Maria Eastman

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Kilbourn-74

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/20800244

The central person in George Eastman's life, without a doubt, was his mother. She was born Maria Kilbourn on August 22, 1821, on a farm on Paris Hill, between Waterville and Utica, New York. The youngest of seven, she grew up knowing a rural, self-reliant life. Her religious leanings were Calvinist and moderate, her social life next to non-existent. On September 25, 1844, at the spinsterly age of 23, she married George Washington Eastman in Kingsville, New York, and they soon moved to the relatively bustling city of Rochester.

George knew that his mother would show the same resistance when he decided it was time to buy her a new house. Rather than enter into a protracted debate, then, he simply purchased a 15-room house for her on Arnold Park, in Rochester's fashionable East Avenue district, then went off to Europe on business.

Maria had no choice but to move in, but she didn't have to like it. Her son sent back telegrams and letters from Europe detailing his adventures. He had attended to the Royal Lyceum Theater and met with famous architects. He had met the famous Nadar, a balloonist and photography pioneer who had once started an "aerialist" society with novelist Jules Verne.To these reports, Maria responded with complaints about the wallpaper, the plumbing, the heating. When George tried to tease her or offer reassurances, she became slow to respond to his letters. Finally, just before returning home, he wrote "I am afraid you are worrying yourself sick."

His fears were prophetic. Not long after he returned to Rochester, they received word that Maria was suffering from uterine cancer. An operation was performed, successfully, but her recovery was slow, and George's became more devoted to her than ever.

By the turn of the century, Maria Eastman was perhaps the happiest she had ever been. Lavished by her millionaire son, she became almost jaunty and was quick to reassure him that everything would be all right even if his various business "schemes" fell through. When he went away on business, she was a familiar presence around Kodak Park, where she kept a well-attended bed of flowers in the engine room. Only in the last two years of her life was she completely confined to a wheelchair.

Maria Eastman The death of one's mother is always a cataclysmic event, but Maria's passing on June 16, 1907, was particularly crushing to George. Almost pathologically concerned with decorum, he found himself unable for the first time to control his emotions in the presence of friends. "When my mother died I cried all day," he explained later. "I could not have stopped to save my life."

Of course, Eastman could never do enough for his mother during her lifetime, and so it was after she was gone: When he opened the Eastman Theater in Rochester on September 4, 1922, among its features was a chamber-music hall dedicated to her memory: the Kilbourn Theater. And long after that, a rose cutting from her childhood home still flowered on the grounds of the Eastman House.