Nellie Bly
Fun Facts
Born in 1864, Bly was the thirteenth of 15 children in a family headed by Michael Cochran, a mill owner and county judge. She was six years old when her beloved father died without warning, and without a will, plunging his once wealthy and respected family into poverty and shame.
An outraged Bly, 19, wrote to the Pittsburgh Dispatch lambasting a column claiming that women belonged at home and certainly not in the workplace. The furious letter attracted the editor’s eye and he hired Bly. At 21, she was a foreign correspondent in Mexico but was forced to return home or risk arrest for her candid reporting. Not long after her return, Nellie Bly set her sights on New York City.
Nellie married millionaire industrialist Robert Livingstone Seaman, 42 years her senior, in 1895. Before long she took over his Iron Clad Manufacturing Company and continued to run it after his death. She patented her own inventions and instituted fair pay and well-being benefits for workers. But Bly’s financial skills did not compare with her journalistic talent. Embezzlement by an employee bankrupted the company in 1911. At its peak, Iron Clad employed 1,500 and could produce 1,000 steel barrels daily.
Nellie Bly, then 50, was in Vienna as the fighting of World War One broke out. After convincing Austrian officials to provide her with credentials as a war correspondent, she made her way to the battlefields and trenches. Her accounts were published in the New York Evening Journalunder the heading “Nellie Bly on the Firing Line”. Making her the first woman to report WWI’s eastern front.
Back in New York, Bly campaigned for disadvantaged women and found homes for abandoned children as a columnist for the Evening Journal. She was still writing for the Journal when she died of pneumonia on 27 January 1922 at the age of 57. Spending her time and money to help people out of poverty, she herself became destitute. Her grave in New York’s Woodlawn Cemetery remained unmarked until 1978 when the New York Press Club erected a simple headstone.
Cemetery Information:
Final Resting Place:
Woodlawn Cemetery
4199 Webster Avenue
Bronx, New York, 10470
USA
North America
Map:
Grave Location:
Section Honeysuckle, Range 19, Grave 212Grave Location Description
Where Canna Lane turns into West Border Avenue park 50 feet from the intersection of the short road. Count 4 rows from the road and 8 rows from the wall bordering the cemetery for the final resting place of legendary journalist and investigative reporter Nellie Bly.
Grave Location GPS
40.8840516796079, -73.8772616305776Photos:
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