page_title: Douglas Tilden
section_title: Personal life
hierarchical_section_title: Douglas Tilden / Personal life
caption_attribution_description: English: Mr. and Mrs. Douglas Tilden, Who Were Married in Oakland Yesterday [9 June 1896]
context_page_description: Douglas Tilden was an American sculptor. He was deaf from a bout of scarlet fever at the age of four and attended the California School for the Deaf in Berkeley, California. He sculpted many statues that are located today throughout San Francisco, Berkeley, and the San Francisco Bay Area.
context_section_description: On June 9, 1896, Tilden was married to Elizabeth "Bessie" Cole, a former student of his, also deaf. Although the union produced two children, a daughter Gladys (born January 5, 1900) and a son Willoughby Lee (born September 4, 1903), it was not to prove to be a happy one. Over the years Mrs. Tilden was subject to "melancholia spells" which, among things, placed a large amount of pressure on the relationship. They separated and Mrs. Tilden, who for years had managed their properties, rented out his studio to a theater group, forcing Tilden to do his sculpting in a shed.
  As they grew farther apart Tilden's lawyer wrote: "Furthermore, the wife (Bessie) has knowledge of personal indescressions  [sic] in the personal conduct of Mr. Tilden which would deprive him of any capacity to stand in court, as we say, "with clean hands." Mr. Tilden claims that Mrs. Tilden has been indescrete  [sic]." The couple separated in 1918, and Bessie subsequently filed for divorce in 1924, which was finalized in 1926.
  Tilden was found dead in his Berkeley studio on August 6, 1935. He is buried in the Cole family plot of Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland, California with his ex-wife Bessie (died 1949) and Willoughby (died 1931).
  In 2017, the Tilden Hotel at Taylor & O'Farrell in San Francisco was renamed to honor Douglas Tilden; it originally opened as the Linden Hotel in 1928 and was renamed almost immediately to the Hotel Mark Twain.
caption: Bessie Cole (L) and Tilden (R), 1896 The San Francisco Call illustration from their marriage
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