Alta Rockefeller Prentice

Alta Rockefeller Prentice (April 12, 1871 – June 21, 1962) was an American philanthropist and socialite. Her parents were Standard Oil co-founder John D. Rockefeller and Laura Spelman Rockefeller.

Early life Alta was born on April 12, 1871, in Cleveland in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. by the Rev. Dr. William Faunce, the President of Brown University and former pastor of the Fifth Avenue Baptist Church. The wedding, which took place on the wide landing of the staircase in the main hall of her parents brownstone in Manhattan located at 4 West 54th Street, had originally been planned as an elaborate church wedding but was changed to a quiet affair at the Rockefeller home due to the recent death of Alta's young nephew, John Rockefeller McCormick, from scarlet fever. His uncle, Edward Swift Isham, was the law partner of Robert Todd Lincoln. Together, Alta and Ezra lived at 5 West 53rd Street in Manhattan (bought by her father for the couple as a wedding present) and were the parents of three children:

John Rockefeller Prentice (1902–1972), a Yale and Yale Law School graduate who became a cattle breeder. Mary Adeline Prentice (1907–1981), a 1934 Vassar College graduate who married Benjamin Davis Gilbert (1907–1992). Spelman Prentice (1911–2000), founder of the Prenalta Corporation which ran oil and gas operations.

She founded Alta House , a settlement house in Little Italy in Cleveland, Ohio, which is named in her honor.

In 1910, Alta and Ezra bought 1,400 acres (5.7 km2) of land near Williamstown, Massachusetts. Elm Tree House, the Prentices' 72-room summer home on Mount Hope Farm, was completed in 1928 at a cost of $400,000 (equivalent to $ today), and their estate became "the most valuable estate in the Berkshire Hills." She was interred at Dellwood Cemetery in Manchester Village, Vermont. She left her New York City brownstone to her neighbour, the Museum of Modern Art, who demolished it and built a new wing of the museum. Her Berkshires property was willed to New York's Lenox Hill Hospital. Shortly thereafter, Elm Tree House was purchased by its current owner, Williams College.