Pepita Crounse

Josephine Julienne Crounse Milmore, aka Pepita Crounse, is the author of two books of poems: Through Remembered Windows: Poems of Old Mexico (1936), and Fold of Dreams (1933). Born in Texas, she was raised by an older sister on a ranch near Laredo. She married John Urban Fraley Jr. in 1900, but was widowed five years later. In 1911, she married her second husband, William Livingston Crounse, a journalist based in DC, and became a noted society hostess. William was chief correspondent for the New York World, and co-founder of the National Press Club.

After the death of her second husband in 1935, Pepita was left a wealthy widow. She married for a third time in 1937 to Joseph Whitla Stinson, an attorney, but later claimed in court that Stinson had drugged her and forced her to marry. Divorce proceedings were covered in the press in lurid detail, and in 1939 her marriage was annulled.

Her fourth and final marriage was to Oscar L. Milmore, a career diplomat with the State Department, in 1942. Pepita lived at this first address for her last three marriages. Commissioned by William Crounse, who left his entire estate to Pepita on his death, she left it to Milmore upon her own death in 1951 at age 68, and he sold the mansion to the government of Austria in 1959. The second address was built by her second husband in 1897, prior to her marriage, as a rural country home, a second residence used during the summer months and on occasional weekends, as an escape from city life. She also owned a summer ome in Chester, Nova Scotia.