Catharine Greene
Catharine Greene was the widow of the Continental Army's best general after Washington, the hostess at whose Georgia table the cotton gin was thought of, and the woman whose money built it. She was born Catharine Littlefield on Block Island in 1755, was raised in the household of her aunt, whose husband was Rhode Island's governor, and in 1774 married Nathanael Greene, a Quaker ironmaster who was about to be read out of his meeting for drilling with a militia. She spent the war in the camps whenever the army sat still, at Valley Forge and Morristown, where she danced with Washington and was the ornament of the general staff, and bore five children between campaigns. Georgia gave the general Mulberry Grove, a confiscated Loyalist rice plantation on the Savannah, for the campaign that had cleared the state. He died there of sunstroke in 1786, forty-three years old and ruined, because he had personally guaranteed the contracts that fed his army in the Carolinas. His widow went to Congress herself, and in 1792 got the debts assumed by the United States, the first claim of its kind to succeed. On the ship home from that petition she met a young Yale graduate going south to tutor, Eli Whitney, and brought him to Mulberry Grove instead, where in the spring of 1793 he built the gin that the Georgia page names; she and her plantation manager Phineas Miller formed the firm that financed the patent, the lawsuits and the losses. The story that she suggested the brush that cleared the teeth is old and unproven. She married Miller in 1796, sold Mulberry Grove in 1800 when the gin money did not come, and built Dungeness on Cumberland Island, where Miller died in 1803 of a thorn prick. She died there of a fever in September 1814 at fifty-nine. Her house burned in 1866 and the Carnegies built theirs on its foundation.
- Lived: 1755 CE – 1814 CE
- Nationality: American
- Roles: planter
