On March 5, 1931, Ida Wood, realizing her sister Mary Mayfield was dying, called for a chambermaid. Thus a socialite of Victorian New York returned to the spotlight a generation after leaving it.

She had been a slim, dark beauty with wonderful eyes. The legend was she had been the daughter of Louisiana judge Thomas Henry Mayfield when she enchanted Benjamin Wood, brother of New York mayor Fernando Wood. Fernando’s nepotism made Benjamin a state senator, congressman, and publisher of the old Daily News. Ida, as wife of a statesman-publisher, became a leading Gilded Age hostess, meeting Abraham Lincoln, entertaining Grover Cleveland, and presented to the Empress Eugenie. Benjamin made the Daily News a sensational success, full of sex, crime, and scandal, with the largest circulation of any American daily. After his death in 1900,Ida edited the paper herself, having the newsboys shout: “Daily News, one cent – help Mother pay the rent,” before selling it to Frank Munsey. Munsey’s assistant, William T. Dewart, later publisher of the original New York Sun, counted out $340,000 before her eyes. Only after Ida had recounted the money did Dewart get the paper’s keys. In 1907, she walked into the Morton Trust and withdrew her money – nearly $1 million in cash – in a shopping bag. She withdrew from society and was soon forgotten.

By 1931, she was 93 years old. For the previous 24 years, she had shared two rooms with her sister and daughter, Emma Wood, in the decrepit Herald Square Hotel at 116 West 34th St. across from Macy’s. When Emma died in 1928, Mary handled arrangements. Mary’s death left Ida helpless. She asked for the only lawyer she knew, Judge Morgan O’Brien. The one lawyer of that name in the directory was the judge’s son. He telephoned his long retired father, who was amazed that Ida was alive: He had been her lawyer 50 years earlier.

The younger O’Brien found her rooms jammed with clutter such as 5,000 pieces of soap from hotels around the world. Stacks of yellowed newspapers, trunks, and barrels towered to the ceiling. Among the papers strewn on the floor was a handwritten letter from Charles Dickens and 1,100 shares of Union Pacific. Investigators found diamond pins, earrings, rings, and necklaces shoved amidst negotiable securities in dusty cardboard boxes. A pouch tied about Ida’s body contained 50 $10,000 bills; another $250,000 in cash was hidden in frying pans beneath the rubbish. Her rooms at Manhattan Storage & Warehouse contained 40 trunks of memorabilia, bolts of French silk still in their original wrappings, and ball gowns such as she had worn to dance with the Prince of Wales.

As Ida was helpless, the state courts appointed her nephew, Otis F. Wood, as “committee of her person and property.” Otis had not seen her since the 1870s and, like most acquaintances, had long thought her dead. Ida found this both amusing and irritating. She told one reporter, “…it seems very strange that they should call me incompetent. I made money and I kept it. So many people whom everyone considers quite competent can’t do that.”

In March 1932, Ida died of pneumonia. Her will left her estate to Emma and Mary, who had predeceased her, and as a witness’s signature could not be verified, its probate was denied. Meanwhile, over 1,100 people filed claims against her estate, including numerous Mayfields from Louisiana.

The New York County public administrator, who administers estates of persons who die intestate – without valid wills – began researching Ida’s ancestry to identify living blood relatives entitled to her property. During an investigation that spanned five years, Joseph Cox, the public administrator’s counsel, found documents showing Ida had been known as Walsh rather than Mayfield before her marriage, including letters and bills concerning various Walshes in Massachusetts and California, and traveled as far as Ireland to research records and interview people. He found not even Benjamin Wood had known the entire truth about his wife. She had been born Ellen Walsh to Irish immigrant parents in 1838. Emma Wood, who had believed herself Ben and Ida’s daughter, had really been Ida’s youngest sister. Ellen Walsh was in domestic service to a wealthy family by the age of 12. Smart and observant, she had absorbed refinement from her employers while learning the value of her looks. The Irish servant girl reinvented herself as a Louisiana aristocrat. By 1857, she was Benjamin Wood’s mistress. Then Ida reinvented her family as Mayfields, even providing her dead father with a tombstone bearing the name Thomas H. Mayfield.

On August 31, 1937, Surrogate James A. Foley rejected the Mayfield claims as absurd. In March 1939, Foley ordered Ida’s estate divided among ten Walsh descendants who each received $84,490.92. None had ever met her.