Eighteen Children, Four Households, One Scream
August 7, 1860. Fifth Avenue, New York.
A lady is driving down the avenue in her own carriage. She has a coachman at her sole disposal; the house she keeps stands at No. 14, just off Washington Square, in the most fashionable part of the city; the household keeps six carriages and ten horses. Everything about her says arrival.
In the opposite stream of traffic she sees an open carriage. In it sits her husband. Beside him sits a woman she has never been introduced to — though she has, as she will put it later, "heard rumors."
She stands up. And she begins to scream.
No accusations. No names. "I used no language upon this occasion," she will testify, with the precision of a woman who has replayed the moment many times. She simply screams, at the top of her voice, until half of Fifth Avenue is looking. Then she turns her carriage down a side street and drives home.
It ends a marriage that never legally existed, a system of hidden households nine years in the building, and the New York life of one of the most famous manufacturers in America.
Her name is Mary Ann Sponsler. The man in the open carriage is Isaac Singer — and the woman beside him is not even his only secret.
The showroom marriage
Mary Ann met him in 1836, in Baltimore, when she was eighteen and he was a strolling actor with a wife elsewhere and a promise ready: marriage, as soon as he could get a divorce. By the summer of 1860 she had been with him for more than two decades and borne him ten children.
On paper, none of it existed. In practice, all of New York accepted it. Her visiting cards read "Mrs. I. M. Singer, 14 Fifth Avenue." The house was new — bought in 1859, his challenge to society. She paid calls and received them; tutors and piano teachers came for the children; a physician, Dr. William Maxwell, was paid to devote his entire attention to the family. Ten dollars a day went to groceries. When the household drove out together, it drove out in a canary-yellow omnibus.
It was everything a marriage was supposed to look like, performed daily by two people who were not married. New York society, it must be said, was not fooled into intimacy: the guests at No. 14 were worthy people, but — as Ruth Brandon puts it — "not names with which society rang." The stage was set, the costumes were right, and the audience he actually wanted never came. It was a pattern that would follow Singer to the end of his life. (→ ссылка: He Staged His Own Funeral — якорь на «the audience he wanted»)
The cards said Mrs. I. M. Singer. The law said Miss Sponsler.
"She would have him in her power"
For twenty-four years the obstacle had a name: Catharine, the legal wife he had walked away from decades earlier. In January 1860 the obstacle fell: Singer divorced her for adultery. Brandon argues the adultery was arranged: a lawyer offered Catharine ten thousand dollars and assured her Singer's fortunes were declining. However it was managed, the divorce came through, and the papers were handed — with what Mary Ann took for ceremony — into her keeping.
She waited for the question of the wedding to settle itself. It had been promised, by her account, for most of her adult life.
His answer, when it came, was simple. He did not intend to marry her — because if he did, "she would have him in her power."
There was no more to be said. Under the law of 1860, a woman in Mary Ann's position had no way to compel him and everything to lose by trying; the more noise she made, the faster her respectability would burn. (→ ссылка: The Rule of Love — якорь на «the law of 1860») Singer understood that arithmetic perfectly. He had, in effect, banked on it from the start.
Seven months after the divorce, the two carriages met in the traffic of Fifth Avenue.
She gave him two decades and ten children. He gave her his reason: a wife would have him in her power.
After the scream
By the time Mary Ann reached No. 14 she must have known what the scream had cost. Things could no longer be decently covered up; something, or someone, would have to give.
Singer was waiting for her. What happened next went into the sworn complaint her lawyer filed the following year — a document alleging that Singer had "repeatedly beaten and choked her to insensibility, frequently forcing the blood to flow in streams from her nose, mouth, face, head and neck," conduct the complaint called "unparalleled atrocity and savage barbarity toward herself and children." That day's beating she named "a brutal and bloody assault."
It had happened before, in the same new house. The previous year he had beaten her over an uncovered box of matches left in the bedroom; their daughter Voulettie threw herself between them, and he beat both women until they lost consciousness — the devoted Dr. Maxwell kept them in bed for days. That time, Mary Ann had retreated to Mrs. Megary's boarding house at 83 Clinton Place, and come back.
