Born: July 4, 1871
Died: September 7, 1922
Married: Charles H. Ludington, vice president and treasurer of Curtis Publishing Company in Philadelphia
Children: Charles Townsend Ludington
Ethel Saltus Ludington died in Saranac Lake of TB. The Ethel Saltus Ludington Memorial Infirmary was erected at the Trudeau Sanatorium in 1926 in her memory by her husband, Charles Ludington. In a letter to Dr. Edward R. Baldwin dated March 7, 1923, regarding his gift of the infirmary in his wife's memory, Charles Ludington described the building as "designed to help others win a fight which she herself had to meet and which she maintained with such gallantry and such victorious self-forgetfulness and cheer to the end." Also given in her memory were an addition to the Saranac Lake Free Library for a children's library (1924), where a large bronze plaque memorializes Mrs. Ludington; two other libraries elsewhere, and a substantial gift to the Henry Phipps Institute for Tuberculosis at the University of Pennsylvania.
Portraits of Ethel and Charles Ludington by Cecilia Beaux (1855-1942) hang in the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut. Cecilia Beaux was quite well known for her portraiture, often favorably compared to John Singer Sargent. According to the National Museum of Women in the Arts, in 1933, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt presented Beaux with the Chi Omega fraternity's gold medal, for "the American woman who had made the greatest contribution to the culture of the world."
The portraits were given to the museum by Ethel Saltus Ludington Anderson, Charles Townsend Ludington, Jr., Anne Ludington Bell, and Constance Ludington Drayton.
Lake Placid News, September 15, 1922
WIFE OF TREASURER OF CURTIS PUB. CO. DEAD
Mrs, Ethel Saltus Ludington, wife of Charles H. Ludington, vice-president and treasurer of the Curtis Publishing company of Philadelphia, died in Saranac Lake Thursday night of last week following a long illness with tuberculosis. The body was taken in a special car attached to the 9:35 train to Ardmore, Pa., where funeral services were held. Interment was at Lyme, Conn.
Mrs. Ludington came to Saranac Lake in 1919 and the couple purchased a cottage at No. 12 Old Military Road, where Mrs. Ludington died. Besides her husband she is survived by four sons. Mr. Ludington plans to dispose of his possessions in Saranac Lake and to return to Philadelphia.
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