William Jay Schieffelin Jr. married  Annette Markoe (1897-1997).  She was the daughter of Dr. James Wright Markoe, the personal physician and friend of J. P. Morgan. Morgan and Markoe were both members of St. George’s Church, where William Jay Schieffelin was a vestryman, As a project closely associated with the church. Morgan gave money to found the Lying-in Hospital, Markoe’s project (his specialty was obstetrics). Morgan, who died in 1913, left Markoe an annuity of $25,000 a years ($600,000 in 2015 dollars)

James Wright Markoe

Dr. James Wright Markoe (1862-1920), William Jay Schieffelin Jr.’s father in law, was involved in two events that show that the troubles we are now experiencing with terrorists (then German, now Islamicists) and mass murderers are not unprecedented. Nor have the legal and political issues involved in those earlier cases ever been satisfactorily resolved.

The Pacifist Terrorist

In 1915 Dr. Markoe was summoned to the house of J. P. Morgan, Jr., who had been wounded by an assailant. It was the culmination of a one-man (as far as we know) terrorist campaign.

Eric Muenter at Harvard

Eric Muenter (1875-1915) had moved with his family from Lower Saxony to Chicago when he was 18. He got his B.A. from the University of Chicago in 1899 and taught at a private school. He married Leone Krembs in    He went to Harvard to work on his Ph.D and taught German at Radcliffe. In 1906 while his wife was pregnant with their second child, he slowly poisoned her with arsenic. She was a Christian Scientist and did not summon a doctor, a although she felt unwell She died ten days after giving birth, He suddenly departed from Cambridge, taking his two children and his wife’s casket which he would cremate. But the police were suspicious and had kept some tissue from the autopsy, which revealed arsenic poising. They put out a notice for his arrest, but he had vanished.

Mrs. Muenter

He had deposited the two children with relatives in Chicago and seems to have gone to Mexico There he shaved his beard and took a new name, Frank Holt. He spoke English with a German accent, but claimed to have been born in the German-speaking area of Texas.   He moved to Fort Worth and studies for B.A. at Polytechnic (now Texas Wesleyan). He impressed everyone with his brilliance and married Leone Sensabaugh, who graduated the same year he did, 1909. Her father was the socially-prominent minister of the Fifth Street Methodist Church.

Frank Holt – Eric Muenter as Polytechnic Graduate

In 1910 he was an instructor at the University of Oklahoma. Then he moved to Vanderbilt University in 1911-12, then Henry & Emory College, and then to Cornell. One of his colleagues from Harvard spotted him at a conference and informed the head of the department at Cornell that Frank Holt was really Erich Muenter, but no one informed the police. Muenter-Holt accepted a position in Dallas and his wife moved there to set up house.

After the war began in August 1914, Muenter-Holt brooded over the mounting casualty lists. He decided the need to do something dramatic to get the attention of the United States and force it to realize the folly and horror of war. He went to New York and rented a house under the name of Patton, There he assembled a bomb factory, buying 150 lbs. of dynamite under the name of Hendricks.

On July 2, 1915, he took a train to Washington and entered the Capitol building. Security was non-existent. He wanted to place a bomb in the Senate Chamber but it was locked. He placed the bomb in the ante-room and timed it to go off at 11:23   p.m. to avoid causalities. He went to Union Station and waited for the midnight rain to New York. He heard the bomb go off.

Senate Antechamber

He wrote, under the name of Pearce, to the Washington papers:

We stand for PEACE AND GOOD WILL to all men, and yet, while our European brethren are madly setting out to kill one another we edge em on and furnish them more effective means of murder. Is it right? We get rich by exportation of explosives, but ought we to enrich ourselves when it means the untold suffering and death of millions of our brethren and their widows and orphans?

By the way, don’t put this on the Germans or on Bryan. I am an old-fashioned American with a conscience, if it is not a sin to have a conscience). We are within the international law when we make this blood money but are we also within the moral law, the law of Peace, or of Love, or of Christ, or whatever else a Christian nation may call it? Are we within reason? Our children have to live after us. Europe helped and encouraged the Balkans in their bestial ware, and she reaped the whirlwinds. Can’t we learn wisdom? Is it right to supply an insane asylum with explosives? Or give them to children? We even prevent our own children to kill and maim themselves at the rate of 200 dead and 5,000 maimed on the glorious Fourth. How much more should we not hesitate to furnish strangers, and they mad? Will our explosives not become boomerangs? If we are willing to disregard our ideals for a dollar, will they hesitate some day when they get a chance? A prostitute sells out for a dollar. Fi! Columbia too?

Wilson said in his Decoration Day speech that the war developed national spirit. Good! Now let peace make for national spirit. Let all real Americans say: “We will not be a party to this wholesale murder!” Would that not be national spirit? Better than one based on the murder of our fellow-man.

“I, too, have had to use explosives (for the last time I trust). It is the export kind, and ought to make enough noise to be heard above the voices that clamor for war and blood money. This explosion is the exclamation point to my appeal for peace.”

He had written letters to the newspaper denouncing J. P. Morgan, Jr.’s financing of the Allies in the war.

J. P. Morgan, Jr. 

Muenter took the early train to Glen Cove, Long Island on July 4, 2015. J. P. Morgan, Jr., and his family were having breakfast with the British ambassador.

Matinecock Point

Presenting his business card to the butler, he asked to be directed to Morgan. The butler refused but upon being confronted with two pistols pulled from Holt’s pockets deceived him by leading him to the distant library. Morgan and his family were, in fact, breakfasting at the other end of the mansion with the British ambassador. Soon realizing he had been deceived Holt began a search, with the butler at gunpoint, room to room. Upon their approach to the dining area, the butler shouted out a warning and the family scrambled for cover.

Muenter, realizing that the he had been fooled by the butler, had started back to the main staircase. Along the way, he heard voices from a small side room. He entered to find Morgan’s younger children at play. He pointed a pistol at them. “Where is Mr. Morgan?” he asked. The children didn’t answer. Muenter demanded they follow him. Finding the main hallway deserted, he started up the main staircase, the children following a few steps behind. As Muenter reached the second floor landing, a loaded revolver in each hand, he yelled out “Now, Mr. Morgan, I have you!” Seeing the pistols, Mrs. Morgan heroically tried to place herself between Muenter and her husband. Morgan pushed her aside, and lunged at Muenter. Muenter fired two rounds into Morgan before he was smashed to the ground by the 220-lb bulk of the millionaire. He pulled the trigger two more times, but the gun misfired both times. Morgan landed with the weight of his body squarely on Muenter They struggled for a moment until Morgan twisted the revolver from Muenter’s hand. Morgan had landed in such a way that he had accidently pinned Muenter’s left hand, holding the second revolver, to the floor in such a way that Muenter was unable to fire it. Morgan’s wife, Sir Cecil Spring-Rice and Miss McCabe pried the second revolver from Muenter’s grasp.

After taking away his guns and tying him up for the police, another servant noticed the dynamite sticking out of Holt’s pocket. The dynamite was immediately placed in a pail of water. “

Dr. Markoe and the police were summoned. Morgan survived. But Muenter did not live long.

