She Gave the Sewing Machine King 10 Children and 24 Years—Then He Married a Woman Half Her Age, and Her Own Secret Destroyed Her: Mary Ann||
Mary Ann Sponsler gave Isaac Singer 10 children and 24 years of her life, living as “Mrs. Singer” without a ring. When he finally divorced his first wife, he married a 22-year-old Frenchwoman instead.
A carriage painted a brilliant canary yellow rolled along Fifth Avenue in New York, pulled by nine horses and carrying a nursery at the rear. Inside sat the children of a man whose sewing machines were beginning to transform households across America, accompanied by the woman who had raised them and shared their father’s life for more than two decades.
Shopkeepers called her Mrs. Singer. So did the coachman. Her children knew her by the same name. Almost everyone around her treated her as Isaac Merritt Singer’s wife, yet the law had never recognized her as such. Her name was Maryanne Sponsor, and when Singer died a wealthy man in 1875, she would discover that the family she had helped build was not necessarily prepared to stand beside her.
What makes a woman a wife? Is it a wedding ring, a marriage license, or a promise made when she is barely eighteen? For much of her adult life, Maryanne believed that a promise was enough. She followed Singer from a traveling theater company in Baltimore to a grand Manhattan residence, bore him, according to surviving accounts, ten children, and endured the loss of two of them.
Wherever she went, she answered to his surname, even though another woman had once married him legally and other households would eventually emerge from the shadows of his private life.
In early 1860, a New York court dissolved Singer’s marriage to Catherine Maria Haley, the wife he had abandoned years earlier. For the first time, the legal obstacle standing between him and Maryanne appeared to have disappeared.
She had waited more than twenty years for the opportunity to become his wife in the eyes of the law. Yet the wedding she expected never came. Why would a man who was finally free to marry the mother of his children refuse to do so? The answer was already living nearby under another name, and on a summer afternoon, Maryanne would see the truth for herself.
The story begins in 1859, when Singer’s extraordinary yellow carriage became a conspicuous presence on Fifth Avenue. The vehicle reportedly weighed nearly two tons and could accommodate as many as thirty-one passengers, counting those seated inside and outside.
Nine horses pulled it along the avenue, while an orchestra could occupy the exterior seats and a nursery at the rear provided beds for the children. The New York Herald compared the contraption to a steamboat on wheels, leaving readers to decide whether its extravagant design was intended for speed, comfort, or advertisement.
Singer was evidently proud of the creation. By then, his sewing-machine business had begun generating the kind of wealth that allowed him to purchase ten horses for $10,000, maintain three carriages, and establish his household on Fifth Avenue.
The children traveling in the yellow vehicle were his, and the woman accompanying them was the person New York society had come to regard as Mrs. Singer. But there was a complication that money, horses, and a grand residence could not resolve: the woman had never legally married him.
Catherine Maria Haley had married Singer in 1830, when she was just fifteen. He subsequently left her and their children, but the marriage remained legally intact until the divorce of 1860. Maryanne, meanwhile, had spent more than twenty years waiting for the arrangement she believed he had promised her.
The city noticed the yellow carriage, but fashionable society did not necessarily welcome the household it represented. Established families, including the Astors and Vanderbilts, reportedly regarded the Singers as a spectacle rather than members of their social circle. Even Edward Clark, Singer’s business partner, was said to have been appalled by his partner’s private conduct.
According to later testimony from Singer’s coachman, the inventor had developed a habit of lingering at street corners, apparently waiting for romantic encounters. Maryanne would soon discover where some of those encounters led. To understand how she had come to occupy such an unusual position, however, it is necessary to return to Baltimore in 1836, when she was eighteen and Singer was twenty-five.
Singer was then a tall, fair-haired traveling performer with a commanding voice, theatrical ambitions, and little money. He courted Maryanne and asked her to marry him without disclosing that he already had a wife and two children in New York.
As the story has traditionally been told, Maryanne learned the truth only after following him north while pregnant. Rather than return home permanently, she went back to Baltimore with him, and the two presented themselves to the world as husband and wife.
