A correction 113 years in the making

Letter from the Editor

In the summer of 1909, a Plain Dealer reporter named George E. Davis went searching for a mystery at a deteriorating house near the village of Kirtland and later related what he “learned” in an overwrought Plain Dealer magazine story with the headline, “The Veiled Lady of Kirtland.”

It was pure nonsense by today’s standards, and more than a century later, we’ve received a request to correct it, along with versions The Plain Dealer embellished and repeated in 1940, 1970 and 2000.

One of the purposes of this weekly column is to examine journalistic sins when we commit them, although the requests usually come within days or weeks, rather than 113 years, but this is a tale worth telling, offering relevant lessons about changing standards of journalism, a bit of history and insights into how we treat people with disabilities.

Before I get into it, I should note that a descendant of the family of the veiled lady, a Smithsonian historian named Paul Sturtevant, brought this to us and has written a much more detailed account of it in Belt Magazine,. You can read it at beltmag.com.

Our story starts, as I said, with Davis, who worked in turn as a general assignment, government and Washington D.C. reporter but for a time appears to have been assigned to write fanciful stories for the newspaper’s Sunday magazine. These are some of his pieces I found in the archives:

--A story about Cleveland’s “worst boy” because he smoked cigarettes, cursed “astonishingly,” threw stones at his mother and committed other misdeeds but somehow, miraculously, turned his life around by drawing cartoons;

--A tongue-in-cheek but lengthy story about The Cleveland Brotherhood of Dress Buttoners who struggled with buttons on the backs of their wives’ dresses -- “The brotherhood was organized with a small membership a year ago when the style of buttoning dresses down (and up) the back first appeared… The object of the brotherhood is mutual aid and comfort. All husbands who button their wives up (or down) are eligible;”

--A piece based partly on legend, partly on fact called “A Treasure Ship in Our Own Lakes: A Real Quest for a Real Sunken Treasure Ship Near Cleveland.”

And on July 18, 1909, he wrote the story of the veiled lady, with the second headline “For Forty Years No Man Has Seen the Face of This Feminine Recluse, Who in Her Youth Was Known as the Beauty of the Town.”

The story opens with a description of a house with an overgrown yard and explains that “In the house lives a spinster who was known in girlhood for her beauty. She has worn a heavy veil for more than forty years. In all that time, so far as people of the village know, no man has seen her face.”

You should read his piece to fully understand how odd it is, so I’ve appended it. The short version is that Harriet “Hattie” Martindale was a wealthy recluse who had not appeared in public without a veil for decades. Davis mentions that the rumored reason for the veil was a love affair while acknowledging that those who knew her best refuted the rumor. To his credit, Davis does not provide details of the rumored affair, demonstrating a restraint his storytelling successors lacked.

The story discusses Hattie’s kindness, in buying houses for two other “aged spinsters” who were losing their homes, and in providing the village with a library. Davis recounts knocking on her door, speaking briefly with Hattie and having the door closed on him with no further response to his continued knocking.

Even with his overwriting, Davis evidently did not have enough to fill out the page, so halfway through his story he does an unusual pivot, suggesting Hattie was the inspiration for a novel at the time, about a woman who wore a veil for 25 years. Fully half of Davis’ story is a long excerpt from the 1906 novel “A Spinner in the Sun” by Myrtle Reed, without him returning to the story of Hattie.

It’s an odd story for a newspaper, but even odder is that it became a story for newspapers around the world. Paul Sturtevant found abbreviated versions in newspapers across the United States and in New Zealand and Australia. They used nearly identical wording as Davis, lifting entire passages from his piece. It was the early 1900s version of virality, but instead of a story spreading across the Internet in seconds or minutes, it spread much more slowly, over a couple of years.

A few years later, for reasons unknown, the story caught fire again. In 1916 and 1917, Hattie’s tale appeared in hundreds of newspapers far and wide to mark the 45th anniversary of her wearing the veil, but this time, the rumor about the romance that Davis mentioned was much more detailed. In the new version, Hattie had been engaged to be married but was left at the altar when her would-be husband eloped with her sister. So, she vowed never to let another man see her face.

