Maggie Mitchell

Margaret Julia Mitchell[1] (June 2, 1836 – March 22, 1918) was an American actress, born in New York City.[2] She made her speaking debut as Julia in The Soldier's Daughter at the Chambers Street Theatre in 1851. The parts in which she earned the greatest fame were Jane Eyre, Mignon, Little Barefoot, and Fanchon the Cricket.

Maggie Mitchell
Born
Margaret Julia Mitchell

(1836-06-02)June 2, 1836
New York City, New York
DiedMarch 22, 1918(1918-03-22) (aged 81)
New York City, New York

Mitchell was at the outset of the Civil War a Confederate sympathizer, but later moderated her views. She reportedly danced on an American flag while performing in Montgomery, Alabama, but later denied doing so. Her southern sympathies, charismatic personality and profession made her a warm, close friend of John Wilkes Booth, but also earned her the admiration of Abraham Lincoln, who invited her to tea in the Executive Mansion and enjoyed her performances at Ford's Theatre.

Family

She was married to Henry Paddock, a Cleveland haberdasher who then became her manager, in 1868, and they had two children, Fanchon and Harry M. Paddock. They divorced twenty years later and she wed her co-star Charles Abbott (Mace). She retired from the stage to live in New York in 1892. She was (variously) the mother or aunt of Julian Bugher Mitchell (b. 7 Nov. 1851), a musical comedy director associated with Weber & Fields and Florenz Ziegfeld.[3][4]

Mitchell's mother was born Hannah Dodson in 1805 in Knaresborough, Yorkshire. She married John Lomax, a native of Bolton, and emigrated to the USA in 1830. In 1832, they were preparing to return to England to escape an epidemic of cholera, but Lomax died before they sailed. Hannah afterward married Maggie's father, Charles S. Mitchell (b. 1805), to whom Lomax's bookbinding business had been sold. Mitchell's cousin, Joseph Dodson Greenhalgh, recalled stories that circulated in the English side of the family about the actress's salary, her servants, accoutrements and jewelry.[5] The actor and author Dodson Mitchell was still another relation.

After her death on March 22, 1918 in New York City, one of the wealthiest actresses in the world (primarily in Manhattan and Long Branch, New Jersey, real estate), Mitchell was interred in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.

References
  1. Thomas A. Bogar, Champagne Sparkle: Maggie Mitchell, the First Musical Comedy Star of the American Stage. Rowman and Littlefield, 2020
  2. J. B. Clapp and E. F. Edgett (1899) Players of the Present, The Dunlap Company, New York
  3. Notable American Women 1607–1950: A Biographical Dictionary, Volume 2; copyright 1971, pgs. 551-552; by Edward T. James, Janet Wilson James, Paul S. Boyer
  4. Maggie Mitchell; North American Theatre Online
  5. Joseph Dodson Greenhalgh (1869) Memoranda of the Greenhalgh Family. (Bolton: T. Abbatt), pp. 22–27.
  • This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Gilman, D. C.; Peck, H. T.; Colby, F. M., eds. (1905). New International Encyclopedia (1st ed.). New York: Dodd, Mead. Missing or empty |title= (help)
  • Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin P. Thomas, 1952, page 241


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