Emilie Hoyt Fox

Daughter of W. M. Hoyt; was accompanied by three children, all of whom are dead; body of mother found by Graeme Stewart.

Emilie Hoyt married the son of George Sidney Fox, a Philadelphia industrialist who owned the Union Traction company and built a fortune financing streetcar companies. As the only daughter of William Melancton Hoyt, Emilie was accustomed to a comfortable lifestyle. Starting with a fruit stand when he was eighteen years old, W. M. Hoyt had built one of Chicago's largest grocery wholesaling companies. A half dozen servants cared for Emilie and her three brothers at the family home at 341 Dearborn in Chicago, next door to the Potter Palmer family (before the Palmers built a new mansion on Lake Shore Drive in 1900).

A director in her father's company, Graeme Stewart, searched for Emilie and her children until he found the remains of all four, in three different mortuaries. Funeral services were conducted at the Fox home by Reverend Henry G. Moore of the Christ Episcopal Church, and burial was at Graceland Cemetery in Chicago.

In 1905, a new Christ Episcopal Church, including a Tiffany-stained glass window, was built in Winnetka with funds provided by William M. Hoyt as a memorial to his daughter and grandchildren. Called Church on the Hill, it is still in use today.  The church history states that the Tiffany window was “given by Emilie Hoyt Fox’s siblings in memory of her and her three children who perished in the Iroquois Theater fire in Chicago, 1903.”