On The Trail Of Miss Letta Crapo Smith, 789 E. Jefferson

I don't remember where I first ran across this picture of her..it was probably while researching the Scarab Club. The inscription on the back of the photo reads, "Letta Crapo-Smith daughter of Mr. and Mrs. H.H.H. Crapo-Smith. The first person from Detroit to have a picture in the Paris Salon. Helen E. Keep". 

Photo from the American Archives of Art, Smithsonian Institution

I was fascinated. Who was she? Why had I never heard of her before? What kind of life did this Victorian cameo out of "Little Women" lead?

Several others had stumbled across this photo and shared what meager information they could find, but they didn't have the advantage of being in Detroit. The clues on the web were sparse. She was granddaughter of a Michigan governor, Henry Howland Crapo. I found few photos of her works. Tantalizingly, I found an article about an exhibition going on in Holland that includes her.

References to shows with the Detroit Society of Women Painters gave me my best leads. After some false starts and dead ends, I went to the mecca of those searching for Detroit's past, the Burton Historical Collection at the Detroit Public Library.

To tell her story, I must first introduce you to the cast of characters that was her family. Her grandfather, Henry Howland Crapo, had come from Bristol, Massachusetts to make his fortune in lumber and railroads. He had a huge farm near Swartz Creek that even had its own railroad and train station. He became mayor of Flint, then a State Senator when she was born, and would be governor of Michigan from 1865 to 1868. He died in 1869 seven months after retiring from office.

He had ten children...Mary Ann Crapo, William Wallace Crapo (stayed in New Bedford, became the head of Wamsutta Mills, and one of his sons, Stanford Tappan Crapo, was a prominent Detroit businessman who looked after the family's Michigan railroad and forestry interests), Rebecca Folger Crapo (whose son William Durant b. 1861, a cousin and contemporary to our heroine, would go on to found General Motors), Sarah Bush Crapo, Lucy Anna Crapo (our heroine's mother), Rhoda Macomber Crapo, Henrietta Pell Crapo (who died at 26 in 1866, less than a year after marrying), Lydia Sherman Crapo, Emma Eliza Crapo, and Wilhelmina Helena Crapo.

Lucy Anna Crapo married someone she must have known from her childhood in New Bedford (for he was named after her father), Humphrey Henry Howland Crapo Smith, in 1858. They had two children. Henrietta Crapo Smith (the star of our story) was born on July 4th, 1862. Crapo Cornell Smith, her younger brother, who became a lawyer and an eccentric, was born on May 22, 1868 and left $1,000,000 to the University of Michigan for scholarships when he died in 1948.

Photo of the Detroit Museum of Art, E. Jefferson Avenue, from the Burton Historical Collection.

I can only guess at her childhood, for Letta, as she was always known, makes her first appearance in public documents in the photo above. She was around eighteen years old in the photo. Her father managed lumberyards near the waterfront for her grandfather. In Detroit, her extended family of Crapos lived in mansions in the best neighborhoods... in Flint, it was the same. There were large family gatherings at the fourteen hundred acre Crapo Farm. Descendants of Letta's cousins tell stories of summers on the farm, the swimming hole, maple-sugaring, hay wagons, and the largest herd of Hereford cattle in North America. There must have been visits back east to family and friends... perhaps there were visits to her brother and cousins who went to Harvard, like her Uncle William. 

I imagine her being interested in drawing and painting at an early age, and perhaps taking lessons from the best art teacher in town, Julius Melchers, whose son Gari, only two years older than Letta, would go on to play an important role in her development as an artist. Her mother Lucy Anna was an early supporter of the Detroit Museum of Art. The name Mrs. H.H.H. Crapo Smith appears regularly in reports on fundraising and operations for the new museum, including an 1894 annual report.

Her twenties and thirties are somewhat shrouded in mystery. When she was twenty-one, her mother was chair of the committee for acquiring foreign artworks to be loaned to the Detroit Art Loan Exhibition of 1883. It seems clear that she traveled to England, France, Italy, and Holland, studying art and painting during this period, although a record of dates is elusive. Sometime in the 1890's, she studied in Paris at the Academie Julian. She had a picture in the World's Fair of 1893, and in an Art Institute of Chicago show in 1898. Her pictures were shown in the Paris Salon in 1901 and 1902, according to Clarence Burton, and possibly earlier, according to the World's Fair book author and Helen Keep (Helen, as an amateur historian and a meticulous record-keeper, would not have been mistaken about this). In Detroit, Letta studied with Julius Rolshoven and Gari Melchers, in New York, with William Merritt Chase, in Paris, with William Adolphe Bouguereau, in Holland with George Hitchcock. Rolshoven did a pastel portrait of her, catalogued in the family papers at U of M Flint, and mentioned in the card catalog of the Burton Collection.

Below, photo of Letta Crapo Smith's studio, from the Burton Historical Collection

I believe the large painting was exhibited in Paris, and also at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.

She lived with her parents and bachelor brother at 789 E. Jefferson. Her studio, shown above, was on the top floor. The home no longer stands, but others of the same era give us a glimpse of how it looked. It would have been located between today's University Club and Garden Court Condominiums (neither there in her time), near Chene. Jefferson Avenue was a tree-lined residential street, a mix of new mansions and some of the oldest homes of the city's earliest residents. Letta's friend Helen Elizabeth Keep, a painter and amateur historian, lived nearby at 799 E. Jefferson with her parents in 1885. She would have passed Senator James McMillan's home (where the University Club now stands) on her way downtown.

Photo below of James McMillan residence from the Burton Historical Collection

Here are some details from nearby homes of her day that still stand....

After 1900, her steps become easier to trace. The most clearly documented period of Letta's life is about to begin, revealed by her involvement with the Detroit Society of Women Painters.

She was a founding member in 1903, along with Mary Chase Perry and a bevy of other familiar Detroit names, four years before the Hopkin Club began (which would become the Scarab Club).

From the very first entry in the book of the secretary's minutes:

Photo of the secretary's book of minutes, the Detroit Society of Women Painters, from the Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library

NEXT WEEK: Letta leads the Detroit Society of Women Painters, visits an art colony in Holland, goes to Japan, and a list of her known works.

Other resources for this post:
My thanks to the librarians at the Burton Historical Collection of the Detroit Public Library for their assistance, and to Maria Ketcham at the Detroit Institute of Art's research library. I also learned much from the following publications:
Dutch Utopia:  American Artists in Holland, 1880-1914
  Telfair Museum of Art, 2009, by Annette Stott and Holly Koons McCullough
Artists of Michigan From the Nineteenth Century
  Muskegon Museum of Art, 1987
  Chapter on Letta Crapo Smith, by Annette Stott
History of the Detroit Society of Women Painters
  1953, by Julia Gatlin Moore