The Dress

by Jonnifer Ellsworth

One constant feature of my "growing up" years was the annual journey from Cherokee in northwestern Iowa to my grandparent's home in Sandusky, Ohio. My mother, Mary Ellsworth (Oaknoll resident from 1991-2004), grew up in Sandusky where her father was sales manager of a major paper and boxboard manufacturing firm, Hinde and Dauch.

My grandfather was born in 1877 and grew up on Isle St. George (North Bass Island) less than thirty miles from Canada in Lake Erie. He was the youngest of six children born to Howard Hill Morton and Annie Milner Morton (pictured below).

Howard Hill Morton

Annie Milner Morton

 His oldest sibling, Alfred, was born in 1866 in Washington D.C.  His parents resided in Washington a little more than two years at the beginning of Abraham Lincoln's second term as U.S. President. Howard had been hired as a correspondent by the Cincinnati Enquirer to report on Lincoln's second term and, following the assassination, the family returned to Ohio and settled on North Bass to grow grapes for the wine industry.

The dress was a pink silk ball gown made in Washington for Annie to wear to Lincoln's second inaugural ball. In the photo below,  I am standing in the backyard  of my grandparents home in Sandusky wearing "the dress." The year is 1950 and I am six years old.

Here I am wearing "the dress."

 The photo of my mother is a studio portrait taken in Sandusky in the early 1920's. All female Morton children had their photos taken in "the dress." We were posed standing on chairs or orange crates with the dress skirt flared over them and sometimes tissue paper was used to expand the skirt bottom outward. It had a 19-inch waist and none of us could get into it much above the age of 6-8. It was donated to a Lakewood, Ohio historical society by my aunt when the last Morton grandchild was born a male.

My mother, Mary Ellsworth, in "the dress."