100 Years of Mother’s Days 2
When Ray and I visited the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library and Museum on Sunday, we enjoyed the “100 Years of Celebrating Mothers” exhibit, co-sponsored by Hallmark Cards. The exhibit explained the origin of Mother’s Day in the U.S. and included a timeline of Mother’s Day cards from each decade beginning around 1930.
We learned about Wilson’s love for his own mother, who is pictured below in a frame the future President made when he was about fourteen years old.
In 1888 Woodrow Wilson’s parents, Joseph and Jessie Wilson, lived in Clarksville, Tennessee, where Joseph was a professor at Southwestern Theological University. When Jessie became gravely ill, her son Woodrow rushed to be at her side. Upon his arrival, he learned that his mother had just died. He wrote this to his wife Ellen whom he had married three years before:
My heart is filling up with the tenderest memories of my sweet mother, memories that seem to hallow my whole life . . . . I remember how I clung to her (a laughed at mamma’s boy) till I was a great big fellow: but love of the best womanhood came to me and entered my heart through those apron strings.
Wilson knew the peace that comes from a mother’s love. Your children know that, too.
Surely I have composed and quieted my soul;
Like a weaned child rests against his mother,
My soul is like a weaned child within me.
Psalm 131:2