"Eva Roberts was born in 1865 in Washington D.C. to James Roberts. She was first married to a Cromwell but he then died. While on a cruise she met Edward Stotesbury and they soon married. Edward Townsend Stotesbury was the head "the resident senior partner" of Philadelphia's most, famous and prestigious, banking house, Drexel & Company. He was also senior partner of J.P. Morgan & Company in New York. Stotesbury, the very model of success his income for 1919 was $5,585,000, and he was known to be "the richest man at Morgan's" by 1927 when his wealth reached $100,000,000. One may question the quality of his intelligence, he never read a book, but as has been noted, he had a remarkably keen mind for the complexities of finance. Together they built three magnificent homes A country manor in suburban Philadelphia named "Whitemarsh Hall", a home in Bar Harbor named "Wingwood"and "El Mirasol" (The Sunflower) in Palm Beach, where Eva entertained in the style of her mentor, Mrs. Astor. Her husband's birthday parties at the Addison Mizner-designed estate were especially memorable, with the guest list often topping out at 1,200 and featuring her husband, who had been a drummer boy in the Civil War, playing the drums and singing.Stotesbury died at eighty-nine on May 21, 1938. Wall Street insiders as early as 1927 had known him to be worth $100,000,000. Stotesbury was spending $1,000,000 a year to maintain Whitemarsh Hall. (In the opinion of Augusta Owen Patterson of Town & Country, who wrote with authority on such matters, Whitemarsh Hall may have been the best-maintained estate in both America and Europe. At one time, Marcel Deschamps, Greber's assistant supervised the daily work of seventy gardeners there.The mosaic is confusing. Stotesbury withdrew $55,000,000 from his account at Morgan's between 1933 and his death – a rate of withdrawal of more than $10,000,000 a year. His stepson, James H.R. Cromwell, who was then married to Doris Duke, had become a devoted New Dealer. One day in 1936 Stotesbury told him, "It's a good thing you married the richest girl in the world because you will get very little from me. I made my fortune and I am going to squander it myself; not your friend Roosevelt."
But where did the money go? What did he squander in on at so incredible a rate?
Two years after his death, a probate inventory revealed the estimated net value of his estate to have been $4,000,000. Stotesbury, had he lived another two years, would have been broke with three unmarketable palaces on his hands. He had, in fact, been on a financial suicide course.
He left Eva the lifetime use of Whitemarsh Hall, but the total income he provided for her from an estate trust was only about one-quarter of what it would cost to run the palace. She immediately moved out and sadly dismissed her staff of forty, most of whom had followed her through the seasons from palace to palace for almost two decades. Fiske Kimball watched angrily as Eva, trying to sell the famous Stotesbury collection of English Portraits and the fine furniture, realized little more than ten cents on the dollar. Since she had been offered a petty sum for her famous Art collection, Eva donated it all to a museum. From the sale of the estates and their contents plus the sale of a substantial part of her famous jewelry collection, Eva received enough to live quite comfortably and was even able to still keep "El Mirasol".