Maryanne later maintained that Singer had promised to divorce Catherine and marry her properly. Whether he genuinely intended to honor that commitment is impossible to establish from the surviving record, but Maryanne said she believed him.
In 1837, two children were born into Singer’s increasingly complicated family: Isaac Augustus, Maryanne’s son, and Lillian, the daughter born to Catherine in New York. Singer was already maintaining two separate family lives before his thirtieth birthday.
For the next several years, Maryanne’s life followed the uncertain rhythm of a traveling theater company. In 1839, Singer was working on a canal in Illinois with his brother when he became dissatisfied with the labor and developed a machine for drilling rock. He sold the patent for $2,000, but rather than preserve the money, he invested it in a theater company of his own.
He named it the Merit Players, drawing on his middle name, and appeared on playbills as Isaac Merritt. Maryanne performed alongside him under the name Mrs. Merritt, taking leading female roles as the company toured small Midwestern towns.
Their repertoire included Shakespeare and moral dramas. Historian Peter Lion identified Richard III among their productions, along with a temperance play titled The Stumbling Block, or Why a Deacon Gave Up His Wine.
Between engagements, the couple’s family continued to grow, with children traveling from town to town alongside the performers. Their theatrical venture eventually collapsed under financial pressure, leaving them stranded around 1844 in Frederick’sburg, Ohio.
The only work Singer could find was at a sawmill, where he cut wooden type for printers’ posters. He remained there for approximately two years, with Maryanne and the children sharing his circumstances. Once again, he searched for a way out through invention. He developed a machine for carving type and attempted to establish himself as a manufacturer in Pittsburgh before returning to New York with his patent.
Misfortune continued to follow him. A firm that had agreed to finance his machine was reportedly ruined when a boiler exploded in its building. By 1850, Singer was in Boston trying to sell a type-carving machine that attracted little interest.
He displayed it in a machine shop at 19 Harvard Place, owned by a man named Ason Phelps. Phelps was working on a different problem: the sewing machines produced by other inventors broke down so frequently that repairing them consumed much of the shop’s time.
Phelps asked Singer to examine the machines. According to biographer Ruth Brandon, Singer’s initial reaction was contempt. He reportedly dismissed the contraption as a devilish machine that threatened to eliminate the very activity that kept women quiet: sewing.
Yet he looked more closely and recognized mechanical flaws. The shuttle traveled in a circle when it needed to move in a straight line, and the needle was curved when it should have been straight.
Working with just $40 supplied by a backer, Singer designed and built an improved machine in eleven days. It worked. He had not invented the world’s first sewing machine, but he had helped produce a practical design capable of changing the way ordinary households worked. Within a few years, his name would be stamped on machines used in homes around the world.
For fourteen years, Maryanne had shared Singer’s debts, disappointments, and theatrical ambitions. She had followed him through financial collapse and repeated relocations, raising their children while he searched for success. Now, the man she had followed since she was a teenager was on the verge of becoming wealthy. Money could no longer serve as an obvious obstacle to the marriage she believed he owed her.
The sewing machine needed a name before it needed a market. Singer’s backers initially considered calling it the Jenny Lind, after the celebrated singer who had captured America’s imagination. By the time the machine reached the public, however, it carried Singer’s own surname. On August 12, 1851, he received patent number 8,294.
That same year, he entered a partnership with Edward Clark, a lawyer and former Sunday school teacher whose reputation for respectability contrasted sharply with Singer’s behavior. Clark recognized the business’s enormous potential, but his wife reportedly urged him to sell his interest and leave his partner, whom she regarded as an unpleasant brute. Clark stayed, devoting much of the next decade to protecting the company’s reputation from the consequences of Singer’s private life.
Singer was unusually candid about his commercial ambitions. He reportedly declared that he did not care about the invention itself and was interested in the money it could make. The money soon followed. By 1860, the company was producing approximately 13,000 machines annually at its Mott Street factory, making it the world’s largest sewing-machine manufacturer.
