Alice (Church) Coffin (b.1853)

She was a great-granddaughter of the colorful revolutionary figure, John Barker Church. She was married in 1874 at Manhattan, New York, to Julian R. Coffin whose father had been the largest cotton producer in Beaufort County, South Carolina, but lost everything in the Civil War. When Julian died after contracting malaria, he left his widow and two children (including the landscape architect Marian Cruger Coffin) with just $300. Alice then moved to Geneva, New York, where her family had been seated at Belvidere since 1804. She lived first with her sister, Harriet, and then with her brother, John Barker Church IV. Despite her poverty, she lived under the umbrella of her family's social prominence and she became best friends with Mary Foster so that she was Mary's maid of honor at her society wedding to Henry Algernon Dupont, of Winterthur.