Florence Steele Martin Vance

Florence Steele Martin Vance (September 24, 1840 – April 22, 1924) was an American heiress, diarist, and letter writer. A wealthy Catholic widow, she later became the second wife of U.S. Senator Zebulon Vance.

Biography Vance was born Florence Steele on September 24, 1840, in Oldham County, Kentucky to Samuel Bledsoe Steele and Ann Alexis Brown Steele.

She married the first time, in 1866, to John Henry Martin. They had one son and lived in Louisville. She was widowed in 1871, leaving her with a fortune.

On January 21, 1880, while attending a ball at the Riggs House Hotel in Washington, D.C., she met the widowed Senator Zebulon Baird Vance of North Carolina. Three weeks later, they were engaged to be married. She and Vance did not have any children together.

They lived at 1627 Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, D.C. and began building a mansion, called Gombroom, in Black Mountain, North Carolina. To fund the construction of their new home, her husband used part of her fortune and money made from selling land he had inherited from his mother in Asheville. Vance kept a diary and wrote about her home, which she named after a city in Iran.

After her husband died in 1894, he was buried in the Vane family plot in Riverside Cemetery in Asheville, next to his first wife. She later had his grave moved into her family's plot in the same cemetery.

She died on April 22, 1924, in Black Mountain and was buried in Riverside Cemetery.