Clark helped transform the product into something ordinary families could afford. In 1856, the company began allowing customers to take home machines after a small down payment and pay the balance in monthly installments, an early example of a manufacturer offering consumer financing.
Clark also arranged discounted machines for clergymen, hoping that an association with the pulpit would lend the product, and perhaps its inventor, a measure of respectability.
In the company’s Broadway showroom, a young woman demonstrated a sewing machine in the window, stitching where passersby could watch. According to Lion, the crowds rivaled those gathered outside P. T. Barnum’s nearby museum. Singer, who had once dismissed sewing machines as a threat to women’s domestic routines, was now profiting from public demonstrations of their speed and convenience.
Maryanne’s circumstances had changed, too. When Singer built his successful machine in 1850, she had been living in New York with a crowded household and little money. Accounts differ about the precise number of children living with her at the time, with one version placing the number at eight.
By the end of the decade, she was managing a grand residence and a large family whose members carried the Singer name. Yet her social standing remained dependent on a promise that had never been fulfilled.
Then, early in 1860, Singer finally divorced Catherine. The grounds he presented included an allegation of adultery involving a man named Steven Kent. The irony was difficult to ignore: the man who had maintained multiple households was now accusing his legal wife of infidelity.
According to one account, Catherine’s lawyer advised her not to contest the proceedings, believing Singer might be experiencing financial difficulties and that a settlement of $10,000 was preferable to receiving nothing. She accepted.
Singer was now legally free to marry Maryanne. She had stood beside him through his failures, borne his children, and shared his surname in public for years. According to Lion, she had privately grieved over the fact that society did not regard her as a respectable woman despite the life she had built with him. A formal marriage, she believed, would finally correct that injustice.
Maryanne maintained that marriage had been the bargain from the beginning. She had not followed Singer from town to town or raised his children on the understanding that she would remain permanently outside the law. She expected him to keep his promise.
Yet surviving accounts indicate that Singer told her he was not inclined to marry her. The record preserves no definitive explanation for his refusal. He simply continued living with her and their children as before.
The months that followed would expose the difference between the life Maryanne believed she had and the life Singer was actually leading. On August 7, 1860, Singer went for a drive along Fifth Avenue.
Historian Peter Lion’s account describes a pleasant summer afternoon, with Singer’s curly beard neatly groomed and the inventor apparently content with his circumstances. Beside him sat a young woman named Mary McGonagal, who had worked for I. M. Singer & Company.
McGonagal was in her early thirties. According to one account, Singer had known her for approximately nine years, and Maryanne had suspected a relationship for some time. That afternoon, another carriage approached alongside theirs.
It belonged to Singer’s household, and Maryanne was sitting inside. She looked across and saw the woman beside the man who had refused to marry her. Singer recognized her and instructed his coachman to turn down the next side street, but it was already too late.
The two carriages had drawn alongside one another. According to one telling, Maryanne began shouting at Singer in full view of the street, her anger continuing long enough to attract the attention of people nearby. When his coachman pulled away, hers followed, and the confrontation continued until Singer’s carriage finally moved beyond her reach.
For twenty-four years, Maryanne had maintained the appearance of a wife without possessing the legal standing that usually accompanied the role. In a single afternoon on one of New York’s most fashionable avenues, the private arrangement became a public spectacle.
She now had reason to believe that the obstacle to marriage was neither money nor the law, but another woman whom Singer was willing to escort through the city in broad daylight.
Maryanne hurried home. By the time she arrived, Singer was already there, and the confrontation escalated. Lion later summarized what followed in stark terms: there were words, then blows, and then appeals to the police. Singer was a large, forceful man accustomed to imposing his will. According to one account, when one of their daughters attempted to intervene, he struck her as well.
Maryanne had covered for him since their Baltimore days. She had accepted his surname without a wedding ring, raised their children while moving from place to place, and helped maintain the household that his growing wealth eventually supported. Now, for the first time, she went to the police.
