Marjorie Lyon

Marjorie Van Wickle Lyon was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1883, the first child of Bessie Pardee and Augustus Stout Van Wickle. In 1894, the family moved to Hazleton, Pennsylvania, and built a house on North Church Street. A year later, they purchased the Blithewold estate as their “Country Home.” In 1898, Marjorie’s father Augustus was killed in a skeet-shooting accident, changing her life forever. Her sister, Augustine, was born 5 months later.

In her teenage years Marjorie attended Miss Vinton’s School in Ridgefield, Connecticut, a small boarding school for young ladies. It was there that she met several young women who would remain her closest friends for the rest of her life. In 1901, her mother Bessie remarried and the family moved to Boston, where Marjorie attended Miss Haskell’s School on Marlborough Street.

When Marjorie was 19 years old, she went on an 11-month tour of Europe and Egypt, accompanied by her cousin Dorothy Pardee, a friend, and a chaperone-guide. In the hundreds of letters home to her mother, Marjorie gave a comprehensive account of her adventures, revealing the beginnings of a lifelong passion for travel, nature, music, and art.

Marjorie married George Lyon in the enclosed garden at Blithewold in 1914. She loved the gardens, and inherited her mother’s considerable horticultural talents. She helped bring Bessie’s vision of a “park-like estate” to fruition, and her experiments in propagating the Giant Sequoia yielded many more sequoias on the Blithewold property, and in Bristol and Newport as well.

In 1917, in preparation for war, George Lyon underwent Officers’ Training, attaining the rank of Captain. In September of that year, he was sent to Camp Jackson in Columbia, South Carolina. Marjorie followed him, and there she began her work with the Red Cross that would become a large part of her life for the next 40 years, through two world wars and in peacetime. In Columbia, she became head of the Home Services Institute, helping local military families with special needs. After the war, she worked in Boston as a Motor Corps driver. Upon her retirement in 1957, it was estimated that she had driven some 150,000 miles for the Red Cross, picking up needy patients and driving them to the Boston hospitals and clinics for outpatient treatment.

In her later years, Marjorie resumed her early interest in painting and traveling. She traveled to Europe often, painting in Rome, Florence, Paris, and Monte Carlo. Changing exhibits of her work are displayed at Blithewold, and hundreds more paintings are stored in the archives. She wrote poetry, journals, and detailed accounts of her experiences in foreign lands. Besides her many visits to Europe, she traveled to Egypt, Panama, Hawaii, and across Canada to Alaska. However, her heart was always close to home. In 1931, she wrote to her mother, “Looking forward to the next weekend in Bristol, which, after all our wanderings, is still the very favorite spot for all of us.”

After a full and active life, Marjorie died at Blithewold in 1976 at the age of 93. The estate is now managed by Blithewold, Inc., a non-profit organization dedicated to keeping the property open to the public, in accordance with Marjorie’s wishes.

Biography and image provided by Margaret Whitehead, Blithewold Mansion, Gardens and Arboretum