There is a photograph in the family collection of Mary Stinson Pillsbury standing in her wedding gown at the carved stone entrance of the mansion at 100 East 22nd Street. It was taken in 1929, beneath the armorial crest, on the threshold the sculptor Charles S. Wells had cut. It is a picture of a settled life beginning.

Six years later, on a January night in the North Atlantic, she and her sister Katherine were in a lifeboat in a snowstorm, watching the ship they had sailed on go down by the head.

Two sisters from East 22nd Street

Mary Stinson Pillsbury was born in Minneapolis on 14 November 1904, the daughter of Charles Stinson Pillsbury and Helen “Nelle” Pendleton Winston. She grew up in this house alongside her brother Philip and her sisters — among them Katherine, who married into the McKee family. Mary graduated cum laude from Smith College in 1927, began family welfare work in Minneapolis, and on 7 December 1929 married Oswald Bates Lord in the city. You can read more about the family who lived here and about Mary’s later life elsewhere on this site.

The ship

The SS Mohawk was not a tramp steamer. Built in 1925–26 by Newport News Shipbuilding for the Clyde Steamship Company, she was 387 feet long, listed at roughly 5,900 gross tons, and carried berths for 446 passengers. She had a veranda café, a dining hall that seated 180, a musical lounge, a library and a dancing deck. She was luxuriously fitted out and regularly carried well-known passengers up and down the Atlantic coast.

She had also, by 1935, had an eventful decade. She was rammed in fog off Sea Bright, New Jersey in 1928 and beached; she ran aground on the St. John’s River near Jacksonville in 1929; she went aground again at Galveston in 1934. Each time she was refloated and put back into service.

The night of 24 January 1935

She left New York that afternoon. Around 9 p.m., several miles south of the Sea Girt Light and about six miles off the New Jersey coast, her automatic steering gear failed. The crew switched to manual steering, and in the confusion between the orders given on the bridge and their execution in the steering engine room the Mohawk made a hard turn to port at full speed — directly into the path of the Norwegian freighter Talisman. Both ships tried to avoid the collision. Neither could.

Talisman struck the Mohawk on her port side. The temperature on deck was two degrees below zero and the lifeboats were under snow; passengers and crew dug them out and lowered them as the ship began to list. About an hour after the collision she rolled onto her starboard side and disappeared. Captain Joseph Edward Wood, having satisfied himself that everyone else was off, went back to his cabin and closed the door. Every bridge officer died. Of the ship’s officers, one survived.

Two Minneapolis women got into the boats: Mary Pillsbury Lord and Katherine Pillsbury McKee. Among those who did not were the New York architect Julian Livingston Peabody and his wife Celestine Hitchcock Peabody, Professor Herdman Fitzgerald Cleland of Williams College, and Gertrude Oakes, sister of Sir Harry Oakes.

A note on the numbers

The sources do not agree, and we have not tried to reconcile them. The Monmouth Timeline, citing The New York Times of 26 January 1935, gives 160 passengers aboard, a destination of Charleston and Jacksonville, and 45 dead. Wikipedia’s account of the ship gives 53 passengers and 110 crew, a destination of Havana, and 47 dead — 16 passengers and 31 crew — while its biography of Mary splits the same total as 15 and 32. What every version agrees on is the hour it took, the cold, and the officers.

Why a ship like that sank at all

The inquiry concluded that the Mohawk caused the collision by veering off course. But the more uncomfortable finding came afterwards: the damage the Talisman did should not have been enough to sink her. During the Depression her owners had modified the ship to carry bulk cargo, and the modifications involved opening up her watertight bulkheads to make loading easier. With the compartments no longer sealed, the water that came through the gash in her bow simply kept going. An hour was all she had.

What Mary did with the years she got back

A great deal. She was president of the Junior League of the City of New York from 1936 to 1938. During the Second World War she served as an assistant regional director of the Office of Civilian Defense, and in 1944 was appointed chairman of the National Civilian Advisory Committee of the Women’s Army Corps. In 1948 she organised and was elected founding chairman of the U.S. Committee for UNICEF, touring a wrecked Europe and presenting her report, Consider These Children, to President Truman.

In 1952 she co-chaired Citizens for Eisenhower. In 1953 Eisenhower appointed her to succeed Eleanor Roosevelt as United States representative to the United Nations Human Rights Commission, a post she held until 1961. Afterwards she chaired the New York Governor’s Committee on the Education and Employment of Women and served as president of the International Rescue Committee. She died in New York on 21 July 1978. Her obituary in The New York Times ran under the headline “Mary Lord, 73, Dies; Held Post At UN.”

It is worth remembering, when you stand in the entrance hall, that the fortune which built this house came out of the mills on the riverfront a mile north of here — a story the Mill City Museum tells well. What the house sent back out into the world was rather different.

See the front door yourself

The threshold in that 1929 photograph is still there, and so is the crest above it. Year-round guided tours of the Charles S. Pillsbury Mansion run from the Pillsbury Club; hours and details are on the plan your visit page. More stories from the house are collected in the History Journal.

Keep reading: What was Christmas like at the Pillsbury Mansion in 1917?