Singer was arrested, although accounts differ over the precise charge. Some describe the incident as an assault case, while others say the accusation involved bigamy. The latter charge was complicated by the fact that Maryanne had never been legally married to him, but the dispute illustrated how thoroughly she had lived in the role of his wife. Singer was released on bond, and the affair became newspaper news.
At the offices of I. M. Singer & Company, Clark reportedly read the coverage with dismay. He had spent years trying to make the Singer name synonymous with reliable machinery and respectable business practices.
Now the name was appearing in the papers because of a domestic scandal. Clark sent his partner a series of angry letters, later blaming Singer’s extravagant public display of wealth in 1859 and 1860 for the damage he was suffering as a businessman.
Singer did not remain in New York to face the consequences. On September 19, 1860, according to a local historical account, he sailed for Europe aboard the Great Eastern, one of the largest ships afloat at the time. Maryanne later stated that he took a young woman named Kate McGonagal, the younger sister of Mary McGonagal, with him.
The departure was striking. Singer’s name appeared on one of the country’s most famous commercial products, yet the inventor himself was leaving behind a household, a scandal, and an increasingly complicated personal history. Within months, the Civil War would dominate the national headlines, but the questions surrounding Singer’s family remained unresolved.
Maryanne was left in the house with the children and the public embarrassment of a relationship that had never been formalized. If there had been one Mary McGonagal, she had reason to wonder how much else Singer had concealed. As autumn progressed, the answers emerged through legal inquiries and the accounts of people familiar with his private affairs.
Mary McGonagal, it turned out, had not been a passing romantic interest. According to the historical accounts cited by Lion, she had been involved with Singer for years and had borne him at least five children. They maintained a separate household in New York, where Singer used the name Mr. Matthews and McGonagal was known as Mrs. Matthews.
For Maryanne, the discovery fundamentally changed the meaning of the years she had spent beside him. While she raised Singer’s children in one house, he had been raising other children in another. Yet the revelations did not end there. Another household existed in lower Manhattan, where Mary Eastwood Walters lived with a daughter named Alice, born in 1851, the same year Singer received his sewing-machine patent.
Singer had reportedly supported Walters and Alice for much of the decade. They used the names Mr. and Mrs. Merritt, the same surname Maryanne had once used while performing beside Singer in their traveling theater company.
Alice would eventually move to England to live with her father and adopt the Singer surname, according to one account. A name that had once belonged to Maryanne’s theatrical past had become part of another household’s identity.
The full picture was more complicated than Maryanne had imagined. Singer had not simply abandoned one wife to live with a single companion. By 1860, four households were reportedly operating at the same time: Catherine, his legal wife until the divorce; Maryanne, who occupied the Fifth Avenue residence; Mary McGonagal, living as Mrs. Matthews; and Mary Walters, known as Mrs. Merritt.
Three of the women were named Mary, and Lion reported that Singer referred to each of them by the same name. By 1860, he had fathered and acknowledged eighteen children by four women, sixteen of whom were still alive. Three households were situated in the same city, with Singer assuming a different surname in each one. Two additional young women, both named Ellen, also appeared in accounts of his relationships during those years.
The arrangement was extraordinary even by the standards of a period in which wealthy men often possessed considerable social freedom. It may also help explain why Singer could sometimes be short of cash despite the rapid expansion of his business. Supporting several households and a large number of children required substantial resources, even as the company producing his machines became increasingly successful.
For Maryanne, the emotional consequences were difficult to separate from the legal ones. She had believed herself to be the woman Singer had chosen over Catherine. Instead, she discovered that she was one of several women with whom he had constructed parallel family lives. Her eldest son, Isaac Augustus, was twenty-three that autumn, older than Maryanne had been when she first followed his father to New York.
There is little evidence that Maryanne responded by retreating into silence. The surviving record suggests that she decided to challenge the arrangement directly. She would take Singer to court, not merely to punish him for his conduct but to establish that the life they had shared made her his wife under New York law.
The case would occupy years of her life and turn on a decision she made in 1862. That decision would ultimately undermine the very claim she was trying to establish. Before that happened, however, she had to wait for Singer to return from Europe.