Muenter explained his plan to the police:

I have a well-trained mind and I studied for a long time as to what would be the proper course for me to pursue before I decided to take the matter up with Mr. Morgan personally… I wanted to go to every manufacturer personally, and persuade him to stop this traffic. It was physically impossible for me to do this, but Mr. Morgan, with his great influence could do what was impossible for me, and so I decided to apply to him.” He explained that it had been his intention to take Morgan’s wife and children hostage. Muenter intended to seal them into a room while he forced Morgan to do his bidding to stop munitions shipments to Europe. He had planned to cut a small hole with his pocketknife in the doorway of the room he placed the Morgan family in, through which he intended to pass food during what even he perceived would have been a lengthy siege.

Muenter was questioned by the police:

MacDonald next asked Muenter whether or not he thought he had a legal right to take action against Morgan. Muenter responded that it had “…nothing to do with legal right. My dear sir, this is war, you are mistaken.” “But we are not at war.” “You are wrong. We are at war. We are actually at war, we are killing thousands of people every day.” “But we haven’t declared war,” MacDonald reminded him. “Yes, we are doing it underhandedly,” Muenter replied. “Do you think that you, single-handed, could arrest the whole trend of an age?” “No, but Mr. Morgan could.”

Muenter with his guns and dynamite

Police quickly suspected that Holt and Muenter were the same person.

Muenter’s wife received a letter from her husband. Among other things he wrote

Second: The steamer leaving New York for Liverpool on July 3 should sink, God willing, on 7th; I think it is the Philadelphia or the Saxonia, but am not quite sure, as according to schedule these two left on 3d.

England-bound ships were radioed; In July 7, the Minnehaha, a Morgan-owned ship transporting explosives, had an explosion and caught fire.

S. S. Minnehaha

Muenter, realizing that his plan had failed, tried to commit suicide by opening an artery with the metal band around a pencil eraser. He was stopped and was put on suicide watch. A guard was stationed outside the open door so he could rush in and stop any suicide attempt. The guard heard another noise and left for a moment to investigate. Muenter rushed out the open door, climbed up some bars, and dove head first onto a concrete floor twenty feet below, killing himself instantly.

He had left a suicide note for his wife

To my dears: I must write once more. The more I think about it, the more I see the uselessness of living under circumstances such as these. Bring up the dear babies in the love of God and man. God bless you, my sweet. Affectionately, -Frank PS — All please pardon me for all the heartaches I have brought you. Pray with me that the slaughter will stop. My heart breaks. Good-bye.

(Many thanks to David Russell, The Day Morgan was Shot.)

________________________________________________

The Homicidal Lunatic

This was not to Dr.  Markoe’s last brush with the mentally erratic.

Thomas Simpkin, a London-born printer,  had left England and moved to Canada. He enlisted in the Canadian Army in 1914, but soon deserted and joined his wife in the United States. He became increasingly erratic and was hospitalized. He escaped and made his way home to Duluth. He was institutionalized again and escaped again.

He drifted down to Virginia, took a job under his wife’s maiden name, and felt one of his spells coming on in Williamsburg, Va. He had himself voluntarily hospitalized, and was classified as harmless. He escaped and went to New York.

William Jay Schieffelin, Jr. and his wife Annette were on the West Coast.

St. George’s Church

On April 19, 1920, his father- and mother-in-law, Dr. and Mrs. (Annette) Markoe, arrived at St. George’s for the 11 A.M. Sunday morning service. Mrs. Markoe went up into the gallery, while Dr. Markoe stayed on the ground floor. The famous Armenian tenor  was singing at the service

Simpkin liked to go to church services. He heard the sound of the bells at St. George’s and entered the doors. An usher directed the shabbily dressed man to a pew.

Rev. Karl Reiland

The rector, Dr. Karl Reiland, chose to preach on Ephesians iv, 18:

Ignorance of God through a darkened understanding and blindness of heart

The rector dwelt particularly upon the necessity of church members extending good fellowship of the real, warm-hearted sort to newcomers; to strangers who seemed to be friendless. He asked his members to go out of their way to be hospitable to men and women of lonely hearts or distressed minds. He reminded them that such approaches might mean the difference between discouragement and fresh hope. He said that there was nothing more important in the practice of the Christian religion than the proffer to poor or rich or warm-hearted churchly hospitality.

The organist and choir began the offertory anthem. The Armenian tenor, George Bagdasarian, began the anthem Seek ye the Lord.

George  Bagdasarian

The usual usher was away, so Dr. Markoe assisted Herbert Satterrlee, J. P. Morgan’s brother in law, and passed the plate. As he arrived at Simpkin’s pew, Simpkin took a revolver out of his pocket and shot Markoe in the head over the left eye.

The rector, Dr. Reiland, recounted:

Suddenly I heard a shot. I thought maybe it was an automobile at first. Then I thought it might be some Bolshevik who had come into the church to get somebody. There was a second shot, bang, like that, and then I heard the collection plate fall. It made a noise like crashing glass. The third shot I thought was a bomb.

Simpkin in lower right corner

Simpkin was running out of the church and shot at the sexton who was blocking his way.

I jumped up and looked down the aisle and saw the door open and a man run out. Then I realized that someone had been shot. Safford, the organist, stopped playing for an instant. I motioned him to continue and the little boys and girls in the choir to keep on singing. I ordered my four assistants to remain behind and continue the service. Bagdasarian was a trump. He kept right on singing.

Then I threw my Bible into the pulpit and leaped the chancel rail and started down the center aisle after the man.

I shouted to several ushers ta the head of the aisle “Get that man!” They told me several men were after him.

Simpkin ran toward the Stuyvesant Square Park. Several young men saw him coming with the others in pursuit and blocked his way. Simpkin turned to face his pursuers.

Dr. George Brewer, a medical officer in Would War I and a friend of Markoe’s, grappled  Simpkin and pinned his gun arm to his side. Simpkin fired it, giving Brewer a flesh wound in the leg. Simpkin was subdued and taken to jail.

George Earl Warren was seated two pews back of Simpkin’s. He jumped into the aisle and caught Markoe before he touched the floor. As they carried Markoe out, he whispered, “I’ll be all right.”  But when they arrived  at the emergency room of the Lying-In Hospital, he was dead.

At the funeral in St. George’s there was a heavy police presence; no one was allowed near the church without a card of invitation. J. P. Morgan, Jr. attended.

Simpkin claimed he had come to America to kill J. P. Morgan, Sr., but then learned that he was already dead. He had no idea who Markoe was. Simpkin was also a Spiritualist and said that the spirits often spoke to him and they told him to shoot Markoe.

Simpkin was committed and died in the asylum at Matteawan four years later.

Alienists,a s psychiatrists weer the called, pointed out the problems the legal system created in dealing with the insane before they committed a serious crime.

At that time if a person was declared insane in one state, he was not automatically considered insane in other states. If he escaped to another state, the process had to begin all over again.