Step forward to 1940, when a Plain Dealer reporter named Grace Goulder tapped into the story of the veiled lady of Kirtland. Goulder was an esteemed journalist in Cleveland. For decades she wrote a column called “Ohio Scenes and Citizens” for The Plain Dealer, appearing every week in the Sunday magazine until 1969. In 1953, she wrote a book called “This is Ohio” with anecdotes and histories of each county in the state. She also wrote respected books on John D. Rockefeller and the history of her beloved Hudson. She won all kinds of awards, including, in 1965, The Cleveland Arts Prize, for literature. She’s the rare journalist to have an entry in the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History.

Despite her renown and reputation, in 1940, she recounted the nonsense about Hattie in her column. Like Davis, Goulder opened with a description of Hattie’s house. And then, “So many of Ohio’s old homesteads look like story-book houses with ghostly secrets and romance seeming to lurk in the set of the eaves, under the shadows, over worn steps; and here is a house with an authentic mystery, a real love story, and even a novel written around it.”

Goulder goes deep on describing the jilted bride. “The great night finally came. Her wedding dress lay out on the new coverlet on her big four poster. We know she had a wedding dress, though she never wore it, for a few years ago it was exhibited in a Willoughby store window… And then Hattie’s younger sister disappeared. Eloped, it was soon learned, with the bridegroom.”

The piece goes on to quote people who visited with Hattie in her later years, including a friend of Goulder’s. And she closes by saying, “But anyway Miss Hattie’s story is true—or so my Lake County friends tell me. And there’s the old house to prove it.”

But the story was not true, as Hattie’s best friends had told Davis in 1909 and as evidence that Sturtevant has collected shows. Years after Goulder wrote her piece, a member of the Hattie’s family tried to persuade her to correct the record. In 1959, the grandson of Hattie’s sister – John Morley Nutting – wrote a letter to Goulder. He criticized Goulder for reporting Hattie’s wedding dress had been exhibited, calling that story “so much tommyrot.” He told Goulder that Hattie had plenty of men friends throughout her life, including one who was serious, although she “turned him down.”

More important, he told Goulder that Hattie’s only sister was his grandmother, and Hattie was a bridesmaid at the grandmother’s wedding. There was no elopement. He said his Aunt Hattie started wearing a veil after a trip to Chicago for treatment of an eye condition. Her eyes watered badly in extreme light.

“I wish, Miss Goulder, that I could count on your assistance in squelching these stories about Aunt Hattie and her home. She has been gone these 50 years. Further propagation of them can do nothing but feed a prejudice and ill will against her and those who happen to follow her. We are very tired of it all. Any time that you want to write the story of her life as a true, faithful, unselfish Christian woman that she was I will be glad to help you all I can. But no more of this common gossip. Can I count on your assistance.”

Sturtevant has no evidence that Goulder acted on the request. If she had, perhaps The Plain Dealer would not have included details about Hattie in a story about a house tour in 1970. It included this reference: “The existence of the ghost of a jilted Martindale daughter is rumored but not legally attested. She is said to peer from a second-story window, watching for her vanished lover and his new love, her sister.”

Finally, in 2000, in a story about guided walks through Lake County cemeteries, The Plain Dealer reported that the tour guide “reveals another myth about the veiled lady reportedly seen floating down Chillicothe Road. The veiled lady was actually Hattie Martindale,” the guide told our reporter. “She died at age 87 but for 55 years she wore a veil around her face everywhere she went. Turns out she was engaged to be married, and, the night before her wedding, her fiancé eloped with her sister. She wore her wedding veil every day after that.”

Notice the new details of the veil being a wedding veil and the ghost now floating down the road. This story is like a game of Whisper Down the Lane.

Sturtevant, like John Morley Nutting, wants it to stop. In his request for a retraction, he wrote, “Research I have done in my family’s archive has revealed the truth, that this original story was a lie, and the reason for Hattie’s behavior was a lifelong struggle with a debilitating eye disability… I’m not making any accusations against the Plain Dealer, it’s really not responsible for what others did under its masthead 100 years ago. However, I feel like this could make the basis of a good story – a 100-year-old retraction, and an opportunity to finally correct the record.”

Sturtevant is descended from people who, as he tells it, “saved everything they ever wrote,” including copies of their letters. His family archive begins in 1817 and covers major moments in U.S. history, including the Civil War. As the originators died, they passed the archive on to their children. John Morley Nutting’s sister Ruth had it. When she died, it went to Sturtevant’s’s grandmother, who passed it on to his mother.

