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mitted to visit Caroline in her new home on theAllegheny River near Pittsburgh, he persuadedthe love of his life to renew their engagement.At the end of the school year a few months later,T.C. returned to Pennsylvania, driving a fine carriageand span of horses loaned to him by Dr.Long for the purpose of conveying his fiancéeto Cleveland. Caroline’s stay at Longwood—theresidence of the Longs, John Long Severance,and Solomon Lewis Severance’s widow and theirtwo young sons—cemented her attachment toher betrothed. She considered T.C.’s extendedfamily “most attractive” and their cozy domesticarrangement “a model in all that is lovely, hospitableand harmonious.” 11Forebears of the future patron of Severance Hall(a Standard Oil Company heir who underwrotethe construction of the Beaux-Arts home of theCleveland Orchestra at the dawn of the Depression),the Longs and the Solomon Severanceswere devoted to a cause about which Carolinealso would become passionate. Dedicated abolitionists,David Long and Solomon Severance hadhelped to found two local antislavery societies.Both organizations “left few traces” of effectivenessin changing the hearts and minds of amercantile citizenry busy trying to capitalize onCleveland’s location at the northern terminus ofthe recently completed Ohio & Erie Canal linkingthe Ohio River with the Great Lakes and easternseaboard. However, the second endeavor—achapter of a national organization founded in1833 by William Lloyd Garrison, the editor of thecrusading abolitionist newspaper The Liberator,based in Boston—did serve to place Cleveland,still a relative backwater, on the circuit of NewEngland’s social reformers and intellectuals. The“coming of noble men and women from the east,with their messages upon vital themes,” as Carolineput it, would enrich the first fifteen years ofher married life. 12T.C. and Caroline traveled straight from Longwoodto Auburn, where they were wed in heruncle’s home in August 1840. Following theirhoneymoon in Buffalo, the couple returned toCleveland to set up housekeeping in a cottageon Euclid Street, the neighborhood of choice forthose who wished to live within walking distanceof the Superior Street business district. Around1845, T.C. became a principal of the Fireman’sInsurance Company. By their tenth anniversary,he and Caroline were the proud parents of four“beautiful” children. Their first child had diedof cholera infantum at six weeks of age, and theinability of a physician substituting for the travelingDr. Long to save her baby son gave rise toCaroline’s conviction that she must seek alternativesto traditional medicine if she were to protectthe health of her husband and children from theSeverance family scourge: consumption. Carolinetook her domestic role seriously. “[I]n the earlyforties . . . I, a young wife and mother, was feelingkeenly the responsibilities of my position andseizing eagerly on all possible helps,” she wrote.Thus was born her trust in “nature to do her ownwork by her own remedies” and her keen interestin hygiene, exercise, and abstemiousness. Herforesighted embrace of the now accepted wisdomof plain living provides early evidence of CarolineSeverance’s receptiveness to radical new ideas. 13The Budding of a Natural LeaderCaroline was always careful to credit her husband—“thelight of my life”—with instilling inher the courage to challenge convention. “[W]henI met Theodore and married, I was at once freedfrom the bondage to authority, dogmas andconservative ideas,” she wrote after thirty yearsof marriage. The heart of a political and socialprogressive beat in the breast of her jovial, entrepreneurialhusband. Possibly as a result of hisexposure to the scientific humanism of his father,T.C. did not believe a woman’s place was solelyin the home. He encouraged his wife to join himin championing the nineteenth century’s “greatmovements to reform society, rather than simplybemoaning its decaying state.” 14