A Dr. Brill

said there are many persons of the same type as Simpkin at large, as they can readily conceal their dementia.

“The trouble is that we cannot keep them in the asylum always,” said Dr. Brill, “because  relatives and friends who visit the place talk to the victims superficially and imagine them to be entirely cured. The take the case to the courts, and the jury, not knowing any better, orders the person to be released.

A Dr. Heyman said that

“men if the paranoiac type usually are adroit and plausible until they commit some overt act, and then, for perhaps the first time, their insanity is made known to the lay mind.”

_________________________________________________

A few months later, Morgan was again targeted.

The Wall Street bombing occurred at 12:01 pm on September 16, 1920, in the Financial District of Manhattan, New York City. The blast killed 30 people immediately, and another eight died later of wounds sustained in the blast. There were 143 seriously injured, and the total number of injured was in the hundreds. The bombing was never solved, although investigators and historians believe the Wall Street bombing was carried out by Galleanists (Italian anarchists), a group responsible for a series of bombings the previous year. The attack was related to postwar social unrest, labor struggles and anti-capitalist agitation in the United States.

The New York assistant district attorney noted that the timing, location, and method of delivery all pointed to Wall Street and J.P. Morgan as the targets of the bomb, suggesting in turn that it was planted by radical opponents of capitalism such as Bolsheviks, anarchists, communists, or militant socialists.

Men were knocked off their feet, including a young stockbroker named Joseph P. Kennedy.  There was carnage. A woman’s head was discovered stuck to the concrete wall of a building, with a hat still on it. The head of the horse was found not far from the blast, but its hooves turned up blocks away in every direction. Morgan himself was on vacation across the Atlantic, but his son Junius was injured, and Morgan’s chief clerk, Thomas Joyce, was killed.

Our current problems with terrorism had their precedent in the early twentieth century. The United States had a large immigrant population. An element of the German population was more loyal to the Kaiser than to the United States, The Irish hated the English. Italians had an anarchist element. Russian Jews had a Bolshevik element.

Today the only immigrant population that harbors disloyal elements is the Moslem (perhaps 2% of the population) and only a miniscule fraction of them are disloyal.

The problem of the mentally ill remains with us. It is even harder today than it was then to commit someone involuntarily. Paranoid schizophrenics can be intelligent and conceal their illness. Often an erratic person will give only moderate signs before engaging in mass murder. It is harder to buy dynamite, but it is easy for a mentally ill person to get a gun, or a whole arsenal.

As to Muenter: he gave no clue as to why he murdered his first wife, and his plan to have Morgan end the war was deeply irrational. But how rational were the government officials and generals and financiers who kept the slaughter going year after year?

Josiah Alexander van Orsdel

Josiah Alexander van Orsdel (1860-1937), was, like my wife, descended from Cornelius van Orsdel, a Dutchman who as a child came to Virginia shortly after 1760. Cornelius fought for the Americans during the Revolutionary war and received a grant in Pennsylvania, where Josiah was born. Josiah is my wife’s first cousin, four times removed. He spelled his name with one l, unlike his descendants who usually used two l‘s. We gave one of children van Orsdell as his third name; it seemed a shame to have a Dutch name die out. Van Orsdel means “of the valley of the bear.”

Josiah was born in New Bedford, Pennsylvania and went to Westminster College. He followed the advice to Go West and moved Nebraska to where he ran a mill. He was a county and practicing attorney in Laramie, Wyoming beginning in 1892; he was elected to the Wyoming State House of Representatives in 1894, and was appointed State attorney general 1898-1905. He was US attorney in Wyoming 1906-1907, Because of his legal work and his work for the Republican party, Teddy Roosevelt appointed him to the US Court of Appeals, where he served until his death.

Wyoming Attorney General

Josiah was the Attorney General of Wyoming from 1898 to 1905 and then became U. S. Attorney there.

Women’s Suffrage

The Western states were the first to give women the right to vote. They did this to counterbalance the large numbers of disorderly, violent young men who were attracted by the frontier. Van Orsdel explained:

Wyoming has had female suffrage ever since 1868, when it was first given a territorial government. When it became a State, the right of the sex to the franchise was incorporated into the constitution. From the earliest period of equal suffrage, with us, women have voted with the same degree of intelligence that the men have displayed, and now that the experimental stage has long since passed, the universal verdict is that the principle is not only correct, but that in its practical operation it has been a great success.

One special good feature is that it makes all the parties put up men for office whose records and private character are clean. It cannot be out pf the question to nominate and elect a candidate who notoriously was of bad or profligate habits, for the women would go to the polls and vote solidly against him.

Van Ordel would have been disappointed by the support that women voters gave to J. F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton; he apparently had not noticed the attraction of some women to the exciting bad boy.

Lynch Law

Perhaps van Orsdel hoped that women voters would help lessen the tendency of men to take the law into their own violent hands.

Crime-control partisans in Wyoming particularly scorned the appellate process, arguing that the state supreme court commonly reversed convictions and granted new trials to murderers and stays of execution to those who had received death sentences. Following a spate of lynchings in 1902 and 1903, the attorney general, J. A. van Orsdel, agreed that the law should be amended to hasten the appeals process in death penalty cases but noted that this was the responsibility of the legislature, not the scapegoated judiciary. Reviewing the courts’ recent record, Van Orsel also pointed out that popular perceptions of reversals in homicide cases were erroneous:

“Juries and trial courts have not been lax in the performance of their duties. In other words, conviction of murderers has been the popular thing in Wyoming for some time past. There has been no disposition on the part of the Supreme Court to reverse any of these convictions. The Supreme Court of Wyoming has never reversed a capital case since statehood, and only one during the territorial period.”

But the courts indeed were reluctant to execute people.

The Territory and State of Wyoming executed ten men between 1969 and 1911, all on homicide convictions. Long dry spells on the gallows twice coincided with spasms of lynching for homicide. The gallows was inactive from 1875 through 1993; lynchers killed four men on homicide charges between 1979 and 1884. The gallows was also dormant from 1895 through 1902; mobbers assassinated four persons accused of murder in 1902 and 1903.

Jim Gorman fell in love with his sister-in-law Maggie. The offended brother Tom drove Jim away. Jim came back and put a hatchet in his brother’s head in April 1902. Maggie was also arrested on suspicion of helping to plan the murder. She claimed she had nothing to do with it; Jim claimed self-defense. Edward Enterline was his attorney..

The jury found Jim guilty of manslaughter, Jim Gorman requested a new trial. He was found guilty of murder in the first degree and was sentenced to death.

Joseph Walters had fallen in love with a widow. When she refused him he shot and killed her and shot himself, but he survived. He was tried for murder, found guilty, and sentenced to hang. Enterline represented him and appealed the verdict.

Enterline wrote Josiah van Orsdel, the attorney general, in July, 1902 about the case:

I am pleased to stipulate with you for further time. My client is not anxious to be hanged during this hot weather.

The Wyoming Supreme Court took up the case on April 14, 1903.

