Ellen Louise Axson, born in
Savannah, Georgia, where it won a bronze medal for excellence. They were engaged 5 months later, but postponed the wedding while he did postgraduate work at
Johns Hopkins University and she nursed her ailing father. Ellen's father committed suicide while hospitalized for depression, after which she went North to study at the
Art Students League of New York. Wilson, who was 28 years of age, married Ellen, age 25, on June 24, 1885, at her paternal grandparents' home in Savannah, Georgia. The wedding was performed jointly by his father, the Reverend
Joseph R. Wilson, and her grandfather, the Reverend Isaac Stockton Keith Axson. They honeymooned at
Waynesville, a mountain resort in western North Carolina. That same year,
Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania offered Dr. Wilson a teaching position at an annual salary of $1,500. He and his bride lived near the campus, keeping her little brother Eddie with them. After Edward’s death in 1905, Ellen set up a scholarship in his memory at the
Berry College; the college held an Ellen Axson Wilson Homecoming event in 2014 to commemorate the centenary of her death. She donated much of her work to charity. She arranged the White House weddings of two of her daughters. She died of
Bright's disease at the
White House on August 6, 1914. ==References==