He came back to New York in 1861, briefly and on his own terms. A lawyer was waiting with legal papers prepared on Maryanne’s behalf. The United States was entering the first year of the Civil War, but Maryanne was preparing for a battle of her own: an attempt to separate her life legally from the man with whom she had spent most of her adulthood.
Lion described the proceedings as an unusual case. Maryanne was asking a court to grant her a divorce from a man she had never married in a church or under a recognized civil arrangement. She had lived with him, borne his children, used his surname, and followed him across the country, but she had no marriage certificate to support her claim.
Her lawyers built their argument around Singer’s conduct after his divorce from Catherine. For months, he had continued living with Maryanne under the same roof, presenting their relationship to the community as a marriage. She argued that his behavior had effectively made her his wife under the law, even without a formal ceremony.
If the court accepted that position, Singer would no longer be a free man who had merely maintained several mistresses. He would instead be a married man who had entered into additional relationships while still bound to a wife. The complaint named the McGonagal sisters and Mary Walters, with at least one account suggesting that several other women were also identified.
Maryanne’s filing contained harsh language about the man she had followed since girlhood. She called him a notorious profligate and declared that a more dissolute man had never lived in a civilized country. Years earlier, she had performed lines written by others on a stage. Now, her words were entering a legal record that could expose the private arrangements of one of the country’s wealthiest inventors.
The judge appears to have considered her case sufficiently persuasive to award temporary alimony of $8,000 a year while the proceedings continued, according to Lion. The amount was remarkable for the time, but the case threatened Singer with something more damaging than a financial obligation. A completed trial could have placed every household, every false surname, and every child into the public record under oath.
Singer chose to settle rather than allow the case to run its course. According to Lion’s account, he bought Maryanne a separate house, had it furnished, paid her legal expenses, gave her $500 immediately, and agreed to pay her $50 each week for the rest of her life or for as long as she remained unmarried.
It was a substantial arrangement for a woman whose status as a wife remained unrecognized. Yet the final condition carried its own significance. Singer’s agreement provided financial security and a home, but it also tied that support to Maryanne’s marital status. If she married someone else, the weekly payments would end.
The proceedings never reached the clear conclusion Maryanne had sought. A history of the Singer family in Devon states that a divorce was granted but never carried out, with the settlement effectively replacing the final outcome. Other accounts describe the case as unresolved. What is clear is that the trial that might have established Maryanne as Singer’s legal wife did not produce the definitive ruling she wanted.
For the next several years, Singer crossed the Atlantic repeatedly while dealing with legal disputes and personal complications. In a letter to Clark written after the settlement, he offered a rare glimpse of his feelings. Singer was nearly illiterate, and Lion preserved the letter’s wording and spelling. His private affairs, he wrote, though justly merited, weighed heavily upon him, and his soul sickened at the prospects ahead.
The admission was brief, but the phrase “justly merited” suggested that Singer understood at least some of the consequences of his own behavior. He had built a business that was changing domestic life while leaving behind a private world increasingly difficult to control.
In July 1863, Singer and Clark finally agreed to dissolve their partnership and establish a new corporation, the Singer Manufacturing Company. Each man received 2,750 of its 5,000 shares, and Singer insisted on a condition that neither partner would serve as president while the other remained alive. They had helped create a major industrial fortune, but their relationship had deteriorated so far that neither wanted the other at the company’s head.
The Civil War proved beneficial to the business, with Singer machines sold to the Union Army. In 1865, during a large New York parade celebrating President Abraham Lincoln’s second inauguration, company workers marched under a banner proclaiming that they clothed Union soldiers while General Ulysses S. Grant dressed the rebels. The company continued growing even as the scandal surrounding its founder remained part of his history.
Meanwhile, Singer’s life in Europe was taking another turn. In Paris, he lodged at a guesthouse run by Pamela Buyer, an English-born widow of a Frenchman. Her daughter, Isabella Eugénie Boyer, was intelligent, attractive, and tactful, and Lion described her as an exceptionally capable woman. She was approximately thirty years younger than Singer.
