Gertrude Divine Webster (born Gertrude Adelaide Divine; June 4, 1872) was an American philanthropist known for co-founding the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix, Arizona, and establishing Yester House, her summer estate which is on the National Register of Historic Places and houses the Southern Vermont Arts Center. During her marriage to William McClellan Ritter (1898 to 1922) she was known as Gertrude Divine Ritter. She subsequently married Hugh Webster (1924 until 1928), and was known as Gertrude Divine Webster until her death on March 31, 1947.
After college, she lived in Columbus, Ohio, where she founded the Big Sister movement in Columbus.[2] On February 2, 1898, she married a lumber tycoon from West Virginia,[1]William McClellan Ritter, at St. Thomas' Church in New York.[7][5] While in Columbus, Webster was the president of the Columbus Arts Association from 1911 to 1921.[1] In 1909, Webster commissioned the painter Cecilia Beaux to paint her mother while Beaux was in Columbus, Ohio.[8][9] The resulting painting "Mrs. Richard Low Devine, born Susan Sofia Smith", was displayed in the Columbus Museum of Art multiple times.[9]
Webster's summer home, Yester House, was in Manchester, Vermont.[2] The house was built for Webster, her then-husband William Ritter, and their two adopted children in 1917.[10] The house was designed by Henry Murphy and Richard Henry Dana, with the landscape design done by Charles N. Lowrie.[10] While she lived there, the house held 6,000 pieces of Swiss glass,[2] and Webster wrote about the Vermont Glass Factory in a 1923 article in Country Life.[11] She also worked with the League of Women Voters in Vermont.[12] From 1919 until 1921, Webster was one of the highest tax payers in Manchester,[13][14][15] and at the time Yester House was showcased in Country Life magazine.[16][10] In 1950, Yester House was purchased by the Southern Vermont Arts Center.[17][18] In 1988, a successful application was filed for Yester house to join the National Register of Historic Places.[19]
Webster divorced Ritter in 1922,[4] and they agreed she was to receive $70,000 per year, the Vermont house, and a house in Washington, DC.[20] When Ritter stopped paying alimony in 1932, she sued him.[4][21] The resulting 1934 trial was covered by the New York Times during which Webster noted that Ritter "beat the horses and the dogs" and further objected when she brought ailing children from a Washington, DC, hospital to their summer home in Vermont.[20] Webster initially declined a settlement offer of $30,000 per year,[22] but accepted the offer the following day.[23]
Webster Auditorium at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix, Arizona.
Webster was also a collector of early Americana who donated multiple pieces to the Smithsonian Museum of American History.[24][25] In 1924 she donated a room to the Smithsonian Institution.[2][26] The donation was the paneled walls of the parlor of the Reuben Bliss house from Springfield, Massachusetts, which was presented in a 1957 report.[27]
Webster married Hugh Webster in Manchester, Vermont, on November 22, 1924,[28] and they split their time between Vermont and Phoenix. She divorced him in 1928, but retained the last name Webster.[4]
A few years later, after a trip to Switzerland, Webster returned to Phoenix with an unusual cactus and met Gustaf Starck, an engineer who organized the Arizona Cactus and Native Flora Society in 1934.[29][4] In 1936, Webster, now president of the Arizona Cactus and Native Flora Society, asked the state of Arizona for land and $2500 to run the garden.[4] When the state declined, Webster raised the $40,000 needed to establish the garden, including a $10,000 donation of her own.[30][29] In 1938 they got permission from the state of Arizona to use the land, in what had been the Papago Saguaro National Monument, as a botanical garden.[31] The landscape architect Charles Gibbs Adams helped design the plans for the botanical garden, and Webster helped design the layout while she was living at her house in Vermont.[29] The Desert Botanical Garden opened to the public in 1939,[32][33] and included plants donated by Starck, Webster, and others.[34] The Webster Auditorium, named after Gertrude Webster, is on the property of the Desert Botanical Garden and was dedicated on January 21, 1940, with over 1500 people attending the ceremony.[29] During World War II, the garden was tended by a few volunteers, but was not faring well.[4]
Webster died on March 31, 1947[2] in Phoenix and was buried in the Elmwood Cemetery in DeKalb County, Illinois.[1] She directed the income from her Arizona properties to the Arizona Cactus and Native Flora Society to be used in the administration of the Desert Botanical Garden.[29][35] The one stipulation was that the society had to retain at least two hundred members in good standing, which Lou Ella Archer made happen in the period following Webster's death.[29] Upon her death, items from her estate[36][37][38] were auctioned off in New York City,[39] ultimately resulting in a donation for over $114,000 that was given to the Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.[40][41]
Dale Chihuly is an American glass artist and entrepreneur. He is well known in the field of blown glass, "moving it into the realm of large-scale sculpture".
The Cathedral of St. John the Divine is the cathedral of the Episcopal Diocese of New York. It is at 1047 Amsterdam Avenue in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City, between West 110th Street and West 113th Street.
Brooklyn Botanic Garden (BBG) is a botanical garden in the borough of Brooklyn in New York City. The botanical garden occupies 52 acres (21 ha) in central Brooklyn, close to Mount Prospect Park, Prospect Park, and the Brooklyn Museum. Designed by the Olmsted Brothers, BBG holds over 14,000 taxa of plants and has over 800,000 visitors each year. It includes a number of specialty gardens, plant collections, and structures. BBG hosts numerous educational programs, plant-science and conservation, and community horticulture initiatives, in addition to a herbarium collection.