Sturtevant worked on the archive with his mother – until it became his after her 2018 death -- and they found many letters between Hattie and her sister. There is no animosity. No mention of eloping.

“She had a very loving relationship with her sister all her life,” he said.

What the letters show is much worry about Hattie’s eye.

“It clearly was a chronic, extremely painful eye disease,” and he thinks it dates to when she attended college in Oberlin. The archive shows she tried all kinds of science to cure it, including the Cleveland Water Cure, which the Encyclopedia of Cleveland history describes as a combination sanitarium and resort built near a soft water spring in the city.

One detail that Davis appears to have gotten right in 1909 was Hattie’s kindness, Sturtevant says. He found receipts for a general store in which he says she was buying milk and butter for other people. In the last years of her life, she bought stocks and gave them to relatives and others whose names he has not traced. He found a record of her donating a library to the local high school.

I asked Sturtevant if he found anything in the archive to show that Hattie was offended or bothered by all of the news coverage. He did not. Based on her remaining active into her later years, he hopes she was not traumatized.

She was just a woman coping with an eye problem. And newspapers around the world made an entertainment out of it.

I’ve called what they wrote nonsense by today’s standards, but I don’t believe we can hold them to modern standards. Newspapers are reflections of their eras. Maybe readers loved a fanciful tale when George Davis was writing. Maybe the publishers sold a lot more papers – and a lot more advertising as a result – if they included pieces that built pseudo-mysteries around local gossip. The Plain Dealer magazine editor back clearly supported Davis, repeatedly publishing his pieces with detailed illustrations.

And what about Grace Goulder, who appears to be Cleveland journalism royalty? Her column about people and places might have been the escape people needed in those post-war and Cold War years. She wrote her piece about Hattie 31 years after Davis wrote the original, so was she even aware of the Davis piece? (I don’t know what to make of what appears to be her non-response to Nutting.)

The 1970 reporter merely listed the stops on a house tour. Was it that reporter’s job to go back and verify what the tour sponsors said, or was it a quick throw-away story about something to do that weekend?

I’m troubled by the 2000 reference mainly because I was a reporter at The Plain Dealer by then, having arrived in 1996. The Plain Dealer in the 1990s was a poor specimen of a newspaper, but that changed after Doug Clifton’s arrival as editor in 1999. Many of us credit Doug with instituting journalistic and ethical standards that made the paper one of the nation’s best. That 2000 reference to Hattie being jilted was during the Clifton era, but it was about 15 months after he arrived. Doug certainly needed more than 15 months to turn the paper around.

I’d like to think that in 2000, a reporter would have done a bit of verification work rather than simply transcribing what someone said in an interview. The Plain Dealer archives were not digitized back then, though. The chances of finding that original Davis story would have been quite low. How would anyone know it existed? And then, how would they find it in a century of archives? The Davis story would have been key to not repeating the malarkey. His piece said Hattie’s friends refuted the rumor. All the versions after that stated the rumor as fact.

That’s why I feel it unfair to judge the reporters who wrote about Hattie or the many newspapers that carried the story. The reporters were operating within the requirements of their jobs at the time they were doing them. The newspapers were serving their readership based on the wants and needs of that readership.

The story of Harriet Martindale surely is not the only journalistic sin in our archives. If I combed through them, I would find all sorts of other content that we’d be embarrassed to publish today. And future journalists and historians surely will find some reasons to question what we do these days. We have 75 journalists in our newsroom, working in good faith to have a positive impact on the community of Northeast Ohio and doing so according to contemporary journalistic standards. I hope those in the future don’t judge us any more than we judge our predecessors.

What, then, do we do with Sturtevant’s request for a correction?

We publish this column.

We publish it because Sturtevant made a request, as it means something to his family to set the record straight. We respond to requests for corrections, no matter how dated.

We publish it because it offers us insights into current debates about journalism -- through a century-long prism of reporting one story -- and shows that those “golden eras of journalism” people often talk about maybe were not so golden as they remember.

More than anything, we publish it because it is one heck of a good story.

That’s what we do here. We publish interesting stories. We hope you liked this one. Thanks for reading.