Jim Gorman and Joseph Walters cellmates in the Big Horn County Jail in Basin, Wyoming. Gorman had been scheduled to be hanged June 16, 1903. The citizens of the area were indignant that he was not hanged, and started muttering about Judge Lynch.

For their protection, Sheriff Fenton took Gorman and Walters to a canyon to escape the mob. Gorman bolted and escaped. But there was no cover, and he was captured. Gorman and Walters were back in the jail, and the citizens were in the bars.

The sheriff was in another town with a posse to arrest a criminal when he was confronted by a masked mob. He wired for the militia.

On July 20, 1903 the only officials at the Big Horn County jail were Earl Price, deputy sheriff, and  George Mead, the jailer. The mob attacked the jail, shooting through the windows , wounding Mead and killing Price. They battered down the door of the jail, but could not get the cell door open to hang the two killers. They shot Gorman and Walters through the jail door, killing them. The Chief Justice on the Wyoming Supreme Court was in town that night for a Freemasonic meeting, and was asked to try to calm the mob. He decided it would not avail.

No one was ever convicted.

Court of Appeals

Because of his extensive legal work and his support of the Republican Party, Teddy Roosevelt appointed van Orsdel to the Court of Appeals on

Van Orsdel’s decisions on the Court of Appeals show that he was a strict constructionist of the Constitution, and did not favor one interest over another. He made some important and some amusing decisions.

The Lie Detector and Admissible Evidence

Josiah’s best known decision was in the case of Frye It is a complicated case because there is an inaccurate legal legend surrounding it. Jim Fisher separated myth from reality in his essay The Polygraph and the Frye Case.Here is an analysis of van Orsdel’s decision:

In what some consider a maddeningly terse two-page opinion, Associate Justice Van Orsdel showed his understanding of the theory behind the science. He abstracted that lying causes a rise in blood pressure, which corresponds to the mental struggle between fear and control of fear. Whereas truth flows without conflict, deception requires effort, manifest in a rise in systolic pressure distinguished from the normal fear of the test situation. Acknowledging the defense attorneys’ argument that expert testimony is required when the subject matter is beyond ordinary experience, the court took a different approach to experts’ use of such technology: Somewhere in this twilight zone [between experimental and demonstrable stages of discovery] the evidential force of the principle must be recognized, and while courts will go a long way in admitting expert testimony deduced from a well-recognized scientific principle or discovery, the thing from which the deduction is made must be sufficiently established to have gained general acceptance in the particular field in which it belongs [Ref. 14, p 1014]. Thus, the exclusion of Marston’s lie detector was affirmed. The court reasoned that, since the apparatus had not yet achieved standing, the testimony from which it was derived must be excluded.

Free Speech, Boycotts, and Picketing 

The second important case concerned the AFL and Samuel Gompers.  The union was in a dispute with Buck’s Stove and Range Stove Company. The AFL published the name of the company in its We Do Not Patronize column, thereby engaging in a boycott.  The lower court held thsi was an illegal secondary boycott, and sentenced and fined Gompers and others for contempt of court, and gave an injunction against even mentioning the boycott or the injunction against it.

On November 2, 1909, the Court of Appeals partially upheld and partially modified the lower courts’ decisions.

Van Orsdel’s concurring decision focused on the question of free speech.

Again, we do not assume that it will be contended that a citizen has not perfect freedom to deal with whom he pleases, and withhold his patronage for any reason that he may deem proper, whether the reason be one originating in his own conscience, or through the advice of a neighbor, or through the reading of an article in the paper. Neither would it be unlawful for such citizen to advise another not to deal with a person with whom he has concluded –not to continue his patronage. If this advice may extend tone it may extend to a hundred; and the thing done will not be actionable so long as it is an expression of honest opinion and not slanderous, however much the intercourse between this citizen and his neighbor may operate to injure the person against whom the advice is directed.

No one doubts. I think, the right of the members of the American Federation of Labor to refuse to patronize employers whom it regards as unfair to labor. It may procure and keep a list of such employers not only for the use of its members, but as notice to their friends that the employers whose name appear therein are regarded as unfair.

I conceive it to be the privilege of one man, or a number of men, to individually conclude not to patronize a certain person or corporation. It is also the right of these men to agree together, and to advise others, not to extend patronage. That advice may be given by direct communication or through the medium of the press, so long as it is not in the nature of coercion or a threat.

As Samuel Gompers said, it was hard to see why van Orsdel ruled against the AFL members even in part. The Railway Clerk agreed with Gompers, but thought that progress had been made.

Another issue involving free speech was brought to the court when suffragettes were arrested for picketing the White House. The police arrested and jailed 20 picketers from the National Women’s Party who had unfurled banners demanding the vote for women.

The Justices, including van Orsdel,  questioned the D.C. corporation counsel

whether he would arrest men for carrying a banner bearing some of “Billy” Sunday’s phrases.

Van Orsdel decided for the picketers and declared the arrests were illegal. This also established the right to peaceful picketing in labor disputes in the District of Columbia.

The Case of the Canadian Bride 

Clyde Williamson, bookkeeper with Potomac Electric, who lived with his mother, wanted an annulment of his marriage with  his wife Mabel. The lower court denied his request, and he appealed

The facts were:

The Williamsons became acquainted through a matrimonial agency paper, the advertisement being inserted by the young woman, a waitress in a Canadian hotel. A correspondence was conducted with ardor, 100 letters being exchanged between April and November 1906.

The engagement of the couple followed, and Williamson urged his bride-to-be to come to Washington from her  home, a village in Canada. For the journey he sent her $21. She failed to appear at the appointed time, but wrote to Williamson, explaining that she had appropriated some of the money to “assist her sister in a runaway from her father’s house.”

Twenty dollars more was sent, and she made the journey to Washington. Within two hours after her arrival here they were married.

This was in April. The relationship soured.  Williamson claimed that in a short time

He began to learn what Socrates enjoyed with Xantippe.

They separated by June. She then sued him for maintenance. He then asked for an annulment of the marriage on the grounds of fraud, because she had “represented herself as having a loving and congenial disposition.”

She claimed

I did not marry Clyde’s family. I married Clyde. My unfortunate temperamental qualities that so pained and shocked him after he had practically married me by mail are entirely based on my alleged mistreatment of his mother.

She didn’t want a divorce because her relations in Canada thought she was happily married, and she didn’t want to hear the “I told you so’s”

Van Orsdel denied the annulment and said:

It appears from his story that she does not possess that mild temperament which he expected to find in a helpmate selected from eth bargain counter of a matrimonial bureau. However, it is well settled that mere misrepresentations as to social positon, rank, fortune, manners, and disposition furnish no grounds for declaring a marriage contract void. Such misrepresentations are tolerated don the rounds of public policy. The law wisely requires that persons who act on representations of this character shall bear the consequences and I can find no reason for the abrupt termination on this romantic venture.

An Administrator of Oaths 

Calvin Coolidge encouraged everyone to vote. Here we have a picture of Coolidge swearing to  van Orsdel that his employment precludes his return to his home district to vote and that therefore he is  voting by absentee ballot.