According to one historian, Isabella was married to another man when she and Singer met. Lion’s account suggests that neither she nor her mother saw a compelling reason to prevent her from becoming Singer’s companion. She soon became pregnant with his child. A later legend claimed that her face served as the model for the Statue of Liberty, although historians have not established that story as fact.
In 1863, Singer brought Isabella to New York. His reputation had suffered, and his private affairs were no longer easily concealed. Yet in the same city where Maryanne lived in the house he had bought her, Singer married again. His bride was twenty-two years old; he was fifty-two.
Despite the complications surrounding his previous relationships, Lion wrote that Isabella persuaded an Episcopal clergyman to perform the ceremony. Their first son, Adam Mortimer, was born soon afterward. Isabella also reportedly developed warm relationships with Singer’s other children, regardless of who their mothers were. That connection would become significant in the years ahead.
For Maryanne, the marriage represented a painful contrast. She had spent two years trying to persuade a court that Singer’s behavior had made her his wife. Now a woman less than half her age had received the formal status she had sought for most of her adult life.
Yet Maryanne did not immediately challenge the marriage. She did not publicly accuse Singer of bigamy or launch another lawsuit, at least according to the surviving record. Her silence has puzzled some historians, particularly because she had previously taken him to court and brought his private life into public view.
The explanation appears to lie in a secret of her own. In 1862, a year after her lawyers argued that she was Singer’s wife, Maryanne married another man named John E. Foster. The ceremony was quiet, and few people apparently knew about it. The decision would fundamentally alter her legal position.
According to one modern reference account, Maryanne declared herself an unmarried woman in order to marry Foster. That declaration contradicted the position she had been advancing in court: that her years with Singer had made her his wife. She was then in her mid-forties, and the financial settlement Singer had arranged would continue only for the rest of her life or until she married. She chose marriage, despite the financial consequences.
The surviving record offers little explanation for why she made that choice. One historian suggests that she had been assured she was free to marry. Beyond that, the evidence is sparse, leaving historians to reconstruct the significance of a ceremony Maryanne apparently wanted to keep private.
Singer learned of the marriage after returning to New York with Isabella in 1863. According to Lion, the discovery forced him to negotiate a new settlement with Maryanne. One local account goes further, claiming that Singer insisted there had never been a divorce between them and accused Maryanne of bigamy. Her lawyer reportedly persuaded her to sign a document accepting his version of events.
The precise details remain uncertain, but the consequences were clear. Maryanne had married Foster before Singer married Isabella, and her own declaration that she was unmarried weakened her ability to argue that Singer’s marriage to another woman was invalid. Her earlier willingness to challenge him legally had placed her in a position from which she could no longer easily object.
That helps explain why she remained silent when Singer married Isabella. Her lack of public protest did not necessarily indicate forgiveness or indifference. The marriage she had entered into in 1862 had complicated her legal position, potentially leaving her unable to pursue the very claim she had spent years trying to establish.
For the next twelve years, Maryanne lived as Mrs. Foster. Singer, meanwhile, moved with Isabella and their growing family to Paris and later to England. On the Devon coast, he built an enormous residence with more than one hundred rooms, a private theater, and a marble hall. He called the house the Wigwam, an extravagant name that suited his theatrical personality.
There, the man Maryanne had once described as among the most dissolute in the civilized world was remembered by many accounts as a devoted father and generous neighbor. The local gentry reportedly continued to keep their distance, but tradespeople and ordinary residents appreciated his hospitality. His public reputation in Devon was more favorable than the one he had left behind in New York.
On July 23, 1875, Singer died in Devon at the age of sixty-three. Clark issued a statement expressing sincere regret at the loss of the distinguished inventor, then promptly had himself elected president of the company. The agreement that neither man would hold that office while the other lived had lasted exactly as long as intended.
Singer left an estate valued at approximately $14 million, to be distributed among his widow and children under the terms of his will. Some beneficiaries received substantial inheritances; others received comparatively little. According to one account, Maryanne Sponsor was not named in the will at all.
