Laura Carter Holloway
Laura Carter Holloway Langford (August 22, 1843 – July 10, 1930) was an American journalist, author, and lecturer. She was born in Nashville, Tennessee, one of fourteen children of Samuel Jefferson and Anne Vaulx Carter.[1] She attended school at the highly-regarded Nashville Female Academy (established in 1816),[2] which gave her a solid foundation for her writing career.[3]
Laura Carter Holloway Langford
July 10, 1930 (aged 86)
Laura Carter Holloway Langford
Journalist, author, lecturer
The Ladies of the White House (1870 nonfiction bestseller)
Vaulx Carter (brother)
Her father was a Unionist during the Civil War, and his Saint Cloud Hotel in Nashville was used as headquarters for Union officers. Perhaps despite this, she went through a "little rebel" phase (as Andrew Johnson once called her).[4] However, in June 1862, she married Junius Brutus Holloway, a Union officer from Kentucky. He was "dismissed" from military service in December of that year.[5]
Their son, George Henry Thomas Holloway, was born November 21, 1864, in Nashville.
Samuel Carter moved his family to Brooklyn, New York, after the Civil War, and Laura and George went with them. Junius Brutus Holloway wasn't with them in the 1870 census. He was registered to vote in San Francisco in 1872. It it not clear when they divorced.
Writing career[edit]
Laura worked as a reporter and editor for the Brooklyn Eagle and published several books. Perhaps due to her previous contact with now-President Johnson, she was in contact with his daughter and official hostess, Martha Johnson Patterson. Holloway was said to be a personal friend of fellow Tennessean Martha Johnson Patterson "and wrote interestingly of her."[7]
Holloway-Langford's book The Ladies of the White House (1870),[8] a group biography of the First Ladies of the United States became a bestseller with 150,000 copies sold worldwide, a phenomenal amount for the time. A spiritualist, suffragist, and progressive, Laura joined the Theosophical Society in the 1870s but left in the late 1880s. She had a new project that interested her.