Julia Ann Moulton Doane

Biography

Julia Ann Moulton's married life with John Wesley Doane connected New England, in the northeastern United States, with Chicago, Illinois, on Lake Michigan. The family records identify five children: Julia, Fannie, John Edwin, Lily and John Wesley. John Edwin was born in Chicago in 1864, placing the family there during the years when John Doane's business was developing. Julia raised children in a household whose movements and circumstances were closely connected with that business, although the surviving accounts describe her husband's commercial activities more fully than her own daily life.

By the end of her life, Julia had a home at Thompson, Connecticut. A newspaper notice reports that she died there at noon on January 7, 1902. Her death came one day before the birthday given in her memorial. The notice announced a funeral later that week; the memorial associates her burial with Mount Auburn Cemetery.

An unusually tangible record of Julia's remembrance survives in France. The Louvre museum in Paris holds a design associated with two memorial windows for John Wesley and Julia Doane at Trinity Church in Chicago. Installed in 1902 and destroyed in 1920, the windows are represented by a surviving workshop drawing: watercolor, gouache and pastel on beige paper. Its practical instructions include a note that the lead lines were sent separately and a direction to protect the drawing under glass. These marks preserve part of the process of turning a memorial design into a finished window.

The National Arts Club records also list a 1902 stained-glass memorial to Julia Doane among material associated with John La Farge. The documentary trail therefore reaches beyond an obituary or family chart to a specific artistic commission made in her memory.

The compiled family genealogy places Julia’s birth around 1840 and names her parents as Joses Moulton and Sarah “Sally” Barnard. Her daughter was Lily Moulton Doane Wicks. John died in 1901. The La Farge memorial windows were destroyed by fire in 1920.