Harriet (Douglas) Cruger (1790-1872)

She was born in New York City to a self-made father who left her $400,000 by the time she reached 21. She became familiar with European society at a young age - meeting William Wordsworth, Juliette Récamier, and the Marquis de Lafayette among others - and in her thirties stayed at Abbotsford as a guest of Sir Walter Scott who was friends with her uncle, James Douglas. She had red hair, a fiery temper, and was one of society's most rampant social climbers, dubbed "the lion-huntress of the social jungle". Philip Hone described her as, "the American Madame de Staël" and she was the inspiration for Mary Monson in James Fenimore Cooper's last novel, The Ways of the Hour (1850).

The English abolitionist Harriet Martineau wrote: "Mrs Douglas Cruger of New York, who amused and bored Sir Walter Scott so wonderfully, and of whom most English celebrities have curious anecdotes to tell, was one of the most difficult ('social lion-hunters') to deal with, from her pertinacity in insisting that I should be her guest when I made my stay at New York: but, before I went there, I had made my abolition avowal; and never was there such a list of reasons why a hostess could not invite guests; as Mrs Cruger poured out to me when we met in a crowd at a ball; nor anything so sudden as her change of tone, with some hesitation lingering in it, when she saw that I was well received after all."

Having spent most of her life mixing in society on both sides of the Atlantic and insisting she would never get married, Harriet eventually changed her mind in 1833. At the age of 43, she married Henry Cruger who was ten years her junior and a member of one of America's oldest and most notable mercantile families. However, aside from just the age difference, their marriage was one of the most unusual matches of their era. Harriet finally succumbed to his proposals after ten years of his trying, and the primary reason for his dogged persistence (as she may well have guessed) was his interest in her money.

But, Harriet wasn't about to hand him an open purse. On agreeing to marry him, she gave him a list of provisos including that he change his name to "Douglas". She also stated that it would be her who chose where they lived and most importantly her money would remain her money, and she had her lawyers circumnavigate the usual codes of marriage to ensure this. Cruger initially refused to sign the papers, but eventually conceded and Harriet only compromised on his taking the name Henry Douglas Cruger rather than Henry Douglas. By 1843, Cruger had had enough and seven years later after a well-publicized court case that scandalized society, they were divorced. Cruger agreed to be paid off with a down payment of $20,000 and $1,000 quarterly for the rest of his life.

In 1844, she built a substantial townhouse at 128 West 14th Street, New York City, that was loosely modelled on Clermiston House near Edinburgh, the home of her first cousin, Mrs William Rose Robinson. In later life, she resided principally at Gelston Castle that she had built in 1834 on a tract of land in Herkimer County, that was originally granted to her maternal great-grandfather, James Henderson. It was named for and very loosely modelled on Gelston Castle in Scotland that was built by her uncle, Sir William Douglas, but for most of the 19th century was home to another first cousin, Mrs William Maitland.