Streetcars

Josiah did not favor business interests over the ordinary citizen.  A rider injured when he fell of the platform of a streetcar as it turned a corner and he sued the company. The streetcar company argued that it had posted a sign warning not to stand on the platform. Josiah decided against the company one these grounds:

The street railway cannot deliberately permit and create a custom of hauling passengers on the platforms of the cars and escape liability for accidents.

Neither can they escape the obligation imposed by the custom by posting a notice  warning passengers :It is dangerous to ride on the platform.: The custom this established is equivalent to an invitation to passengers to occupy and ride upon the platforms, and the mere posting of such a notice will not relieve the company from liability.

It is the custom not only to permit passengers to ride upon the platforms but to permit cars to be so crowded as to compel passengers to ride there.

It also sounds like it was written by someone who rode the Washington, D. C. streetcars.

Minimum Wage

The Children’s Hospital of the District of Columbia vs. Jesse Adkins et al.

Congress passed a law that women must be paid a minimum wage on the grounds that a sufficient salary would protect them from temptations to immorality. The Hospital maintained that it could not afford to pay the wage, and that Congress had no authority to set wages. The Court of Appeals upheld the law, but Josiah dissented on two grounds:

One: if women were equal to men (and he was a firm supporter of the vote for women) why were they singled out for protection?

Two: A minimum wage interferes with freedom of contract; if the government can establish a minimum wage, it can establish a maximum wage.

“No greater calamity could befall the wage earners of the country than to have the legislative power to fix wages upheld. Take from the citizen the right to freely contract and sell his labor for the highest wage which his individual skill and efficiency will command, and the laborer would be reduced to an automaton – a mere creature of the state.

It will logically, if persisted in, end in social disorder and revolution.”

Welfare Act of 1935

The Welfare Act of 1935 provided for the resettlement of people in new towns, such as Greenbelt. Franklin Township, where one of the new towns was to be located, sued to stop the construction. The case was FRANKLIN TP. IN SOMERSET COUNTY, N.J., et al. v. TUGWELL, Administrator Resettlement Administration, et al.

Van Orsdel ruled against the government on these rounds:

The Act was an unconstitutional delegation of legislative power.

It is axiomatic in constitutional law that Congress cannot delegate the law-making power with which it is vested by the Constitution.

The Constitution did not grant the federal government power over housing.

The Constitution will likewise be scanned in vain for a power conferred upon the federal government to regulate “housing” or to “resettle” population. Those words are not explicit there, nor do we think they are implicit in any power which that instrument confers on Congress; and, unless the power exists, any effort by Congress to assert it at once transcends the scope and limitations of section 8 of article 1 and violates the Tenth Amendment.

The Social Life of the van Orsdels

Josiah married Kate Barnum )1868-1951) of Beatrice, Nebraska, on July 28, 1891, in Blue Springs, Nebraska.

314 East 21st St, Cheyenne 

In the spring of 1899 Josiah bought the house  at 314 East 21^st Street, Cheyenne, Wyoming, and lived there until 1906.


The Norwood, 1868 Columbia Road NW

When Josiah moved to Washington he took an apartment at 1868 Columbia Rd NW, in Adams Morgan.

1854 Wyoming Ave., Washington, D.C.

In 1912 he moved to this house on Wyoming Ave, with eighteen rooms and four baths.

1306 Washington St, Beatrice  

The van Orsdels kept a house in Beatrice, Nebraska, and returned to it most summers.

The Ball Player

May 21, 1910 was a quiet day in court. The Washington Bar Association et al. boarded a ship and went on a picnic.

Following breakfast, which was served immediately upon landing, the legal lights engaged in athletic games. There was the usual ball game, and it lasted the usual length of time, some five or six innings, which required one hour and thirty minutes to play. Sides were chosen from the ‘fat’ and ‘lean’ members of the fraternity, and when the game came to a halt to allow the party to partake of the feast of shad the figures rested 14 to 13 in favor of the lean aggregation.

It was some game. The figures multiplied rapidly, and the day was so warm that new faces appeared on bath teams every inning. There was one who stuck it out, though. He was the unfortunate umpire. James A. Toomey essayed the role of arbitrator, and got away with it. One of the features of this interesting contest was a home run by Justice Van Orsdel and at a time when the bases were crowded to capacity. It was the hit that broke up the game.

SAR, DAR, CAR

Josiah was active in the Sons of the American Revolution: President of the D.C. Society from 1924 to 1925, National Vice President General from 1925 to 1927, and President General from 1930 to 1931 and again from 1931 to 1932, filling the vacancy caused by the death of his successor.

In 1935 he explained his view of the Constitution to the SAR:

The primary object of government in this country was not to govern the citizen, but to protect him from arbitrary power, and above all to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority.

His wife Kate was active in the Children of the American Revolution.

Mrs. Josiah van Orsdel

Kate With a child of the American Revolution

Kate with the Coolidges

Josiah died on August 7, 1937 at his niece’s home, The Cabin in the Pines, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts; Roosevelt filled the vacancy with a judge more sympathetic to the New Deal.

William G. van Orsdel (1844-1864), the brother of Josiah and the son of Ralph Lashiel van Orsdel and Margaret Fitz Randolph (of the Randolphs of Virginia) was my wife’s first cousin, four time removed.

The historical records revive old sadnesses. Disease was a big killer in the Civil War; There was little attempt at sanitation, and farm boys had had little exposure to infectious diseases.

William G. Van Orsdel, who gallantly yielded up his young life for the sacred cause of American liberty. When the rebellion opened with its gigantic power, young Van Orsdel was only nineteen years of age, and therefore too young to be compelled to enter the service. But from the very opening of the struggle he was desirous to have a part in the defense of his country from the onslaught of her foes. He felt, as he often expressed himself, that it was the duty of every one to go, who could be spared from his family.

He volunteered and went with the Pennsylvania militia to Chambersburg. He then entered the service under General Sherman, and died after a brief illness, near Atlanta, Ga., on June 23, 1864, a little upwards of twenty years of age. He was a brave, heroic boy, and never flinched in the hour of danger, but was always on hand, ready for duty, whether that was life or death, it was all the same to him. Thus was this noble boy cut down in the bloom of his early manhood. Sad indeed was the parting scene when he took leave of “the loved ones at home,” and bade them “good-bye”—as it proved—for the last time on earth! But sadder yet, and more crushing the blow, was the announcement of his untimely death! But the stricken parents, though they deeply mourn the loss of their boy, have the blessed consolation that they gave him for the glorious cause of Liberty and that he died for his country and his God.

The young Winston

My wife is related by marriage to Winston Churchill (first cousin once removed of the wife of the great-grandfather of my wife), through Jennny Jerome.

Jeanette Jerome (1854 – 1921)
mother of Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill

Leonard Walter Jerome (1817 – 1891)
father of Jeanette Jerome

Isaac Jerome (1786 – 1866)
father of Leonard Walter Jerome

Thomas Atwater Jerome (1810 – 1896)
son of Isaac Jerome

Gertrude Jerome (1853 – 1883)
daughter of Thomas Atwater Jerome

James Henry Alexandre (1848 – 1912)
husband of Gertrude Jerome

Mary Elizabeth Alexandre (1894 – 1970)
daughter of James Henry Alexandre

The Jeromes were extremely prolific, so my wife shares that distinction with several thousand other Americans.

