This collection includes greeting cards and letters sent to Calvin Hathaway, mostly by Edith Wetmore, between 1957 and 1965. Also included in the collection is one greeting card from Maude Wetmore, Edith’s sister, and correspondence regarding Edith Wetmore’s death in 1966.
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Description or title of item, PSNCA.H.064: Edith and Maude Wetmore and Calvin S. Hathaway correspondence, Box 1, Folder 1, Preservation Society of Newport County, Newport, RI.
Materials are arranged in chronological order and described at the item level.
Edith Malvina Keteltas Wetmore (1870-1966) and Maude Alice Keteltas Wetmore (1873-1951) were the two daughters and eldest children of Edith Malvina Keteltas (1848-1927) and George Peabody Wetmore (1836-1921), who served as governor of Rhode Island and United States Senator. The sisters lived at the family estate, Chateau-sur-Mer, after the deaths of their parents. Philanthropists and socialites, they were integral to many social causes in Newport and across Rhode Island, funding the construction of the Seaman’s Church Institute building in 1930.
The sisters were incorporators of the Preservation Society of Newport County; Maude served as its first president and Edith was on the first Executive Committee. Maude was a prominent activist for the Republic party. Edith donated almost 2,000 books to the Providence Public Library: 1,850 children’s books and 400 other illustrated works. After Edith’s death, the Preservation Society acquired the house 1969 to operate as a historic house museum.
Calvin Sutliffe Hathaway (1907-1974) was the first professional art historian at the Cooper Union Museum, and became its director after World War II. Hathaway was a friend of the Wetmore sisters and advised them on the potential of turning Chateau-sur-Mer into a house museum.
Born in upstate New York, Hathaway earned his Bachelor’s degree in French literature from Princeton University in 1930 and then studied art history at Harvard and New York Universities. He also worked as a curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and then became an assistant curator at the Cooper Union Museum in 1933.
Hathaway’s methods for organizing, identifying, and cataloging every object in the Cooper Union Museum’s collection were later useful in his work with the U.S. Army’s Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFAA) division as one of the “Monuments Men,” tracking down looted cultural heritage objects during World War II. One of his most notable discoveries was recovering an art collection in Austria, which had been partially looted from the Vienna Kunsthistorische Museum; he received a Bronze Star for this work.
After the war, Hathaway served as curator of Cooper Union Museum from 1946 to 1951, and then as director until 1963. When the Cooper Union Museum trustees began to consider closing the museum, Hathaway resigned and took a new position at the Philadelphia Museum of Art as R. Wister Harvey Curator of Decorative Arts, a position he held from 1964 until his retirement in 1972. He died on vacation in Boston in 1974.
Found in collection, most likely gift or bequest of Calvin Hathaway or heirs. These letters were filed with papers found at Chateau-sur-Mer and separated into their own collection due to their likely separate provenance.
Collection was processed by archivist Genna Duplisea in 2026.
Additional accruals are not expected.