When the will was presented for probate in White Plains, New York, that autumn, newspapers across the country seized on the extraordinary family history behind the fortune. Headlines described Singer as the father of five wives and twenty-four children, although the number of women and children reported varied among accounts. Maryanne came forward to claim that she was the inventor’s rightful widow.
Her argument returned to the legal dispute she had initiated in 1861. She maintained that the divorce proceedings had never been completed and that she had therefore remained Singer’s wife under the law. If that position were accepted, Isabella’s marriage would be invalid, and the provisions of the will benefiting her could be challenged.
But Maryanne’s claim had a serious weakness. She had already married John E. Foster and declared herself unmarried in order to do so. More than a decade later, she was asking a court to recognize her as Singer’s widow despite that earlier declaration. According to Lion, she demanded $1 million and refused to accept less.
She pursued the claim in the Surrogate’s Court of Westchester County, where she was nearly sixty years old. The courtroom attracted a crowd of fashionably dressed spectators eager to witness another chapter in the Singer family’s extraordinary history. Years earlier, people had watched from the street as Maryanne shouted at her companion. Now they gathered to see whether she could prove that she had been his wife.
Her lawyers needed witnesses who could describe the couple’s life together. They needed people who had heard Singer introduce Maryanne as his wife, observed how the household operated, and could testify to the role she had played in raising his children. The people best positioned to provide such testimony were the children themselves.
But almost all of Maryanne’s children stayed away.
She had borne them, carried them from town to town during the theater years, and raised them in the Fifth Avenue household after Singer became wealthy. She had endured the public scandal surrounding their father and maintained the family home through years of uncertainty. Now, when she needed witnesses to support her claim that she had been their father’s wife, most of them did not appear.
According to Lion, only one son, John Albert Singer, stood beside her. The reasons for the others’ absence are not established by surviving letters or records. Nevertheless, the family’s financial interests and its relationships with Isabella may have complicated the decision.
William Singer, the eldest son from Catherine’s marriage, had reportedly taken his mother’s side against his father at one point. Yet Singer’s will left him only $500, a detail that may have demonstrated the potential consequences of opposing the family patriarch. The record does not establish whether Maryanne’s children considered that example when deciding whether to testify.
What is clearer is that the children had been left substantial blocks of Singer stock under their father’s will. Isabella had reportedly treated them kindly, and they had grown fond of her. Maryanne’s lawsuit, meanwhile, required them to support the position that the woman their father had formally married was not his lawful wife. Their silence left Maryanne with little of the family testimony her lawyers needed.
One unexpected witness did appear: Orson Phelps, the Boston machine-shop owner who had given Singer the opportunity to examine the sewing machines that eventually transformed his career. Phelps testified about his memories of Singer’s early years, recalling that the struggling inventor had sometimes spent more time reciting Shakespeare than working on his machines.
Phelps could speak to the period before the fortune, the Fifth Avenue residence, and the scandal. He had known Singer when Maryanne and the children were following him through one failure after another. But the recollection was not enough to establish the legal marriage Maryanne sought to prove.
Writing about the case decades later, Lion judged Maryanne harshly, describing her as her own worst witness. Yet the legal complications at the heart of the dispute were not simply a matter of personal credibility.
They involved a relationship built over decades, a promise that Maryanne said had been made to her as a young woman, and a series of decisions that left her without the documentation ordinarily used to establish a marriage.
The case did not end in a verdict that later histories consistently describe. According to Lion, Maryanne eventually accepted a settlement of $75,000 in exchange for renouncing all claims against the estate. Other accounts state more simply that her claim failed. Whatever the precise legal outcome, she did not receive recognition as Singer’s lawful widow.
That status belonged to Isabella Eugénie Boyer. Maryanne had been Singer’s leading lady, the mother of his children, and the woman who remained with him through the years when his inventions failed and his finances were uncertain. Yet the law did not recognize her as his wife, and she could not claim the position she believed those years had earned.