I could say many things about Winston (especially about Operation Keelhaul), but here I would like to point point that being a member of a famous and aristocratic family is no guarantee of a sane or decent or happy life.

Winston’s son Randolph (1911-1968) married as his second wife Jane Osborne. Their daughter was Arabella Churchill (1949-2007), the first cousin, three times removed, of the wife of the great-grandfather of my wife.

by Hag, bromide print, March 1976

Her life was not especially happy. Wikipedia summarizes:

She went to Fritham School for Girls, where she was Head Girl, and then Ladymede school, near Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire. She worked at Lepra, the charity for leprosy sufferers, and then briefly at London Weekend Television.

In 1954 she had appeared on the cover of Life as part of a feature on possible future spouses of Prince Charles. In 1967 she was ‘Debutante of the Year,’ met the Kennedys and Martin Luther King in America, and was romantically linked with Crown Prince (now King) Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden in 1970. In 1971 she was invited to represent Britain at the Norfolk International Azalea Festival in Virginia, established in 1953 after NATO’s Allied command was established there. Each year a NATO country is honoured, and invited to send a beautiful “Azalea Queen” as its ambassador.

Churchill refused to go, indicating in a letter she believed in the goals of the peace movement, and was horrified by the Vietnam War. Chased through London by a surprised press, she left instead for rural Somerset, where she helped lead the first full-scale incarnation of the Glastonbury Festival with Andrew Kerr, Thomas Crimble, Michael Eavis and many others.

During the 1970s she embraced the alternative culture of the time, which included living for a time in a squat^\ but later worked and lived on a farm. She granted a rare interview to Rolling Stone magazine. In 1979 Churchill and Kerr were again in charge of the festival, and from then on her administration continued alongside Eavis and Kerr, along with the founding and leading of the charity Children’s World and work as a fundraiser.

In 1972 she married Jim Barton, and in 1973 had a son, Nicholas Jake. In 1987 she met her second husband, a juggler, Haggis McLeod, and in 1988 they had a daughter, Jessica.

She embraced Tibetan Buddhism through the teachings of Sogyal Rinpoche, author of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.^[4]

On Thursday 20 December 2007, Churchill died at St Edmund’s Cottages, Bove Town, Glastonbury, Somerset, aged 58. She had suffered a short illness due to pancreatic cancer, for which she had refused chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Arrangements following her death respected her Buddhist faith, and included a parade and simple farewell on the final evening of the Glastonbury Festival in June 2008. Festival organiser Michael Eavis, paying tribute to Churchill after her death, said “Her energy, vitality and great sense of morality and social responsibility have given her a place in our festival history second to none.”

James Barton was a schoolteacher. The son Jake has had a troubled life. The Daily Mail goes on about the family troubles:

Churchill it was worth everything to fly to Australia to be at her son Jake Barton’s wedding. It was the moment for which Sir Winston Churchill’s favourite grandchild had long been waiting — the day that Jake, 33, whom she had cheerfully hauled as a baby through squats and hippie communes, was finally settling down. Arabella remembers waving goodbye to him and “my beautiful new daughter-in-law” Kim as she and her husband drove away from the ocean-side resort of Byron Bay towards Brisbane airport.

“The thought of more air travel and jet lag appalled me, but we love Jake and Kim dearly, so Haggis (her second husband, a juggler) and I really felt we had to be at their wedding,” she wrote afterwards in a website diary. Perhaps the next piece of family news would be about a baby, her own first grandchild?

When important news came, though, it was anything but joyous. Jake’s beachside home had been raided by New South Wales police and he was in custody accused of running a £5 million drugs ring. Today, seven months after that happiest of wedding days, Jake is held in Sydney’s Parklea prison and Arabella Churchill’s brief dynastic contentment has turned to anguish. Next month, Sir Winston’s great-grandson goes on trial and faces a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

“There is nothing I can say about this,” says Arabella, 57, who, as a teenager, would sit and talk with her grandfather, holding the great wartime leader’s hand. “Nothing at all.”

Worst of all, for a woman who has devoted much of her life to helping thousands through her Children’s World charity (which provides entertainment for children from all backgrounds) is the certain knowledge that, in this grave moment of crisis, her own child is beyond her help.

Australian police allege that Jake Barton ran a major drugs syndicate. They say they seized 250,000 Ecstasy tablets and all the paraphernalia of a large-scale drug-producing operating, including 30lb of MDMA, the powder used to make Ecstasy tablets, and two pill presses. So large is the drugs ring police claim to have smashed that a shortage of Ecstasy supplies in Sydney has been noticed and prices have shot up. The problem of being a Churchill is that the name always attracts attention, but no one in Australia knew that Jake was a scion of that remarkable — and, at times, remarkably troubled — family. Jake kept his dynastic connections to himself.

Jake’s arrest is an unimaginable twist in a saga of disappointment that for decades has pursued the descendants of Britain’s most lionised leader. Ever in the shadow of Sir Winston, whatever they have done never seems to be enough for them to feel they live up to him.In particular, the great man’s son Randolph — Arabella’s father — was one of the most famously unpleasant figures in mid-20th century public life. A man of huge political ambition and enormous alcohol consumption, he stood six times for Parliament without success, each failure making him more generally unpleasant. When he had surgery for a benign tumour, Evelyn Waugh remarked that the surgeon had removed “the only part of Randolph that was not malignant”. Arabella’s half-brother, Winston, 66, did become an MP but was a politician of only modest achievement. If he did achieve any kind of status it was only, according to Soraya Khashoggi, former wife of billionaire Adnan, in bed. But on one occasion at least, being a Churchill certainly helped him out of a little difficulty. Soraya tells how once, during their five-year affair, they were driving along a freeway in America when she started to remove her clothes. She told him: “The faster you go, the more I’ll take off. “In no time at all, Winston was doing 100 miles an hour and I had nothing on — which was when we heard the police siren.” The punishment? Just a ticking off after the officer examined his driver’s licence and satisfied himself he really had stopped Winston Spencer Churchill.

It was the same Winston who created a furore in 1995 by selling the Chartwell Papers, his grandfather’s archive, to the nation for £12.5 million, paid for with National Lottery money. Some historians and many of his fellow MPs were outraged because they believed many of the documents should have been the property of the state.

As for Arabella, her early years — post-war years when her grandfather was the hero of the free world — were embellished with Churchillian glamour. In America, she met the Kennedys and Martin Luther King. Jackie Onassis, she recalled, took “an almost aunt-like interest” in her. On the eve of her wedding in 1972, she bumped into the former American First Lady at the hairdressers. As Arabella has recalled: “She said, ‘Darling, I’ve heard about the wedding. May I go to Tiffany and get you a little box or something?’ I said: ‘No, no, I have a wedding list at a shop called Kitchens’ — and she went and bought the rest of the stuff. “My brother Winston thought I’d gone mad, but I couldn’t think what I’d do with a silver box. I was more interested in having a bread board.”

