Lydia Latrobe Roosevelt

In Love With a Much Older Man

Sep 27, 2006 Mary Trotter Kion

Lydia Latrobe met her future husband, Nicholas Roosevelt, when she was a child and he was 25 years her senior. She would become the great grand aunt of Theodore Roosevelt

Lydia Latrobe would, in many years hence, become the great grand aunt of Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th President of the United States of American History. But that was not her major claim to fame. It was merely a by-product of marriage. Nor was the highlight of her life the fact that her own father, the American architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe, had introduced the Greek Revival style to American architecture and rebuilt the Capitol in Washington D.C. after it was burned by the British in 1814, during the War of 1812. This was only a chance of birth. Lydia Latrobe Roosevelt's fame involved simpler elements: water, birth, earthquake, and a mighty river that, for a time, ran backwards.

In Love With a Much Older Man

Lydia first met Nicholas Roosevelt when she was nine years old. He had

been an ancient thirty-four at the time of this meeting. Nicholas was a business associate of Lydia's father. But evidently the wide gulf between their ages was of little consequence, at least to Lydia and Nicholas. When Lydia was thirteen, and over her father's objections, she became engaged to Nicholas Roosevelt. Four years later, they were married.

No Lady Was Lydia

Now Lydia Roosevelt, at seventeen, could conduct herself with the

extreme decorum expected of a matron in the early years of America's 1800's. She could conduct herself thusly except that Lydia was an adventurous rebel. It is said that she also "possessed remarkably advanced attitudes," as well as being "bright and assertive, artistic and most of all-fearless." Not a very lady-like description for the time, it is true. It well may have been these very traits that made her such an excellent mate for enterprising and also adventurous Nicholas Roosevelt.

Nicholas Roosevelt

Nicholas, himself, was considered a maverick

, although he was also a man of many skills. He was a mechanic, metallurgist, machinist, and civil engineer. And he was obsessed with building steam engines, and for very good reasons.

Lydia Latrobe Roosevelt: In Love With a Much Older Man, continues with New Era in River Transportation: Changes on the Mississippi .

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