Margaret Louisa Vanderbilt Shepard

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Margaret Louisa Vanderbilt (Mrs. Elliot Fitch Shepard) by John Singer Sargent in 1888

Margaret Louisa Vanderbilt Shepard (New Dorp, July 23, 1845– Manhattan, March 3, 1924) was an American heiress and a member of the prominent Vanderbilt family.

Early life

Born 1845 in Staten Island, New York, the eldest daughter of William Henry Vanderbilt and Maria Louisa Kissam Vanderbilt and granddaughter of the Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt. Her older brother was Cornelius Vanderbilt II and younger siblings William Kissam Vanderbilt, Emily Thorn Vanderbilt, Florence Adele Vanderbilt Twombly, Frederick William Vanderbilt, Eliza Osgood Vanderbilt Webb and George Washington Vanderbilt II.

Houses

• Townhouse (double mansion) (1882) on Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street designed by John B. Snook, provided to them by her father and shared with her sister Emily Thorn Vanderbilt
• Woodlea (1892–1895), a Stanford White (of the firm McKim, Mead & White) designed country estate in Scarborough, New York, now the Sleepy Hollow Country Club.

Personal life

On February 18, 1868 Margaret Louisa married Elliot Fitch Shepherd in the Church of the Incarnation in New York. They had five daughters and one son: Florence (1869–1869), Maria Louise (1870–1948), Edith (1872–1954), Margaret (1873–1895), Alice Louise (1874–1950) and Elliot Fitch Shepard, Jr. (1877–1927).

An ardent supporter of the YWCA, she built, in 1891, the Margaret Louisa, a YWCA hotel strictly for transient guests at 14 E. 16th Street in New York City. Mrs. Shepard fully financed and furnished the building.

Margaret Louisa narrowly escaped being a victim of the RMS Titanic, having booked passage but for unknown reasons cancelled and traveled a week earlier on the RMS Olympic.

Death

Margaret died at her apartment on 998 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan on March 3, 1924. She is interred at the Vanderbilt mausoleum, Moravian Cemetery, Staten Island.