The Churchill girl who had been Deb of the Year in 1967 and whose lunch date with the then Crown Prince (now King) Carl Gustav of Sweden excited the Swedish media to speculate on her as a future Queen, was marrying a bearded, Scots-born teacher, Jim Barton.Arabella had been under an intense media spotlight after declining to be the Azalea Queen at the annual celebration of one of her grandfather’s greatest monuments, Nato. She wrote a pithy letter to the organisers in Norfolk, Virginia, saying that a military organisation using force of arms to impose its view “alarmed and disillusioned” her. In her exasperation about the way the world was going, Arabella was eschewing the conventional gilded Churchillian path through life. She was determined to be herself. One day she just wasn’t around any more: she’d slipped away to join a group of hippies. At Glastonbury, as she and others were founding the music festival in which she is still involved, she met Barton, whose father was a headmaster in Bournemouth.

Enter Jake, born in 1973, not at Blenheim Palace, seat of the Dukes of Marlborough, where his illustrious great-grandfather was born, but on a sheep farm in Wales which Arabella and Jim were running. Barely a year later, Jim Barton had left and his mother was on her own. An extraordinary, not to say eccentric childhood followed, as Arabella, wracked by periods of depression so familiar among the Churchills, drank, took Valium and consulted a clinical psychologist. By the time Jake was three, his mother had moved into a squat in London’s Maida Vale. Ever the organiser, she set up a restaurant in the rooms downstairs, cooking “cheap, wholesome food for my friends”. Her friends? These were 200 other fellow-squatters in the run-down neighbourhood. When she learned that the then Greater London Council was evicting her and Jake from the squat, she burst into tears. “Oh Christ, I’m homeless again,” she sobbed. “What am I going to do now?”

For Jake it was a totally un-Churchillian start in life, but some normality arrived when Arabella’s mother June (Randolph’s second wife, who was to commit suicide at 58 while suffering from cancer) bought her a house in Kensington. Before long she had let the upper part of the house and was living downstairs with Jake, but spending increasing amounts of time among the hippies in and around Glastonbury. Eventually she moved to the town, sending Jake to St Dunstan’s mixed secondary school just behind Glastonbury High Street. He was “a bit of a character, a comedian, but with a wise air about him — the kids looked up to him,” recalls one of his contemporaries. “I didn’t know until afterwards that he was a member of the Churchill family.”

By now — again through the Glastonbury festival — Arabella had met her second husband, Ian ‘Haggis’ McLeod, a juggler of some renown and 14 years her junior. They have a daughter, Jessica, 17, who is also being educated locally.For Arabella Churchill, life continues to be rather bohemian, based round the New Age mecca of Glastonbury, in a somewhat dilapidated semi with beautiful views over the hills. But with Haggis and Jess, Gracie the dog and cats Rumple and Badger, her Children’s World charity and the Glastonbury festival in which she organises three big performance fields for children, life of late was “absolutely lovely” for Arabella.

But then came the news about Jake. “It was,” says a family friend, “the most disastrous news she has ever had. “She is speechless with despair. She doesn’t know what to think. Deaths in the family, for whatever reason, you come to expect. But not this, not Jake. He’s such a lovely boy, and he’s always worked hard for a living.” Jake, however, has always been a young man without a settled career. At 19, he teamed up with his father, Jim Barton, to form a film company. Three years later, having made no impression on the film world, the company was dissolved. He went to Australia and — encouraged long-distance by Arabella — did a fish-farming course at Launceston University in Tasmania. At the same time, by now in his late 20s, he took out Australian citizenship. After this he moved to Indonesia to work as a pearl farmer. Then he returned to Eastern Australia, surfed, sailed and met Kim.

And then, last June, the New South Wales Special Crimes Unit burst in. Jake is charged, together with his associate, New Zealand-born Rees Gerard Woodgate, 42, with supplying a commercial quantity of Ecstasy. The shock waves have reverberated through the widespread Churchill family whose talents through the generations have encompassed everything from soldiering to literature. The family has always had a melancholic side — Sir Winston called it his “black dog” — but is never short of instant, often dark humour.

“Well, we’ve done everything else — so what about drug dealing?” quipped one peripheral family figure yesterday, before adding hastily: “But I cannot believe that Jake has done these things. It must be a terrible mistake.”

The Australian court, however, on December 20, 2007, had a different opinion:

The great-grandson of Sir Winston Churchill has been sentenced to three years’ jail for being part of a multi-million dollar party drug syndicate.

Nicholas Jake Barton, 33, had pleaded guilty in the Downing Centre District Court in Sydney to knowingly taking part in supplying a commercial quantity of a prohibited drug.The judge said it was brought to his attention that Barton was a relative of Sir Winston Churchill.

“The fact that the offender descends from a hero of the 20th century does not affect the penalty I must impose,” Justice C.D. Charteris said. Barton, wearing a dark suit, white shirt and silver tie, did not not react when the sentence was read.

Justice Charteris said he had to take into account the deterrent value of the sentence to the offender and the community, but Barton’s early admission of guilt, added to the fact the Crown did not have a strong case, meant that he considered Barton to have good prospects for rehabilitation. Barton was arrested in June during police raids in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, following a three-month investigation.

About 250,000 tablets, 18kg of MDMA – the powder used to make the drug – and two industrial pill presses were confiscated by police. The tablets had a street value of $12.5 million and the powder was worth $2.5 million.

Barton admitted that he had sublet a property in South Coogee to a co-defendent, Reese Gerard Woodgate, 42, a New Zealander, who also pleaded guilty. Barton said he then found out Woodgate was involved in the “neferious business” of the manufacturer and distribution of drugs, according to the agreed facts, read out by Justice Charteris. “To my [eternal] regret I did not take any action to stop this,” Barton said in a statement read out by the judge. In the statement, Barton said he regretted bringing disgrace and shame upon his family because of the crime.

Barton was given a 20-month non-parole period in court today, and will be eligible for release next February as he has been in custody since June 2006. Judge Charteris said he was satisfied that Barton had shown remorse and the reason for the short non-parole period was that his mother – Arabella Spencer Churchill, granddaughter of Sir Winston and daughter of his son, Randolph – was terminally ill in the UK with pancreatic cancer and had a life expectancy of between four and five months.

She elected not to have chemotherapy and the judge hoped that Barton would have time to visit her after serving his sentence.

But that was not to be.

Arabella Churchill, charity worker, co-founder of the Glastonbury festival and granddaughter of Sir Winston, died of cancer early yesterday [20 December 2007] – the same day that her son was jailed in Australia for his part in a multi-million pound drug racket.

My son, who for some reason seems to have heard of this case, says that Jake was framed.

Arabella’s second husband fourteen years her junior) was colorful: Ian “Haggis” MacLeod.

