SUA alumna and archivist Nancy M. Broermann ’68, an SUA Golden Grad, just co-authored and published her first book, called Maria Longworth Storer: From Music to Art to Popes and Presidents
The book, co-researched and written with Constance J. Moore, features Maria Longworth Storer, a Cincinnati native who founded the first female-run manufacturing company in the United States, Rookwood Pottery. Storer also had very close ties to Saint Ursula Academy and Convent. She was central in making The Queen City the major cultural landmark it is today.
Nancy and Constance spent years researching Maria Longworth Storer, and together found a treasure trove of letters and documents that shed a light on Maria’s rich contributions to the world. Many of the documents were found in the archives at Saint Ursula Academy, where Longworth Storer resided for a time. Little has been written about Longworth Storer’s contributions and her exploits in diplomatic relations or her powerful influence on turn-of-the-twentieth-century political leaders...until now.
The Cincinnati Enquirer recently published an article about the book and the story it tells. Enjoy the Cincinnati.com story below:
You may know of Maria Longworth Storer as the founder of Rookwood Pottery Co., makers of the renowned, world-class decorative vases and tiles. Or perhaps as the co-founder of Cincinnati May Festival, which helped elevate the city’s arts culture. But it’s the other areas of her life that rarely get attention that are the real focus of a new biography, “Maria Longworth Storer: From Music and Art to Popes and Presidents,” by Constance J. Moore and Nancy M. Broermann, published by University of Cincinnati Press.
Maria (pronounced mah-RY-uh) Storer was a complex woman with far-reaching influence, not just in the arts, but in politics, religion and health care.
“She’s a wonderful women’s story, what she did, but it limited her just to speak about Rookwood Pottery and the May Festival because she did so much more,” said Broermann.
It all started with a question.
Moore, a historian from El Paso, Texas, had been researching Theodore Roosevelt when she stumbled upon an incident involving Storer in 1906. She telephoned Broermann at the Ursulines of Cincinnati Archives at St. Ursula Academy in East Walnut Hills, where Storer and her husband once resided, and asked, “Who is this woman?”To fully answer that, Moore and Broermann collected 1,800 letters to and from Storer and her family from dozens of libraries and archives, and traveled to France to meet with Storer's great-grandson, Jean François de Chambrun, who shared his extensive family history photos and documents.
In Cincinnati, Storer's legacy is firmly in the arts. “Maria was the chief representative of the feminine element that transformed the metropolis into a major cultural center in the late 19th century,” Moore and Broermann wrote.
The granddaughter of winemaker and early city leader Nicholas Longworth was 24 years old when she and her first husband, George Ward Nichols, planned the first Cincinnati May Festival in 1873. She recruited conductor Theodore Thomas to lead the choral festival, the oldest in the western hemisphere.
In 1880, she founded Rookwood Pottery, named after her father’s Walnut Hills estate. In 1889, her pieces won a gold medal at the Exposition Universelle in Paris.
“I would say she was a visionary,” Moore said. “It isn’t often that your ideas actually happen, and when they happen they stay around for over a hundred years. I think that’s extraordinary.”
But, Moore added, “We wanted to know the rest of the story.”
Read about what inspired Nancy Broermann '68 to begin this book writing journey
HERE.