Here’s what I want. I notice you changed your name. I want you to keep your new name. I guess you made up someplace you came from – well, that’s where you came from… You figure you died and now you’re somebody else and we’ll get along fine.
 — John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Part 2
Who Was Blanche Dumont?

Miss Blanche Dumont operated a brothel in Guy Town, the red light district of Austin, Texas, from before 1880 until 1914. She became one of Austin’s most infamous and best-remembered madams. People still speak of seeing Dumont’s ghost near her former establishment. She was the mother of Wilson Matthews, the legendary Texas League umpire.

The origin and true identity of Blanche Dumont are lost to history. Even Wilson Matthews’ wife, Maude Huyck Matthews, did not know her provenance. When Maude filled out her husband’s death certificate in 1918, she wrote her mother-in-law’s maiden name and place of birth as Unk. (unknown).

Wilson Matthews’ death certificate, September 2, 1918.

Dumont was born around 1850. The 1900 census records her birth month and year as November 1851. Other sources, which state her age but not her birth year, imply that she was born between 1841 and 1855.

The name Blanche Dumont may have been borrowed from a character in “A Hero of Romance,” a popular play based on the novel Le Roman d’un Jeune Homme Pauvre by Octave Feuillet. Other demimondes chose the same name: newspaper accounts record the arrests of women named Blanche Dumont in Galveston and New Orleans.

The character of Blanche Dumont (center) in a scene from “A Hero of Romance.” Illustrated London News, 1868.

Dumont began her career as a sex worker sometime after the Civil War. The 1870 census for Austin records Blanche Dumont, 21, living with two other young women, ages 19 and 22. All three women are working at home.

The oldest woman lists her birthplace as Texas. The entry for Blanche Dumont, on the next row of the ledger, has a faint ditto mark in the Place of Birth column, indicating that she, too, was born in Texas. Dumont does not claim a parent of foreign birth.

1870 census for Austin, Texas. Headers and relevant entries (intervening rows removed).

After 1870, Dumont began refining her character and invented a fictitious backstory. In the 1880, 1900, and 1910 censuses (the 1890 census records were destroyed in a fire), Dumont claimed to have been born in England to English parents. Her son later displayed the same talent for self-invention, weaving a fantastic, continually shifting resumé out of whole cloth.

In the late 1870s, Dumont either gave birth to a son or adopted a boy. It was also around this time that she began operating her own brothel.

Dumont does not appear in the 1877-1878 Austin Business Directory. The directory lists other madams, including Sallie Daggett, Sallie Davenport, Frannie Kelley, and Alice Smith. By mid-1880, she was in business for herself.

The June 1880 census shows Dumont keeping house on Austin’s Live Oak Street (probably 200 West Live Oak, at the corner of West Live Oak and Colorado). The ledger lists Blanche Dumont, four women, and a two-year-old boy named W.F. Mathews.

1880 census for Austin, Texas. Headers and relevant entries (intervening rows removed).

The census taker designated Dumont as the head of the household. Under Relationship of each person to the head of this family, W.F. Mathews is described as son.

The census records the boy’s birth location as Texas and states that his mother and father were also born there. Blanche Dumont’s birthplace, however, is given as England. The discrepancies between the surnames and birthplaces add to the mystery of the boy’s origin.

According to Wilson Matthew’s death certificate, his father’s name was W. Wilson. Mathews, then, must have been his mother’s name.

The simplest explanation for Mathews’ provenance is that Dumont was the boy’s adopted, rather than biological, mother. His birth mother, named Mathews, may have worked in Dumont’s brothel. She may have died after giving birth, or she may have abandoned her infant child. Blanche Dumont took the boy in and raised him as her own son.

It is also possible that Dumont’s real name was Mathews and W.F. Mathews was her biological son. Dumont gave her son her actual legal name (Mathews) and birthplace (Texas), rather than the fictional name and birthplace of the character she portrayed in Guy Town.

In the 1920 census, taken after she had abandoned Guy Town and was running a legitimate boarding house in Fort Worth, Dumont again claimed a Texas birth. She gave her father’s birthplace as Texas and her mother’s as Tennessee. Her marital status was marked with a W, meaning widowed.

1920 census for Fort Worth, Texas. Headers and relevant entries (intervening rows removed).

The information in the 1920 census rings true. Her place of birth and her parents’ birthplaces are consistent with the information in the 1870 census, where she stated that she was born in Texas and that her parents were not of foreign birth. She was probably a widow.

By the time Dumont died in 1933, she had yet again changed her origin story. Her death certificate recorded her birthplace as France. The names of her mother and father, and their birthplaces, are Unknown.

Blanche Dumont’s death certificate, February 20, 1933.

The speech and writings of Wilson Matthews provide a clue to his mother’s provenance.

Matthews was said to have an odd manner of speaking. As an umpire, he pronounced OUT! as OOT! He once wrote a newspaper article in which he used the word noot – probably a phonetic spelling of nutte, German for prostitute.

If we assume that Wilson Matthews picked up his mother’s speech patterns, then Blanche Dumont may have descended from the Germans who settled in Central Texas in the 1830s and 1840s.

Both Matthews and Dumont may have spoken with German accents. In those days, German accents were common in Central Texas. Dumont may even have spoken the Texasdeutsch dialect that still lingers in a few Texas communities. In the unsophisticated world of Guy Town, Dumont may have parlayed her foreign-sounding speech into what her clients accepted as an English accent.

Based on the accumulated, conflicting information, we can hazard a guess at Dumont’s biography.

The woman who called herself Blanche Dumont was born in Texas around 1850. Her father was born in Texas, her mother in Tennessee. Both parents may have been German. Dumont was married, possibly to a man named Mathews, and was widowed early. To support herself she moved to Austin, turned to sex work, and took on the character of an Englishwoman.

Around 1877 or 1878, she either gave birth to a son or adopted a boy whose mother was named Mathews. The boy’s father was named W. Wilson. She retired from active sex work and began running a brothel.  Her son became the minor league ballplayer and umpire who called himself Wilson Matthews.

The relationship between Blanche Dumont and Wilson Matthews must have been known during Matthews’ lifetime. It was probably common knowledge in Austin and a topic of gossip in newsrooms and saloons around the Texas League.

Dumont no doubt counted many sportswriters and players among her clients. Some of the older hacks may have seen the boy trotting about the brothel. Journalists, though, especially in Texas, seemed protective of Matthews and never exposed his heritage until Dumont died, fifteen years after Matthews’ passing.

Dumont’s death made headlines all over Texas. She was memorialized, not as a once-famous madam, but as the mother of the still-famous umpire. Like her son, Dumont passed without a cent to her name and was buried in a grave marked only by a 3, her space in Lot 2, Section 8-H of Fort Worth’s Greenwood Cemetery.

Waco Times-Herald, February 18, 1933.

Fort Worth Star-Telegram, February 18, 1933.