Historicimage

The highest paid actress in America started out at six years old, dancing in California mining camps while men threw gold at her feet. Her name was Charlotte Mignon Crabtree, and everyone called her Lotta. She was born in New York City in 1847. Her father went to California after gold in 1851, and two years later Lotta and her mother Mary Ann followed him out and ended up running a boarding house in Grass Valley. Their neighbor there was Lola Montez, who at that moment was one of the most notorious women alive. She had been the mistress of the King of Bavaria and had effectively been run out of the country over it. Montez took an interest in the little girl next door and encouraged her to perform. The family moved on to another camp, and at six years old Lotta gave her first professional performance in a tavern. Then Mary Ann took her on the road through the mining country as a singer, a dancer and a banjo player. Understand the audience. Camps full of men with no families, no entertainment of any kind, and raw gold in their pockets. They threw coins onto the stage. Lotta stuffed them into her stockings. Mary Ann collected the money in a large leather bag. The bag got too heavy, so she upgraded to a steamer trunk. Then the trunk got too heavy to haul from camp to camp, so she started putting the money into San Francisco real estate, bonds, and racehorses. That is the actual engine of this story. Mary Ann Crabtree never let her daughter handle a dollar, and she turned a child's tip money into a fortune. Lotta went east in 1864 and became a genuine national star. She was tiny, which meant she played children and boys well into adulthood, and audiences loved her for decades. By the 1880s she was the highest paid actress in the United States, making as much as five thousand dollars a week. The press called her the Nation's Darling. She never married. She was on the road almost continuously, and her mother ran her life. In 1875 she gave San Francisco a cast iron fountain at Market and Kearny as a gift to the city. It still stands there. It survived the 1906 earthquake when most of what surrounded it did not, and in the days afterward it became the place where people went to look for the people they had lost. There is still a ceremony at that fountain every year before dawn on April 18, the anniversary of the quake. She fell on stage in 1889, attempted a comeback in 1891, and retired for good at forty five. She then lived another thirty three years mostly out of sight. She died on September 25, 1924, at seventy six, in a hotel in Boston that she owned. The New York Times called her the eternal child. And she left about four million dollars. What she did with it is the best thing about her. Nearly all of it went into charitable trusts. Money for aging and destitute actors. Money for disabled veterans. Money for abandoned and mistreated animals. Money for former convicts trying to start over. A million dollars went to Massachusetts Agricultural College to fund interest-free loans for farmers and agricultural scholarships. Those scholarships are still being handed out at the University of Massachusetts today, and there is a dormitory on that campus with her name on it. Then a crowd of people came forward claiming to be her relatives and entitled to all of it, and the estate spent years in court fighting them off. Every one of them lost. A six year old girl once stood up in a mining camp and let strangers throw gold at her. A century later that money is still working, and the only people who ever tried to take it were strangers claiming to be family.