Pittsburgh lost one of its last connections to Stephen Foster 100 years ago.
“Mrs. Susan E. Robinson, aged 85, the last surviving member of the first famous Stephen G. Foster quartet, died yesterday morning at her home,” The Gazette Times reported on Feb. 1, 1916. “It was to her, as Miss Sue Pentland … that Foster dedicated his first success, ‘Open Thy Lattice, Love.’ ”
Robinson’s residence on Cedar Avenue was only a few blocks from her childhood home where Foster’s family lived next-door. “It was in her mother’s home in Union avenue that Foster found inspiration for many of his love ballads, playing the melodies at Mrs. Pentland’s piano while Miss Pentland sang the words,” the Gazette Times reported. “Pianos were scarce in the forties and fifties … There was no piano in his home, but a splendid one in the Pentland house.”
Foster, the composer of almost 300 songs, was born July 4, 1826, in what was then the Pittsburgh suburb of Lawrenceville. The family later moved to Allegheny City, now the city’s North Side.
As a young woman, Mrs. Robinson, then Miss Pentland, sang the soprano parts in what the newspaper described as “the original Stephen C. Foster quartet.” The other performers were tenor “Billy Hamilton, at one time superintendent of city parks,” bass James McBrier, “later a successful lumber dealer,” and contralto Jane McDowell. McDowell married Foster in 1850.
After Miss Pentland’s marriage to Allegheny City banker Andrew L. Robinson, she continued to make music. “Mrs. Robinson retained her splendid singing voice until she was aged 79 and she sang for many years in the choir of Christ Episcopal Church, North Side,” the story said. “Even at the advanced age at which she died, she enjoyed humming the beautiful old ballads that Foster had composed at her mother’s piano.”
“In [the] Robinson home in Cedar avenue there are today several original Foster manuscripts as well as the first flute upon which Foster played,” the Gazette Times story said. “Mrs. Robinson expressed the desire that all her Foster mementoes be given to the city of Pittsburgh for the Foster Memorial.” Her son, John W. Robinson, told the newspaper his mother’s wishes would be carried out.
The Foster Memorial, owned by the city on Penn Avenue in Lawrenceville, was a predecessor to the Stephen Foster Memorial in Oakland. After the original Foster Memorial shut down, there is no record of Mrs. Robinson’s artifacts being transferred to the new museum on the University of Pittsburgh campus.
Foster died in 1864 and is buried in Lawrenceville’s Allegheny Cemetery.
Len Barcousky: lbarcousky@post-gazette.com. Mr. Barcousky’s new book, “Hidden History of Pittsburgh,” will be published in April by The History Press.
First Published: February 14, 2016, 5:00 a.m.
