Mabel Marks was born on December 17, 1876, in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Jeanette "Nettie" Holmes (née Colwell) and
William Dennis Marks. Her father was a noted engineer, originally from
St. Louis, Missouri, who taught at the
University of Pennsylvania and later became president of the
Edison Electric Light Company. During the height of his fame, he was painted by
Thomas Eakins, and his portrait is now in the permanent collection of the
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum. Her mother, originally from
Chattanooga, Tennessee, raised the daughters and enjoyed playing both the piano and zither, as well as riding horses. Mark's older sister,
Jeannette, known in her youth as "Gussie" would grow up to become a writer and a professor at
Mount Holyoke College. Their parent's marriage was estranged and the girls lived with their mother, periodically in Philadelphia, as well as at their home on
Lake Champlain, near
Westport, New York. The family dynamic was marked by indifference and ambivalence, without close ties. Though well-to-do, the girls were mostly taught at home sporadically by a stream of governesses. Her education ended after a two-year attendance at a boarding school in
Dresden, Germany, where she, her mother, and her sister had located to enable Gussie's treatment for
rheumatic fever. After their return to the United States, the girls, and their mother primarily lived in Westport until her mother's health began to decline and she was sent to a sanitorium. She died around 1894 and soon thereafter, Marks married her second cousin, Henry Douglas Bacon (1876–1948). H.D. was the son of Frank Page Bacon and Mamie (née Cooper) and grandson of
Henry Douglas Bacon, an early philanthropist who had banking interests in St. Louis and San Francisco. After the banking collapse of 1855, grandfather Bacon moved to Oakland and donated his extensive art collection to the
University of California. As had been the case in his wife's family, H. D.'s parents had been estranged and divorced soon after Frank inherited his father's estate. The couple married over their family objections, as their union caused H.D. to quit school in his senior year at the
Virginia Military Institute. The Bacons first lived in California, where their daughter Mabel, known as "Bell", was born in 1898, but were living in Scotland in 1900, when their son Henry Douglas Jr. (1900–1925) was born. A month after his birth, in March 1900, the family returned to the United States to settle in Philadelphia. In 1903, they moved to
Bath, Maine, where H.D. began working in the shipyard of the
Bath Iron Works. In 1904, H.D. bought Thorne Island near the eastern shore of the Kennebec River as a summer camp and deeded it to Bacon. The couple's third child Francis Page was born in Maine in 1908. Besides raising the children, Bacon was an accomplished sailor and in 1910 made headlines in the
New York Times when she participated in a motor boat race from the New York Motor Boat Club to Bermuda, which touted that she was the first woman to participate in powerboat race, was going to skipper the boat, and that she had a steamboat pilot's license. She made the news again in 1911 when she took up driving a car. In 1916, H.D. was hired to head one of the shipyards for the
Panama Canal project, and the family relocated to Panama, though they kept their home in Maine and returned periodically over the next 3–4 years. ==Career==