This time she did not go to Mrs. Megary's. She went to the police.
Bonds to keep the peace
The next issue of Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper — as Brandon records — carried this item:
"Mr. I. M. Singer, the great sewing machine manufacturer, who resides at No. 14 Fifth Avenue, New York, was arrested on complaint of his wife, who accuses him of having beaten and choked her in a violent manner. He was put under bonds to keep the peace for six months."
Fifty words. It was the first time the name Singer — the name in gold letters over the Broadway showroom, the name that would go onto some thirteen thousand machines that year — appeared in print under the word "arrested." No disgrace, Brandon writes, could have been more public.
The scream had been wordless. The newsprint was not.
Four households, three surnames
Then New York started reading, and the addresses began to surface.
At No. 14 Fifth Avenue lived the Singers — Mary Ann and her children, the official family, the canary-yellow omnibus. At No. 70 Christopher Street lived the Mathews family: Mary McGonigal, who had known Singer for nine years, and their five children. Singer was known there as Mr. Mathews. The youngest Mathews boy, born in 1859, had been given the name Charles Alexander — the name of the little boy Mary Ann had buried five years earlier. Did his mother know? Brandon wonders; perhaps she did.
At No. 225 West Twenty-seventh Street lived the Merritts: Mary Eastwood Walters and her daughter Alice. There Singer was Mr. Merritt — his own middle name, worn like a borrowed coat.
And the map was still not complete. There was a fourth family — the first, the one that needed no false surname. Catharine, the legal wife he had divorced that January, had two grown children by him: Lillian, and William, who drew his wages in Singer's own factory alongside Mary Ann's eldest son Gus.
By 1860, Isaac Singer had fathered and recognized eighteen children by four women, sixteen of them living — and could claim, with some justice, to be supporting them all. Three of those households sat within a few miles of each other on Manhattan, running for years without one family colliding with another. It took a traffic pattern on Fifth Avenue to do that.
Four households. Three surnames — Singer, Mathews, Merritt. One man.
"J. W. Simmons and Lady"
Six weeks later, on September 19, 1860, a passenger boarded a boat for Europe under the name "J. W. Simmons and Lady."
Simmons was Isaac Singer. The Lady was not any of the three mothers. She was Kate McGonigal — his mistress's nineteen-year-old sister, who had been living in the Christopher Street house.
In London he took rooms in Cornhill, near Cheapside, where the company kept an office. The business did not miss a day; Edward Clark stayed behind to manage the machines, the lawsuits and the story. (→ ссылка: Edward Clark — якорь на имени) The playbook reads familiarly now — deny nothing, admit nothing, put an ocean between yourself and the headline until it cools. Singer was writing it freehand, a century before anyone called it crisis management.
What the scream bought
The next year Mary Ann sued — ingeniously. She could hardly sue for divorce from a man she had never married, so she claimed the marriage had existed in common law: he had, after all, lived with her as his wife for seven months after the divorce from Catharine. The court granted her a divorce and awarded eight thousand dollars a year — the largest alimony America had yet seen.
The order was never executed. Seven days after the decision, Singer proposed a compromise, and Mary Ann — for reasons Brandon can only guess at — accepted: a furnished house on West Twenty-eighth Street, between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, and fifty dollars a week. From six carriages to a side street. In April 1862 she left No. 14 for good; in June 1863, seven weeks after obtaining her renunciation, Singer married a Frenchwoman named Isabella Boyer in a church on Waverley Place.
The scream cost Mary Ann the name, the address, and the life she had spent twenty-four years building. It cost him six weeks of embarrassment and a boat ticket.
The largest alimony America had yet seen — awarded, and never paid. She got a side street. He got a steamer to Europe.
But the scream did something no court managed to do: it put the private Isaac Singer on the public record, where he could never be fully hidden again. Fifteen years later, dying in an unfinished palace in Devon, he would stage the one performance nobody could walk out of. (→ ссылка: He Staged His Own Funeral. It Was His Best Role.) The evidence Mary Ann and her children gave would follow him even there — into the will case that ended with a judge named Coffin.