The Sonoran Desert is a hot desert in North America and ecoregion that covers the northwestern Mexican states of Sonora, Baja California, and Baja California Sur, as well as part of the southwestern United States. It is the hottest desert in both Mexico and the United States. It has an area of 260,000 square kilometers (100,000 sq mi).
The New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) is a botanical garden at Bronx Park in the Bronx, New York City. Established in 1891, it is located on a 250-acre (100 ha) site that contains a landscape with over one million living plants; the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, a greenhouse containing several habitats; and the LuEsther T. Mertz Library, which contains one of the world's largest collections of botany-related texts. As of 2016, over a million people visit the New York Botanical Garden annually.
Barrel cacti are various members of the two genera Echinocactus and Ferocactus, endemic to the deserts of Southwestern North America southward to north central Mexico. Some of the largest specimens are found in the Sonoran Desert.
Desert Botanical Garden is a 140-acre (57 ha) botanical garden located in Papago Park, at 1201 N. Galvin Parkway in Phoenix, central Arizona.
2 Columbus Circle is a nine-story building on the south side of Columbus Circle in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City. The building fills a small city block bounded by 58th Street, Columbus Circle, Broadway, and Eighth Avenue. It was originally designed by Edward Durell Stone in the modernist style for A&P heir Huntington Hartford. In the 2000s, Brad Cloepfil redesigned 2 Columbus Circle for the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), which has occupied the building since 2008.
Papago Park is a municipal park of the cities of Phoenix and Tempe, Arizona, United States. It has been designated as a Phoenix Point of Pride. It includes Hunt's Tomb, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The Merchant's House Museum, also known as the Old Merchant's House and the Seabury Tredwell House, is a historic house museum at 29 East Fourth Street in the NoHo neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. Built by the hatter Joseph Brewster between 1831 and 1832, the house is a four-story building with a Federal-style brick facade and a Greek Revival interior. It served as the residence of the Tredwell family for almost a century before it reopened as a museum in 1936. The Merchant's House Museum is the only nineteenth-century family home in New York City with intact exteriors and interiors.
The saguaro is a tree-like cactus species in the monotypic genus Carnegiea that can grow to be over 12 meters tall. It is native to the Sonoran Desert in Arizona, the Mexican state of Sonora, and the Whipple Mountains and Imperial County areas of California. The saguaro blossom is the state wildflower of Arizona. Its scientific name is given in honor of Andrew Carnegie. In 1933, Saguaro National Park, near Tucson, Arizona, was designated to help protect this species and its habitat.
The James B. Duke House is a mansion at 1 East 78th Street, on the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City. The building was designed by Horace Trumbauer, who drew heavily upon the design of Château Labottière in Bordeaux. Constructed between 1909 and 1912 as a private residence for businessman James Buchanan Duke and his family, the building has housed the New York University (NYU)'s Institute of Fine Arts since 1959.
A cactarium or cactuario is a garden dedicated to the planting of cacti. While they generally specialize in collecting cacti, they can also include other desert plants such as sabla, agaves or Crassulaceae, although this would better be termed "xeriscaping".
The LuEsther T. Mertz Library is located at the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) in the Bronx, New York City. Founded in 1899 and renamed in the 1990s for LuEsther Mertz, it is the United States' largest botanical research library, and the first library whose collection focused exclusively on botany.
Rose Eudora Collom was an American botanist and plant collector. She was the first paid botanist of the Grand Canyon National Park. She discovered several plant species, some of which were named in her honor, and collected numerous plant specimens.
Charles Nassau Lowrie was an American landscape architect and designer. He was one of eleven founding members of the American Society of Landscape Architects in 1899 and was active in the City Beautiful Movement.
The Southern Vermont Arts Center is a multi-disciplinary arts organization in Manchester, Vermont. It is located on the west side of West Road, at the former Yester House country estate. The center includes art galleries with permanent and rotating exhibits, the area's largest sculpture park, a performance space, and educational facilities. Its grounds are open to the public for recreational pursuits, with trails for hiking and cross-country skiing. The center's campus is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Edward Frederick Anderson was an American botanist who conducted extensive explorations in Mexico.
Edith Margaret Bell Douglas was a Canadian botanist and horticulturist known for her work in the Southwestern United States and Mexico. She helped establish the Desert Botanical Garden and donated 1,500 of her own specimens to its herbarium. She is a member of the Arizona Women's Hall of Fame and the namesake of the Garden Club of America's Margaret Douglas Medal.
Echinocereus websterianus, commonly known as the San Pedro Nolasco hedgehog cactus or Webster's hedgehog cactus, is a species of cactus. It is named after American philanthropist Gertrude Webster, who cofounded the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix, Arizona.
↑ "Local Brevities". Ann Arbor Argus. January 28, 1898. Retrieved January 1, 2022.
↑ Beaux, Cecilia; Yount, Sylvia; High Museum of Art; Tacoma Art Museum; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (2007). Cecilia Beaux: American figure painter. Atlanta: High Museum of Art; [Berkeley]: University of California Press. p.58. ISBN978-0-520-25318-6.
↑ United States National Museum (1951). 1957 Annual Report. Smithsonian Libraries. Washington: Smithsonian Institution. pp.2, 7.{{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |1= (help)
↑ Lindsay, George (1947). "Echinocereus websterianus G.E.Linds". Cactus and Succulent Journal of America. 19: 153.
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