In August 1883 at the beach in Sea Girt, Maud Noble, a 24-year-old music teacher from Germantown, stayed with her friends Bess and Marriott Morris. College friends reuniting at the beach has a long history. I wonder if they went to the Parker House?
Maud on the right. Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia Marriott C. Morris Collection
Maud was from a prominent family. Her mother Elizabeth Backus was from the founding family of Norwich Connecticut. Maud's father, William Stephenson Noble owned a foundry but died the year she was born. Her mother remarried the head of the local hospital Dr. Thaddeus Leavitt, but he also passed away in 1880. When she was not in Sea Girt, Maud and her mother entertained summer guests at their large home at Lake George in the Adirondacks of New York. At the time, if your mother was widowed, it was not unusual for the youngest daughter to forego marriage to care for the mother.
Maud took care of her mother until her until she died in 1913 and Maud retired from teaching in 1914 at age 47 after the estate was settled. She then spent a summer at the Bar BC Ranch in Beaver Creek Wyoming as a "dude".
Teddy Roosevelt had popularized dude ranch life in the 1880s. "It is certainly a most healthy life. How a man does sleep, and how he enjoys the coarse fare!" He bought his own ranch in the Badlands of North Dakota.
Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show was the most popular act of its time. Sharpshooter Annie Oakley was his star performer. She split cards on their edges, snuffed out candles, and shot the corks off bottles. She normalized getting Victorian-era women to move into the outdoors, “God intended women to be outside as well as men, and they do not know what they are missing when they stay cooped up in the house.”
Tourist ranches were set up and the Bar BC was the most popular dude ranch in Wyoming, near the Grand Teton and Yellowstone. Maud paid about $300/week to live the cowboy life. There were few women on the trail. But Maud fell in love with the Grand Teton and decided to stay in Jackson Hole.
Maude fell in love with the area. Snake River, Grand Tetons, National Archives photo
She had a three-room cabin built alongside Cottonwood Creek in 1916. When her only brother died a year later, she approached Bill Menor who operated the ferry across the Snake River, and offered to buy his farm and ferry. She wrote home and had her step-father's carriage driver and groomsman, Sydney Fredrick Sandell join her and they moved to the cabin near the ferry.
Sandell, known as Fredrick in Philadelphia was married with a son. He was a partner in the property. They lived together and operated the ferry until a bridge was built in 1927. Maud had the kitchen removed to make room for Sydney. They cooked in Melor’s main house about 500 feet away.
The ferry was a system of cables and pontoon platforms that could be pulled across the swift-moving Snake River. Automobiles had started to arrive, mostly tourists visiting Yellowstone and looking for more scenery in wild Jackson Hole, a half day’s drive south.
Maude raised prices from $0.50 to $1.00 for local wagons or Wyoming cars, and $2.00 for tourists from out of state.
After donating land for a log church, the Chapel of the Transfiguration, they sold the rest of the property to John D. Rockefeller's Snake River Land Company in 1927. She was one of the few people who knew the motive. In 1923, she hosted a group of local ranchers in the cabin with Horace Albright, Superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, and they laid out a plan to save the Jackson Hole area from development. They eventually convinced Rockefeller to buy up and preserve the land. It was eventually added to the National Park Service. The Maud Noble Cabin at Melor’s Ferry is located in what is now Grand Teton National Park.
Church of the Transfiguration on land donated by Maud Noble Library of Congress Image
Maud lived with Sydney at a new ranch they bought at Wilson, about seven miles from Jackson. In the 1930 census, he was listed as Maud’s spouse although there is no record of their marriage. He got sick in 1937 and went back to Pennsylvania to live with his son Fritz, where he died in 1938. Maude left in 1943 to live with her brother’s family, “too old to handle winters in Jackson Hole”. But she remembered her time at the ferry as “Those happy years there, always a joy for me to remember”. Maud died in 1951 in Philadelphia.
Maude in the cabin 1920s (National Park Service Photo)