This mourning dress presents a tantalizing mystery. The dress was worn by Caroline Schermerhorn Astor Wilson (1861-1948) and was donated by her sons in 1950. At the time, they informed the museum that this dress, along with some others, belonged to their mother. Caroline Schermerhorn Astor was the daughter of William Backhouse Astor Jr. and his wife, Caroline Webster Schermerhorn, both from wealthy, prominent New York families. Caroline married Marshall Orme Wilson in 1884 in New York. Since the dress was a mourning dress, we wondered for which death in the family it might have been made. Her husband did not die until 1926. Her mother died in 1908 and her brother, John Jacob Astor IV, died in 1912. He went down with the Titanic in the North Atlantic. Both the 1908 and 1912 dates are possible, but without written or pictorial documentation to link this dress to a particular death, even possibly one we do not know about, we will never know for certain if there is a link between this dress and the Titanic. Exhibited at the Renwick Gallery in the early 1980s.