The book — SINGER: The Scoundrel Who Changed the World — is out on August 12, 2026, five days after the 166th anniversary of the scream. Chapter one is free.
Key facts
- On August 7, 1860, Mary Ann Sponsler saw Isaac Singer driving down Fifth Avenue with Mary McGonigal beside him; by her sworn testimony, she stood up in her carriage and screamed — "I used no language upon this occasion."
- Mary Ann had been with Singer since 1836 and had borne him ten children; her visiting cards read "Mrs. I. M. Singer, 14 Fifth Avenue," but they were never married.
- When she returned home, Singer beat her — what she later called, under oath, "a brutal and bloody assault." She went to the police for the first time; he was arrested and put under bonds to keep the peace for six months.
- The scandal exposed four parallel households: the Singers at 14 Fifth Avenue, the "Mathews" family at 70 Christopher Street (Mary McGonigal, five children), the "Merritts" at 225 West 27th Street (Mary Eastwood Walters and daughter Alice) — and the first family, Catharine Haley's, whose grown children Singer also supported.
- By 1860 Singer had fathered and recognized eighteen children by four women, sixteen of them living.
- On September 19, 1860, Singer fled New York for Europe under the alias "J. W. Simmons and Lady" — the Lady being Kate McGonigal, his mistress's nineteen-year-old sister.
- A court awarded Mary Ann $8,000 a year — the largest alimony America had yet seen. The order was never executed; she settled for a house on West 28th Street and fifty dollars a week.
Frequently asked questions
What happened on Fifth Avenue on August 7, 1860?
Mary Ann Sponsler, who had lived with Isaac Singer for more than twenty years as "Mrs. Singer," met his carriage in traffic on Fifth Avenue — with his mistress Mary McGonigal beside him. By her sworn testimony she stood up in her own carriage and screamed, without words, until half the street was watching. The scene, and the assault and arrest that followed it, exposed Singer's four parallel households and ended his life in New York.
Who was Mary Ann Sponsler?
Isaac Singer's common-law wife. She met him in Baltimore in 1836, at eighteen, and spent more than two decades as "Mrs. I. M. Singer," raising their household at 14 Fifth Avenue and bearing him ten children. Singer refused to marry her after divorcing his legal wife in 1860 — because, he said, a wife "would have him in her power."
Why was Isaac Singer arrested in 1860?
On his wife's complaint, for having "beaten and choked her in a violent manner" — the words of the notice in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, as recorded by his biographer Ruth Brandon. He was released under bonds to keep the peace for six months. It was the first public crack in the reputation of one of America's most famous sewing machine makers.
Why did Isaac Singer flee to Europe?
After the arrest and the newspaper coverage, the scandal made his position in New York untenable. On September 19, 1860, he sailed for Europe under the false name "J. W. Simmons and Lady," accompanied by nineteen-year-old Kate McGonigal. He settled near the company's London office in Cornhill; the business, run by Edward Clark, continued without interruption.
What happened to Mary Ann Sponsler after the scandal?
She sued in 1861 and was awarded $8,000 a year — the largest alimony yet awarded in America — but the order was never executed. She accepted a compromise: a furnished house on West 28th Street and fifty dollars a week. Singer married Isabella Boyer in 1863. Mary Ann's testimony resurfaced in the will case after his death in 1875, when the estate of $13–15 million left her nothing.
Sources
- Ruth Brandon, Singer and the Sewing Machine: A Capitalist Romance (1977)
- · Mary Ann Sponsler's sworn complaint and testimony, Singer divorce and will proceedings, 1861–62 and 1875–76
- · Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, August 1860 · New York Daily Tribune, August 10, 1860.
Read more
Edward Clark: The Lawyer Who Built the Singer Empire — the quiet partner who turned Singer's chaos into the world's first global consumer brand. The man behind the Dakota.
The Hungry Wolf in a Golden Muzzle: Who Was Isaac Singer? — runaway apprentice, failed Shakespearean actor, bigamist with five families and twenty-four children — the "scoundrel" who perfected the sewing machine and changed the world.
About Singer Series — the book, the series, the film. One story. Three formats.
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