Throughout its history, Palm Beach has seen its share of spectacular romances. This Valentine’s Day, we dive into a true love story that has stood the test of time in the grandest style.
Edward Townsend Stotesbury was not supposed to fall in love again. Not in his sixties. Not after thirty years alone.
He had married young, to Frances Berman Butcher. They lost their first baby daughter in infancy. Then, in 1881, Frances died in childbirth at thirty-one, delivering their third child. Just like that, Edward was a widower with two little girls and a heart that did not seem interested in trying again. So he did what heartbroken men of industry often did. He worked.
Born in Philadelphia in 1849, slight of build but formidable in ambition, he rose to become a senior partner at Drexel & Company and closely allied with J.P. Morgan. He built railroads. He built fortunes. He built a reputation described as thin-lipped and keen-eyed. What he did not build was a second marriage. For more than three decades, he stayed alone.
Then, in January of 1910, on a steamship bound for Europe, he met Lucretia Bishop “Eva” Roberts Cromwell. She was forty-six and a widow of one month.
Her husband had died suddenly, leaving her with three children and far less security than society rumors suggested. Some said she was rich. Others whispered she was nearly penniless. The truth probably lay somewhere in between.
Rather than sit alone in a house full of memories, Eva took her daughter to Paris. On that voyage, through a mutual acquaintance, she was introduced to a banker from Philadelphia, a widower of many years, enormously powerful, and, as it turned out, enormously lonely. They were enchanted.
The couple married almost exactly two years later, on January 18, 1912, in what newspapers at the time called one of the most important weddings in the country. There were diamonds the size of robin’s eggs and ropes of pearls long enough to brush the floor.
But the real gift was not the jewels, it was Palm Beach.
They had wintered there often since their honeymoon at The Breakers and Eva saw possibility in the light and the stage the island offered. She admired Addison Mizner’s vision and persuaded Edward to commission something extraordinary.
So he built her El Mirasol. Completed in 1920, the estate stretched from the ocean to the Intracoastal, with gardens, a Moorish tea house, an aviary, even monkeys. There were butlers and gardeners and cooks and chambermaids. There were ancient portraits lining halls, Spanish ceilings, terraces overlooking the sea. And there were parties.
Eva would throw her husband the most lavish birthday celebrations. Their 1920 housewarming doubled as Edward’s birthday, welcoming more than 150 guests. Other years the celebrations included entire orchestras, luncheons that swelled into full-day affairs, and even an airplane exhibition. Maharajas, diplomats, financiers, generals, society fixtures from New York to Newport, all made the pilgrimage to El Mirasol to toast Ned, who sometimes played his old Civil War drum while everyone clapped along.
By 1927, Edward was said to be worth $100 million (approximately 1.89 billion today.) El Mirasol glowed at the center of Palm Beach society. It must have felt as though nothing could touch them.
And then the markets crashed.
Fortunes that once seemed immovable shifted overnight. Edward’s wealth contracted dramatically during the Great Depression. The mood throughout the country, even in Palm Beach, changed.
What did not change was Eva. She had married him when he was powerful, yet when his financial empire collapsed, she did not step aside. She stood by him, as the strong partner of a man who had built his life twice: once after heartbreak, and once after meeting her.
They spent twenty-six years together. Their love was not a youthful fevered romance, it was a second act that held. When Edward died in 1938 at eighty-nine, Eva was by his side. She remained in Palm Beach until her own death years later, carrying with her the memory of the man who had built her a house that stretched from ocean to lake, and a life after loss.
In a place famous for its glittering beginnings and dramatic endings, their love was a steady flame that kept burning.
And that is a tale worth aspiring to, today and always.