ABSTRACT
When Olivia Louise was born on the night of November 27, 1845, the Langdons were one of the most recent families to Elmira, New York. (By the time she reached the age of seventeen, they would be the most prominent.) Her father, Jervis, and her mother, Olivia Lewis Langdon, had only just arrived from Millport, Chemung County, New York. It was the last stop for the thirty-six-year-old Jervis on a journey he began at the age of sixteen. For twenty years he had moved from store to store among the hills and the pines in a one-hundred-mile area between Syracuse and Elmira on the road to prosperity.
