In 1917, the year that the United States entered World War I, the school catalogue advertised two scholarships, each worth $325. They were earmarked for the daughters of commissioned officers of the United States Navy. The scholarships were bequeathed to the school by Rear Admiral Nicoll Ludlow, a thirty-six-year veteran of the navy, who had died in 1915. Ludlow gave the scholarships in honor of his wife, Frances Mary Thomas ’58. Ludlow had married Mary Thomas in 1870; she gave birth to two children, Nicoll, Jr., in 1871 and Mary in 1873, and died shortly after Mary’s birth.
Admiral Ludlow entered the United States Naval Academy in 1860, and in 1863 his graduation was accelerated so that he could go on active service with the Union navy. All together, he spent nearly four decades in active duty, almost twenty of them at sea. His career spanned the Civil War to the Spanish-American War.
In 1897 Ludlow remarried. His new wife, Mary McLean, was extremely well connected. Her sister was married to Admiral George Dewey, the hero of Manila Bay. Her father, Washington, and, later, her brother, John, were proprietors of The Washington Post. Her nephew, Ned, was married to Evalyn Walsh McLean, the Denver socialite to whom he had given the Hope diamond. (Ned’s son, Neddie, would briefly marry Gloria Hatrick, who, after their divorce, married the actor Jimmy Stewart.) For a decade Ludlow apparently enjoyed the social life that marriage to Mary McLean brought him. However, in 1908 the couple separated; he told reporters that he wanted to live in the country, and she did not. When he died in 1915, the wife he remembered in his will was the wife of his youth, Troy Female Seminary graduate Frances Mary Thomas.
The scholarship he left in her honor is still available today.
