BELLE VINSON, DAUGHTER OF SAMUEL; TITANIC CONNECTIONS Source: Withers, Bob. "Memories of the Titanic (A Huntington Woman Who Survived the Disaster. . .". The Herald Dispatch, Huntington, WV. March 22, 1998. Note: Belle Vinson, daughter of Samuel and Mary Damron Vinson, was born July 30, 1868, and married Congressman James A. Hughes. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Eighty-six years later, we still find the Titanic fascinating. Two street markers in Westmoreland prove it. Eloise Street and Lucian Street were named for Eloise Hughes Smith and Lucian Philip Smith, local people who were aboard the doomed vessel in 1912. She made it home. He didn't. Brittle yellowed clipings from library archives, scrapbooks and file cabinets tell the tragic story. Eloise Hughes, a daughter of James A. and Belle Vinson Hughes, grew up in Huntington, but spent a lot of time in Washinton, D. C., where her father was a member of the U. S. House of Representatives. By the time of her society debut in Huntington and Washinton in January 1912, she had caught the eye of Lucian Philip Smith, 24, a West Virginia University student from Uniontown, PA., whose father had earned a fortune as a partner of steel magnate Andrew Carnegie. Shortly after the debutant's debut, Smith came to Huntington and their engagement was announced. The couple wed at Central Christian Church on Feb. 8, 1912, and embarked on a long honeymoon to Europe, Egypt and the Middle East. Cathy Gay of Orlando, one of the Smiths' granddaughters, says they sailed across the Atlantic on the White Star passenger liner R. M. S. Olympic, the Titanic's sister ship. Their master was Cap't. Edward J. Smith, no relation, who would later be assigned to command the Titanic on her maiden voyage. An incident aboard the Olympic served as an omen. The ship struck a submerged object at sea, breaking a propeller and forcing it to Belfast, Ireland, for repairs. The vessel resumed its journey later. The dream trip's last lap--scheduled early by the Smiths because she was pregnant--was their return across the Atlantic on the Titanic. The British liner sailed from Southhampton at noon April 10, 1912. The night of Sunday, April 14, found Lucian Smith struggling through the linguistic maze of a bridge game with several Frenchmen in the first-class smoking room on A Deck. Two decks below, his 18-year-old wife had gone to bed early because she didn't feel well. The card players sipped hot whiskey or lemonade to ward off the increasingly chillier North Atlantic night, talking animatedly to each other until a grinding jar from somewhere below brought silence. It was 11:40 P. M. Smith and several others got up and walked out on deck. "My God, we hit an iceberg!" someone shouted. Eloise was awakened in her C Deck room by the vibration. Momentarily, the lights snapped on and she saw her smiling husband standing by her bed. "We are in the North and have struck an iceberg," he said gently. It does not amount to anything but will probably delay us a day getting to New York. However, as a matter of form, the captain has ordered all ladies on deck." She dressed slowly--a heavy wool dress, two coats, high shoes and a knitted hood. All the while Smith chatted about landing in New York and taking the train home. He didn't mention the iceberg again. As they started for the deck, she decided to go back for some jewelry. Smith suggested she not bother with "trifles," and she relented to a point--but grabbed her favorite ring off the night stand. The Smiths sat, calmly talking, in the ship's gymnasium just off the Boat Deck as the first of the Titanic's lifeboats started to fill with women and children. Few passengers seemed to realize they were in danger. One woman told another, "Oh, come and see the berg--we have never seen one before." Someone in a second-class smoking room asked if he could get some ice from the iceberg for his highball. "There was no commotion, no panic, and no one seemed interested in the unusual occurrence, many having crossed fifty and sixty times," Eloise was quoted as saying. Then, above their heads, white distress rockets exploded in blinding flashes. The jokes, poker games and imbibing stopped. Everyone realized it was time to say goodbye. Men helped their wives or other women into the lifeboats. Many refused to go, begging their husbands to join them. Arguments erupted; some women were tossed into the rowboats. Eloise Smith noticed Captain Smith standing close by with a megaphone and begged him to let her husband sail away with her. He ignored her and kept shouting, "Women and children first!" Lucian Smith spoke up. "Never mind, Captain, about that," he said. "I'll see she gets in the boat." He turned to her and spoke, very deliberately. "I never expected to ask you to obey, but this is one time you must," he said. "It is only a matter of form to have women and children first. The ship is thoroughly equipped and everyone on her will be saved." She questioned his honesty, but he insisted he was being truthful. So she kissed him and stepped into the boat. As it was being lowered, he shouted to her, "Keep your hands in your pockets. It