successful attorney who would later serve in the Pennsylvania State Legislature. Stephen, though coming into his own as successful songwriter, was not as financially stable as Cowan. However, in the end it was Stephen who won Jane’s hand. On July 16, 1850, he wrote a letter to his sister Ann Eliza, informing her that “I am to be married on Monday next to Miss Jane.” Foster hastened to add that “we will start on the same evening for Baltimore and New York, The trip will be on business as much for pleasure, as I wish to see my publishers in the east as soon as possible”—a task which perhaps suggests Foster’s commitment to providing for his new wife rather than an unromantic sidetrack. [vii]

Figure 8 Marion Foster. Foster Hall Collection, Center for American Music, University of Pittsburgh Library System. 

    Jessie Welsh Rose, Stephen’s granddaughter, claimed that in regard to the wedding her grandmother “nineteen in years and unused to quick decisions [referencing Stephen’s sudden proposal to her one night], made one then and never regretted it.” According to many of Stephen’s biographers, however, the marriage to Jane was not a good fit. John Tasker Howard suggests that Jane “was not the ideal spouse for Stephen,” and claims that Stephen was not “altogether fitted for married life” because “love for a woman, as a physical, male emotion, was [not] in any way a dominant passion of his existence.” JoAnne O’Connell writes that despite Stephen’s moderate income from songwriting royalties (roughly $45,000 a year), he still had trouble “meeting the expenses of his little family, a problem with which he struggled for the rest of his life” and that Jane’s practicality grated against Stephen’s impulsiveness. Ken Emerson presents brow-raising evidence that suggests a lack of intimacy between the couple. He suggests it is possible that Stephen and Jane may not have had intercourse after their wedding night (their only child, Marion - Fig. 8 - was born exactly nine months from the day of their wedding), though of course this is impossible to confirm, and a speculation based off a series of dates scribbled at the back of Stephen's manuscript book. Ultimately, though there were many leavings and reunions between the couple during their fourteen-year marriage, there are only two family letters which reference trouble, and seem to corroborate an underlying issue deeper than a husband and wife quarrel. One of these letters is from Stephen’s sister Henrietta to Morrison (in which many lines are crossed out):

                         How sorry I feel for dear Stephy, though when I
                         read your letter I was not at all surprised at the news
                         it contained in regard to him and [Jane]. I last winter
                         felt convinced that she would either have to change
                         her course of conduct or a separation was inevitable.

Another is from James Buchanan (not the presidential candidate) to his father, Reverend Edward Y. Buchanan in which he mentions a purported “sin” that Jane had committed which had caused a great disturbance amongst the family. Without further evidence, it is difficult to determine the reasons for Stephen and Jane’s seemingly tumultuous marriage. As Stephen’s first biographer, Harold Vincent Milligan writes, “it would be idle, and even impertinent, to speculate as to the causes of the unhappiness,” or that they were unhappy at all. [viii]

Figure 9 Brick row house in Hoboken, New Jersey where Stephen lived with Jane and Marion during 1854. (Now 601 Bloomfield Street). Foster Hall Collection, Center for American Music, University of Pittsburgh Library System. 

     Six weeks after their wedding Stephen and Jane moved in with Stephen’s family at the house on the East Common, where Marion was born on April 18, 1851. Stephen paid six dollars a week to live there with his wife and daughter, as well as a nurse. A few months later father, mother, and baby moved to Jane’s mother’s house, renting rooms from his mother-in-law. Stephen also rented an office with a piano in which he could compose uninterrupted. In his manuscript book, started in 1851—the one he used to refine the lyrics of songs he wrote up until his final move to New York in 1860 (this book still exists, housed at the Center for American Music, part of the University of Pittsburgh’s Library System)—there is a page that contains a note written in pencil: “Rented Office July 28/51.” 1851 was one of Stephen’s most fruitful periods as a songwriter. He produced eighteen songs that year alone, including one of his most famous pieces, “Old Folks at Home,” which netted him some of his highest earnings as a composer. The Fosters remained with Jane’s mother only until Christmas of 1851, when they returned to the East Commons house where Stephen helped care for his elderly father, who had recently suffered a stroke. However, by May of 1853 something had happened between the couple that made Jane “angry enough to pack up her clothes and leave with baby Marion”. In June of that same year Stephen “sold all his furniture to his father for seventy-five dollars” and moved to New York. By January of 1854 the couple was back together and living in Hoboken, New Jersey. The house they rented was a new four-story brick row house (which still stands today, at 601 Bloomfield Street) in an affluent neighborhood where such prominent contemporary figures as Horace Greeley and John Jacob Astor also resided (Fig. 9). [ix]

    Did Stephen write songs about, for, or to Jane? Several songs that he produced between 1850 and 1860, including “The Wife,” (Fig. 10) “The Hour for Thee and Me,” and “For Thee, Love, For Thee,” contain lyrics that might be interpreted as having roots in their relationship. Stephen had an affinity for alcohol throughout his life—and drank heavily during his last four years in New York, but it is unclear what effect this ultimately had on his marriage. “The Wife,” a temperance song published in 1860, is written from a wife’s perspective, and includes the refrain “he’ll come home, he’ll not forget me, for his word is always true / He’ll come home with tears and pleading words and ask me to forget.” Was Stephen describing an episode (or several episodes) that occurred between him and Jane as a result of his drinking? Or was this merely a matter of Stephen attempting to capitalize on the temperance movement? [x]

    It is interesting to note that another of his temperance songs, “Comrades, Fill No Glass for Me” published in 1855, followed the huge success of Timothy Shay Arthur’s novel Ten Nights in a Bar-Room, and What I Saw There published in 1854. As for the “The Hour for Thee and Me,” and “For Thee, Love, For Thee,” both describe a sort of harkening back to happier times of new love—perhaps reflecting feelings Stephen had when he first began to court Jane. And yet the lyrics in both songs refer in no direct way to her; in fact, the ambiguous love in “For Thee, Love, For Thee” could even be interpreted as being about his daughter as much as his wife. However, there are many songs in which the name “Jenny” or the alternate spelling “Jennie” is used in addition to “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair,” in which Jeanie was originally “Jennie”—a reference to Jane: “Jenny’s Coming O’er the Green,” “I’ll Be a Soldier,” “A Penny for Your Thoughts,” “Jennie’s Own Schottische,” “Little Jenny Dow,” and “Jenny June.” In regard to these, John Tasker Howard writes that “Stephen loved Jane . . . several songs in which he used her name bear witness to his affection.” [xi]