Juliette Gordon Low

Juliette Magill Kinzie Gordon was born October 31, 1860, at 10 East Oglethorpe Avenue in Savannah, Georgia. She was named after her grandmother, Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie, and nicknamed Daisy, a common sobriquet at the time, by her uncle. She was the second of six children born to William Washington Gordon II, a cotton broker with the firm Tison & Gordon, which was later renamed W. W. Gordon & Company, and Eleanor "Nellie" Lytle Kinzie, a writer whose family played a role in the founding of Chicago. Her brother, William Washington Gordon III, was also major in the United States Army.

When she was six months old, Gordon's father joined the Confederate States Army to fight in the American Civil War. In 1864, due to the proximity of Union troops to Savannah, she moved with her mother and two sisters to nearby Thunderbolt. After the Union victory in Savannah the same year, her family received many visits from General William T. Sherman, who was a friend of her uncle. Sherman arranged an escort to take her family to Chicago in March 1865. Upon arriving in Chicago, Gordon became sick with brain fever, although she recovered without severe complications. A few months later, after President Andrew Johnson issued the amnesty proclamation, her father reunited with the family to move back to Savannah.

As a young child, she was accident-prone and had numerous injuries and illnesses. In 1866, her mother mentioned in a letter that "Daisy fell out of bed – on her head, as usual...." That same year, she broke two of her fingers so severely that her parents considered having them amputated. She also had frequent earaches and recurring bouts of malaria.

Gordon developed partial hearing loss as a child. At her wedding, a grain of rice thrown in celebration landed in her left ear and led to an infection. Its removal punctured her ear drum, leading to permanent deafness in that ear.

Marriage

After the death of her 17-year-old sister Alice, in 1880, Gordon relocated to Savannah to take over household duties while her mother grieved. During this period, she met William Mackay Low, the son of a family friend, and they began courting in secret. Low left Savannah to study at the University of Oxford, and they did not meet again until almost three years later, in 1884. Gordon had traveled to Europe in the interim and learned several new skills, including shorthand, bareback riding, and hunting partridge. In late 1885, Low proposed marriage.

The Lows' wedding in Savannah on December 21, 1886, coincided with her parents' wedding anniversary. The couple honeymooned at St. Catherines Island near Savannah. Then they leased property in London and Scotland, spending the social season in London and the hunting season in Scotland. They spent much of their first two years of marriage apart, due to Juliette's medical problems and William's long hunting trips and gambling. The long separations, combined with her inability to bear children strained their relationship.

Low often painted, but also learned woodworking and metalworking. She even designed and built iron gates for her home in Warwickshire. As a hostess, she held parties and events at the house and also received visits from such illustrious guests as her husband's friend Albert Edward, the Prince of Wales, and the writer Rudyard Kipling, whose wife was related to her mother. Despite her husband's opposition, she devoted time to charity work, including regular visits to a woman with leprosy; she also fed and cared for the poor in a nearby village, and joined the local nursing association.