As mentioned above, here is the original George E. Davis story from 1909, without his long excerpt of the Myrtle Reed novel:

The Veiled Lady of Kirtland

A house, painted white, ninety years old, stands in a tangle of brier and shrubbery at the side of a country road near Kirtland. The house is on the edge of a hillside in a yard grown high with grass and flowers. A peacock struts through the high grass.

In the house lives a spinster who was known in girlhood for her beauty. She has worn a heavy veil for more than 40 years. In all that time, so far as the people of the village know, no man has seen her face.

Few women have seen beyond the heavy veil. Sometimes, when alone, she raises the veil to her forehead, but she pulls it down at the first approach of a human being. When she drives out it is doubly thick and envelopes her face from her forehead to her chin.

The name of the veiled lady is Harriet Martindale. She has money. She bought a library for the village. She bought homes for two aged spinsters who had lost their own. That is why they call her kind.

No one at the village knows why she wears the veil. The gossip of the place is that it is because of a love affair and a resolution more than forty years ago that no man again should see her face.

Some who know her best believe this isn’t so. But no other reason is offered. So far as the village knows, she has never, herself, made any explanation.

Visitors are Not Welcome

To strangers who call at the old white house on the hill the “veiled lady” seldom shows herself at all. Men whom she has known from boyhood sometimes call at the place on farm business. Her veil is in place when she opens the door. She stands with her side or her back to the visitor.

The home was silent when the writer knocked at the heavy, wide, white door. Footsteps inside. A bolt was drawn, and the heavy door opened about a foot.

Beyond lay a darkened room. From behind the heavy door came the voice of a woman, low and kind,

“What is it?” asked the voice.

Men call at the house sometimes to ask for Alton Martindale, a nephew of the veiled lady, who works the farm. The veiled lady tells these visitors where the nephew may be found and she did so now.

As she talked from behind the heavy door three finger tips of the hand that held the latch projected beyond the door’s edge. No more of her was seen. At the first question that concerned herself a change came into her voice.

“Is this Miss Martindale?”

“Yes.”

The finger tips drew back. The door closed. The latch clicked. There were hurried footsteps inside. Then an inner door closed with a bang. All was still. To further raps there was no answer.

The Belle of the Town

The “veiled lady” has lived in the house on the hill ever since she was a little girl. John Wells, postmaster at Kirtland, went to school with her at the old Western Reserve seminary, and remembers her as a young woman of unusual beauty.

She had large black eyes. Her hair was dark like her eyes. She was fond of horses and could manage the wildest on the farm. She was graceful, popular and had many suitors.

Postmaster Wells and other old residents remember a morning when she was missed. She had risen in the night, harnessed a colt and driven north. The whole countryside was aroused. The lake to which the tracks of the colt led was dragged.

But the girl was not drowned. She returned home while they were still patrolling the beach. She said she had gone away to be alone, and as far as the postmaster remembers no other explanation was made. When they saw her again the veil covered her face.

She has worn it ever since.

Women, now gown, remember when as little girls they sometimes went to the house of the “veiled lady” to look at pictures in the books she had for them. Even at those times she kept her face hidden behind the veil.

She never enters the store at Kirtland where the postoffice is located. Before there was rural free delivery she came at night to drop her letters through the door when no one was about.

Now, when she drives to the village, as she does infrequently, her face even on the warmest day is muffled in a veil so heavy that there is no suggestion of the features beneath. She is very straight in her carriage as it passes others on the road. She looks straight ahead until the others are gone.

A Genuine Philanthropist

When she bought a library for the village she wrote the postmaster that all the arrangements had been made, and asked him to give it room in the store. She never entered the store to see the books. So it was with a Sunday school she paid to establish in an old vacated stone building.

Miss Hattie Moore, an aged spinster who lived in the village, had not spoked to the “veiled lady” for years when she lost what money had been left to her. The “veiled lady” sent her word that the house in which Miss Moore now lives was to be hers for life.

A similar gift was made by the “veiled lady” to Miss Martha Wells, another aged spinster, a relative of the postmaster. The villagers tell of other gifts as generous.

The Heroine of a Book

At Kirtland, they say that the “veiled lady” suggested the central character of a successful book by Myrtle Reed, called “The Spinner in the Sun.”

This is the story of another woman who wore a veil for twenty-five years. The story starts as followes…