The story did not end with the courtroom dispute. In the summer of 1875, Singer’s funeral procession stretched for much of a mile along the Devon coast road. Lion reported that approximately seventy-five carriages accompanied the procession and that some two thousand mourners attended. Flags flew at half-mast in nearby towns, and many of those lining the route were shopkeepers and tradespeople who had appreciated Singer’s generosity.
He was buried in a marble tomb at the cemetery in Torquay, and his descendants would eventually join him there. But Maryanne was thousands of miles away in New York, living under another surname and pursuing a claim that would not be resolved for several more years. She was not among the mourners traveling behind his coffin.
Almost nothing survives about Maryanne’s life after the courtroom battle. Historians have found no substantial collection of letters, no known diary, and no recorded newspaper interview in which she offered a final account of her experiences. She does not appear to have written a memoir or left behind a detailed personal narrative that would explain her decisions in her own words.
Burial records place her death in New York on August 9, 1896, when she was approximately seventy-eight years old. She was laid to rest at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, far from the marble tomb in Devon where Singer and members of his family were buried. She did not rest under the surname printed on millions of sewing machines. That name had passed to another branch of the family.
Isabella’s children entered a world of privilege and cultural influence that Singer himself had struggled to access. One daughter, Winnaretta, reportedly became a millionaire at eighteen, married a French prince, and supported composers whose music continues to be performed.
A son, Paris Singer, rebuilt his father’s Devon residence in a style inspired by Versailles. In 1908, the Singer Building rose above Lower Broadway in New York, becoming for a time the tallest building in the world.
Within a few years of Maryanne’s death, the family name had become associated with grand drawing rooms, European aristocracy, and one of the most recognizable commercial brands in the world.
The machine itself spread through factories, tailoring shops, farmhouses, and city apartments, entering the homes of millions of women who would never know the name of the woman who had followed its inventor through his leanest years.
That may be the most striking element of Maryanne’s story. Isaac Singer helped build one of the great international businesses of the nineteenth century, yet he left behind little detailed written testimony about his own private life. He was not a fluent writer, and the surviving record of his relationships is largely derived from legal proceedings, business correspondence, and the testimony of people who knew him.
In a 1958 account, Peter Lion observed that the most detailed description of Singer’s private life could be found in the divorce proceedings Maryanne had brought against him. Later biographies and documentaries have repeatedly drawn on those records for the story of the multiple households, the borrowed surnames, the public confrontation, and the violence alleged during the couple’s final years together.
Lion also cautioned that Maryanne’s account could hardly be impartial. She was a woman describing the conduct of someone she believed had wronged her, and her statements had to be weighed with that context in mind.
The surviving evidence does not permit every allegation to be independently confirmed, and different historical accounts disagree on some of the legal details. Still, her testimony remains a central source for understanding the private life of a man whose commercial legacy eventually overshadowed the controversy surrounding him.
The courts ultimately recognized Isabella as Singer’s legal widow. His fortune passed to the people named in his will, and the Singer surname continued through descendants who occupied positions of wealth and influence. Maryanne’s own children, with one reported exception, did not stand beside her in the final legal battle. She died in another city, under another name, far from the man whose promise had shaped so much of her life.
Yet the historical record contains an enduring irony. The woman who failed to secure legal recognition as Singer’s wife helped preserve the most detailed account of the life he otherwise left undocumented. Her complaint exposed the family arrangements behind the famous inventor’s public success, and historians have continued to rely on it more than a century and a half later.
Maryanne had performed under one name beside Singer on Midwestern stages when they had little money. She lived under another in a Manhattan mansion when his business made him rich.
She married under a third name in a quiet ceremony that weakened the legal claim she had spent years pursuing. In court records and newspaper accounts, she remained Maryanne Sponsor, the young woman from Baltimore who believed a promise.
What name appears above her grave at Woodlawn Cemetery? Few people have made the journey to find out. The machines still carry Singer’s name, displayed across generations of households and businesses.
In the Bronx, however, rests a woman whose life intersected with his at nearly every decisive turn, yet whose place in the story was almost erased by the very legal and social arrangements she had spent decades trying to overcome.