is very cold weather." Of course, Smith was lying. The ship carried enough lifeboats for barely half of the 2,234 people on board--and even that was more than the British Board of Trade required at the time. Only 28 people filled No. 6, the second lifeboat to be launched from the ship and the first from the port side, even though it had room for 65. Eloise Smith was one of them. Denver socialite Margaret "Molly" Brown--the noted "Unsinkable Molly Brown"--was another. It was 1:00 A. M. Across the icy water, Smith could see her husband waving from the rail of the Boat Deck, as were hundreds of others. By 2:15, the Titanic's stern, the only section of the vessel still visible, was absolutely perpendicular, its three dripping propellers glistening in the starry darkness. Five minutes later, it slid under the waves. Smith was upset that she had fallen for her husband's lie. For more than an hour, she watched for some sign of him--to no avail. The ship took 1,513 people down with it, including millionaires John Jacob Astor and Benjamin Guggenheim; Charles M. Mays, president of the Grand Trunk Railroad; Archibald Butt, military aide to President William Howard Raft; Broadway producer Henry Harris--and Lucian Smith. Only three weeks before, the Smiths had been sightseeing in Cairo. He had climbed to the top of a pyramid and they had ridden a camel into the Saraha Desert. Eloise Smith wrote home to her parents, Congressman Hughes and Belle Vinson Hughes, about their adventure: "Lucian is getting so anxious to get home and drive the car and fool around down at the farm. . . We leave here Sunday. . .by boat to Brindisi, by rail to Nice and Monte Carlo, then to Paris and via Cherbourg either on the Lusitania or the new Titanic. . . I will love so much to tell my Sunday school class when I get home." Adrift at sea, Eloise Smith and her new traveling party were rescued after daylight by the Cunard liner Carpathia, which had frantically steamed 58 miles through the North Atlantic's ice-infested waters to help. She was one of 711 people who survived the disaster. Hundreds of city residents jammed the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway station when she arrived on the F. F. Limited shortly after 1:00 P. M. on Sunday, April 21. The crowd was so large that five police officers escorted her automobile from the station to her grandmother's home in the West End. On May 12 Smith took part in a tearful memorial service for her husband in the same church where they had been married three months before. At about the same time, congressional hearings convened in Washinton, D. C., to investigate the tragedy. Smith testified at the hearings, becoming known among Washington society and the press as "the white widow" because of her mourning clothes. Later that year, a newspaper article reported that "Mrs. Smith was one of three Titanic brides to whom posthumous heirs were born." She had a son, Lucian P. Smith, Jr., on November 29, 1912. "We used to say that Eloise was probably the only woman in the world who in just a year's time made her debut, got engaged, married, survived the Titanic, became a widow and then a mother," says Sandra Pinson, a family friend. Ironically, Eloise Smith married Robert W. Daniel, another Titanic survivor, two years later. "The story she told my family was that Daniel, 27 at the time and wearing only his grandfather's gold watch on a chain around his neck, jumped from the Titanic into the sea," says Smith's second cousin Edwin Vinson. "Moments later, he was pulled aboard Lifeboat 6 and Eloise offered to share her mink coat with him to keep him warm. Things got hotter aboard the Carpathia. "It seemed more than blankets and hot food warmed the newly acquainted Daniel and the attractive young lady from West Virginia," said a newspaper in Richmond, VA, where the Philadelphia banker was born. A later edition said, "Daniel left the ship carrying in his arms Mrs. Smith, handing the nearly faint woman to her congressman father." Following their 1914 wedding, the couple spent their honeymoon in England. They had sailed across the Atlantic just south of where the Titanic had gone down. Eloise Smith Daniel married twice more before her death at 47 in 1940. Incidentally, the streets in Westmoreland named after the Smiths were not so labeled because the tragic couple was on the Titanic, but because they belonged to the Hughes and Vinson families, who owned much of the land in the area and pushed for its annexation by the city in the '20's. Which is why Huntington has a Belle Street, Blair Street, Hughes Street, Jefferson Road, Mary Street, Tudell Street, Vinson Street and a Vinson Road--as well as an Eloise Street and a Lucian Street. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- USGenWeb Project NOTICE: In keeping with our policy of providing free information on the internet, data may be used by non-commercial entities, as long as this message remains on all copied material. These electronic pages may not be reproduced in any format for profit, nor for commercial presentation by any other organization. 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