Flora London, Jack London's Mother (The World of Jack London)

Flora (Wellman) London 1843 - 1922
Jack London's Mother

The earliest known picture of Flora Wellman

"Flora Wellman was born August 17, 1843, in Massillon, Ohio, the youngest child in a family of five. Her father, Marshall Wellman, was one of the wealthiest men in the area. Her mother, Eleanor Garrett Jones, was born in Brookfield, Ohio in 1810, the daughter of "Priest Jones," a devout circuit-rider of Welsh extraction. Flora's mother died when she was a baby, and when she was four her stepmother, Julia Frederica Hurxthal Wellman, joined the family. Flora resented her and never allowed her to become a mother to her."

Source: Kingman, Russ. A Pictorial Life of Jack London Crown, 1979.

"By her mid-seventies Flora was too crippled from arthritis to use her hands on needlework or at the piano, and her eyesight was so worsened as to limit her reading. After a short stay in the hospital in late 1921, she died on January 4, 1922. A local obituary focused on the "many tributes" Jack had paid 'during his literary career to his mother and his sister Mrs. Eliza Shepard' for their encouragement before he became famous. Nothing else was said of her life apart from her son. Eliza, Bess, and the girls paid their respects at the sparsely attended service. But they felt saddened by the loss than by what had become of a life once so promising and full of spirit."

Source: Stasz, Clarice Jack London's Women University of Massachusetts Press, 2001.