The Third and Last Time: A Yesler Avenue Marriage Comes Apart in Public
A grocery clerk's wife, reported to have cleared out with half the household goods, tells a reporter the split was mutual — and that her husband handed her $1.10 as a parting gift after threatening her and slapping their little boy.
Mrs. Georgia Tiffany, the handsome young woman who was reported in one of the evening papers to have unceremoniously departed from her home at 1113 Yesler avenue, after having divided the household furniture unbeknown to her husband, Charles Tiffany, who is a clerk in Stetson Brothers' grocery, was called upon at the old Occidental hotel, corner of Main and South Third streets, last evening by a Post-Intelligencer reporter and asked for a statement of the case. She said she did not like to rush into print, but as long as it had been claimed she left without her husband's knowledge, she would tell the truth.
"There was no unceremonious departure at all," she said. "My husband was at the house when the furniture was divided, and when I left he gave me $1.10 as a parting gift. Our last trouble arose Tuesday night, when I returned from visiting my sick sister Jennie at the Occidental hotel. Mr. Tiffany threatened to whip me and ordered me out of the house. I told him to keep his hands off me and that I would leave in the morning. Then he vented his spite by slapping our little boy. Wednesday we divided the furniture, and it was at Mr. Tiffany's request that I left the curtains, as he said he intended to room at the house. This is the third time I have tried to live with Mr. Tiffany and it will be the last. I am greatly surprised that Mr. Tiffany has not followed his usual course and slandered me. I shall be looking for divorce proceedings now. He commenced them once and then came back to me. I want to say here that my mother had nothing to do whatever with the trouble between my husband and myself. We two and no one else had anything to do with it."
Mr. Tiffany called at the hotel last evening to see Mrs. Tiffany, but he did not see her.
“"My husband was at the house when the furniture was divided, and when I left he gave me $1.10 as a parting gift."”
In 1898 a wife's account of threats and a slap could only reach the public through the society-gossip column, framed as a curious item about divided furniture and a $1.10 farewell. Today that same account would be a domestic-violence case file, and the Yesler Avenue house and the old Occidental at Main and South Third are both long gone. The story is a reminder that the paper's most quotable domestic drama was, for the woman at its center, the third attempt at a marriage she was finally done with.
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