Ellen Hansell Allderdice

Born on September 28,1969, Ellen Forde Hansell Allderdice won her first title shortly before she turned 18 by beating Laura Knight of the Philadelphia Cricket Club and was given a silver trophy by Bailey, Banks and Biddle. She eventually lost the title a year later following a defeat to Bertha Townsend. The right-handed player is known as the first US female chmpion, a title given when she won the first ever women’s singles championship of the 1887 US Championships.

As a child, Allderdice was known to be an anemic child, and got started on the sport out of the advice of the family physician who recommended that she be taken out of school and put on the court to build her defences. Her mother took this advice to heart and in no time Allderdice was on the court, often wearing a plaid gingham dress with overdraped voluminous skirts that she had to lift up from time to time in order to give more power to her strokes.

She gave up playing serious tennis after her marriage to Taylor Allderdice, a one-time president of National Tube Co., in 1890, which subsequently led to a move to Pittsburgh where tennis was a virtually unknown sport at the time. She eventually gave birth to four daughters and two sons and hung her tennis racket up for good, stepping on to a tennis court at least once a year. Singing and playing the piano, not to mention an interest in society and style soon developed and took over the time that she previously gave to the sport.

Allderdice died on May 11, 1937 in Pittsburgh. She was posthumously inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1965.