On Sunday, November 19, 1916, the Minneapolis Sunday Tribune ran a photo feature under the headline “They Care for Little French War Orphans.” Beneath it sat a second, smaller headline that reads like the setup to a riddle: “King of Belgium Thanks Minneapolis Children for Aid.” The child in question was Mary Pillsbury, twelve years old, of 100 East Twenty-second Street, the address of the Charles S. Pillsbury Mansion. The letter, sent through the King’s secretary, is reproduced in the newspaper in its original French, and the clipping still sits in our archive. Here is what it says, and what a household of four children was doing to earn it.

A letter from the Secrétariat du Roi

The Tribune printed a fragment of the letter as an illustration, drawn inside a sketched map of Belgium. The letterhead reads Secrétariat du Roi et de la Reine, and the note opens “Chère enfant.” The visible lines say that her letter, overflowing with kindness and generous feeling, had touched the King, and that His Majesty thanked her. The paper’s own caption is plainer: “Part of letter sent by King Albert of Belgium through his secretary to Mary Pillsbury thanking her for helping the soldiers.”

In November 1916 that was no small correspondent. Albert I had refused Germany’s demand for free passage in August 1914, watched his country overrun, and then spent the entire war with his army behind the Yser River, running things from a headquarters at De Panne on the coast. The Tribune article mentions La Panne by name, as the place where the French president and the British king had come to meet him “on Belgian soil for the first time after the war broke out.” A thank-you note from that headquarters to a twelve-year-old in Minneapolis says something about how far the children’s work had travelled.

Four children, four adopted orphans

The article names all four Pillsbury children and their ages: Mary, twelve; Philip, thirteen and away at Hotchkiss; Katharine, ten; and Helen, eight. (The paper spells the second daughter’s name both “Katharine” and “Katherine” on the same page. We have kept both.) Each of the girls, it reports, “has adopted a French war orphan,” and Philip a fourth. Mary’s charge was Marie Gilberte Minjot; Katharine’s was Henriette Mazurier; Helen’s was Marguerite Mazurier; Philip’s was Fernand Mazurier. Each child sent $36.50 a year toward an orphan’s care, and the family planned to take on four more after the holidays. Portraits of the four orphans, and of two Belgian soldiers the children wrote to, ran across the top of the page.

The engine behind it was the family’s governess, Mlle. Laurentine Lemaire of Liège, who by 1916 had been with the Pillsburys for ten years. Born in Belgium to a French mother and a Belgian father, she had been home on a visit when the war opened. The Tribune has her crossing a bridge over the Ourthe as shrapnel tore the water a few feet away. Back in Minneapolis she obtained, through her contacts, a list of Belgian soldiers who had not heard from their families since the war began, and the Pillsbury children wrote to them every week, in French. The paper notes that Katharine, at ten, and “even little Helen, aged eight,” had long since mastered the language, and that the three girls spoke only French with their governess.

The Secret Club and the candy money

The part of the story the newspaper clearly enjoyed most is that Mary did not stop at letters. Unknown even to her governess, she organised a club among her friends, “known as the ‘Secret Club,'” and staged a play at the family’s lake home during the summer of 1916. The play was Cinderella, with song and dance specialties “arranged by the little coach.” It cleared $62, the club’s first contribution to relief work.

Then she collected ten cents a week from each member, money they “willingly gave up” from their own candy allowance. That added $20 to the fund sent to Belgium. The club had sixteen members, the youngest five and the oldest fourteen, and the Tribune lists several by name, including three Heffelfinger girls and a Hodgman. Mary Pillsbury was president; Katharine Pillsbury was secretary.

Out of that came the physical goods. The children made comfort bags for Belgian soldiers whose names were on the list; the article gives the number as twenty-four in one paragraph and says twenty-six were “ready to send as Christmas gifts” in another, so we report both. They made two hundred pillows for the wounded in hospitals. They sent, in Mary’s own phrase, “football shoes enough for 39 soldiers,” after Philip received a letter from a Belgian soldier asking for a pair of football boots and stockings so he could join the games the men played to keep their minds off the front. And they knitted bandages. A French priest, Don Marc de Montpellier d’Annevoie, wrote to Philip several times and gave the girls a title the paper repeats with evident pleasure: “Godmothers to the soldiers.”

Letters from the front, and a decorated brother

The correspondence ran both ways. A French girl named Madeleine Leroy wrote to Mary through a Paris intermediary, Madame Frederix, who ran a Belgian refuge in the city. Madeleine sent photographs of her soldier brothers: the oldest, Pierre, in his fighting uniform, and the youngest, Jack, who had just received a decoration for bravery during a bombardment. “This is my brother, Jack, by an ambulance on the front,” she wrote in French. “This ambulance was bombarded three weeks ago by the Germans and completely destroyed.” Katharine’s correspondents included a soldier named Pierre Werwulgen, who, the article notes without ceremony, “was killed in a recent railroad accident at the front.”

Some of the soldiers sent their pictures back “that the children might see to whom they were sending cheer.” Several of those portraits are the ones on the page. The paper also records that Mrs. Pillsbury sent clothes and supplies to Paris every week and a cheque every month, that James Ford Bell sent a monthly allowance for the same refuge, and that Mary was one of a group of girls at Stanley Hall giving their Sunday mornings to sewing comfort bags for the Woman’s Club of Minneapolis.

Why the date matters

Two things about the timing are worth noticing. First, the United States was still neutral. The country would not enter the war until April 6, 1917, five months after this page was printed; the Library of Congress’s Echoes of the Great War exhibition is a good place to see how contested that question still was at home. The children’s project was private charity in a neutral country, organised by a Belgian governess and a twelve-year-old, and the Tribune framed it that way, as a story about Minneapolis children rather than about the war effort.

Second, the article gives the family’s address as 100 East Twenty-second Street. That places the Pillsburys in this house in November 1916. It does not, on its own, tell us when the house was finished; we have written before about how the record on that point disagrees with itself, with a 1913 clipping already calling it “the new home.” This page is simply one more fixed point on the timeline, and it happens to be a warm one.

What became of the twelve-year-old

Readers of this journal will know how the story continues. The girl who organised a Secret Club to fund war relief grew up to be Mary Pillsbury Lord, who helped lead recruiting for the Women’s Army Corps in the Second World War and, in 1953, succeeded Eleanor Roosevelt as the United States representative on the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. We have told the Second World War chapter separately. Reading the 1916 page with that in mind, the ten-cents-a-week candy fund starts to look less like a cute anecdote and more like a first draft.

The sisters turn up elsewhere in these pages too: the Christmas of 1917, the year after this article; the war-relief garments displayed in the amusement room in 1918; where the daughters went to college; and the shipwreck two of them survived in 1935. If you would like to go to the source yourself, the Minnesota Historical Society’s digital newspaper collections are where a page like this one lives.

Stand where the letters were written

The rooms where four children wrote weekly letters in French to strangers in the trenches are the rooms you walk through on a guided tour of the Pillsbury Mansion. The house is now the Pillsbury Club, and it is open to guests with a reservation; details, hours and parking are on the Plan Your Visit page. Come and see the house a King once wrote to.