Haggis and Charlie are a comedy juggling act formed in 1984 by Haggis McLeod and Charlie Dancey. They learned their skills together at the Walcot Village Hall juggling workshop in Bath, England. Their first performance was a busking show that took place on the waterfront of Bristol Docks. Haggis and Charlie performed regularly on the streets of Bath in their early years together. They have been seen almost every year at Glastonbury Festival and became something of a tradition at the Winchester Hat Fair.

They were also involved in a successful world record attempt on 26 June 1994 when 826 people, juggling at least three objects each, kept 2,478 objects in the air, at Glastonbury Festival.^[1]

For a brief time the duo became a trio, when Pippa Tee joined the act, which was renamed Haggis & Chips (short for Haggis & Charlie & Pippa).

Here he is in 2012 doing his routine in Hawaii.

Arabella and Haggis’s daughter Jennifer has managed to stay out of the news.

Mary Bowne Lawrence (left) and Anna Louise Lawrence (right)

Mary Bowne Lawrence (1830-1898), the second cousin four times removed of my wife,  married Henry Augustine Bogert (1827-1905). Mary was close to her sister Anna Louise (1834-1908).

On July 19, 1870 she wrote this letter to Anna:

Dear Anna,

God has taken my beautiful baby – Frank died this morning at 4 o’clock. He was sick only two nights and one day, commenced on Saturday night with a slight diarrhea which seemed checked Sunday morning, but returned Sunday afternoon…I thought the disease controlled, but his head became affected last night he suffered greatly with his head until death released him.

I need not tell you how great the shock, you have gone through the same trouble dear, and know that death never comes to us thus, in our children without bitter pain, even while we own God’s love and wisdom in all his doings.

I felt so safe about little Frank because he had so good a wet nurse. He had grown so beautiful and seemed so well I scarcely dreaded the summer, but this intense heat and teething were too much for him.

I feel that everything was done that could be, for Mrs. Pettit and Maggie and I watched him carefully, but God willed it, and just one year from the time of his last summer’s sickness, God took him to Himself.

I have four darlings now in Heaven. How blessed to know them safe. I do not think I am a very good manger with children, so God takes some of them to bring up for me and in Heaven they will be mine forever. I wondered how I should manage with three babies next winter. God has answered the doubt for me, tho not quite in the way I would have chosen.

It is so hard to look forward to bringing more children into the world only to see them die.

The other children are well, and I hope your little ones are too.

You sent me a little note of your safe arrival. Do, if you can, write me some particulars and why you staid at Worcester instead of Centre Harbor.

Dear Anna, life has many trials for all of us; let us not receive them in a bitter spirit, but as Christians walk humbly with God receiving all things from His hands, remembering that in another world we shall see clearly the reasons for much that now appears mysterious.

May God give you Grace, dear, to bear and forbear until this life shall merge into the better one above.

Your loving sister,

Mary

Frank (July 11, 1869 – July 19, 1870) was Mary’s ninth child.

There were two Eloise Breeses, an aunt and a niece, and they were conflated both by the newspapers and by researches on the internet. I think I have disentangled them.

Eloise Lawrence Breese (1857-1921), usually known as E. L. Breese, was the daughter of Josiah Salisbury  Breese (1812-1865)  and Augusta Eloise Lawrence (1828-1907). Eloise was the seventh cousin three times removed of my wife.

She had a 9 bedroom house, Nundao, in Tuxedo Park. This

summer cottage in Tuxedo Park faces Tuxedo Lake and is directly across from her brother James Lawrence Breese’s large Tudor Style home that fronted the lake.  James was as engineer befriended Stanford White, yet his true passion was photography. It is believed James introduced Eloise to the Architectural firm of Mckim, Mead & White to design her summer cottage in 1889 and Mead and Taft constructed it. The  2 1/2 story cottage has an interesting combination of roof styles, including a Queen Anne Tower.

In Tuxedo Park her French car made on the news in June, 1904.   Her chauffeur drove her and five friends around the countryside. They were driving up a hill when a boy, Joseph Mutzs, came over the hill on his bicycle and started making wide swerves. The driver tried to avoid him, but they collided and the boy was killed. The chauffeur took the body to the police. The police chief

told Miss Breese to leave at once, as the friends of the Italian boy might get excited when they heard of the accident and, in spite of the fact that it was the lad’s own fault, make some kind of demonstration. Miss Breese took the advice.

She was known as a bachelorette. She was the only female member of the New York Yacht Club. Her steam yacht, the Elsa, had a swan shaped prow, like the boat in Lohengrin, because Eloise was also a devotee of the opera. She sailed the Elsa to Newport to participate in the July 30, 1901 harbor fete in honor of the North Atlantic squadron.  Admiral Higginson’s fleet was assembled in the harbor and a full day of activities—including a exhibition of the submarine torpedo boat Holland—was planned.

Her box was number 45 at the old Metropolitan Opera.

(I was there once, for a Go0d Friday performance of Parzifal (1966?) with James Ramsey. We had seats with les dieux (it has a ruder name); I could see some of the stage, and could also see the light bulb in the chalice when it was raised. But the music was great.)

Her town house was at 35 East Twenty-Second Street. There she had a long-standing conflict with a neighbor at No 33.

The unmarried Eloise-she preferred that the press referred to her as Miss E. L. Breese-inherited her mother’s unconventional Independence and was a true socialite that entertained lavishly, often arranging concerts in her Tuxedo Park ballroom. Her fashions of the time were also rather scandalous as she preferred off the shoulder evening gowns with plunging necklines, the french fashion was shocking  to most Victorian minds.

Mrs. Elizabeth B. Grannis, a self-appointed combatant against sin.  Mrs. Grannis was president of the Woman’s Social Purity League as well as president of the National League for the Protection of Purity.  In December 1894 her search for sin would place her squarely in the social territory of Eloise Breese.

The Evening World reported on December 1, 1894 that Mrs. Grannis lately “has been engaged in seeing for herself just how wicked New York really is.”  Having visited (escorted by her brother, Dr. Bartlett) “nearly all the dance and concert halls, theatres, joints, missions and dives in this city,” she turned her focus to the Metropolitan Opera and its wealthy patrons.

Mrs. Grannis took an Evening World reporter in tow and explained the Purity League’s plans to abolish the décolleté dress.  “What we want to do is to call public attention to the evil, and by this means to shame people into dressing differently.”  She admitted,when the reporter said that judging from the Metropolitan audience “Mrs. Grannis’s idea cannot be said to have borne much fruit,” that it would take time.  She blamed the absence of social purity on two forces.  “One reason is the décolleté dress; the other and greater is the round dance.”

Mrs. Grannis approved of “a modest square dance like the lanciers or the minuet,” but waltzing “and every other form of round dance is, per se, sinful.”

The equally strong-minded Eloise Breese disagreed.  And the two women would make their differences known repeatedly.   While the social reformer railed against the high fashion of the young socialite and her wealthy friends, Eloise frequently complained to authorities about “smells” coming from the Grannis home.

In 1902 Eloise L. Breese had had enough of her pious next-door neighbor and she purchased the Grannis house “with the understanding that it was to be pulled down,” said The Sun.   But she had second thoughts and once the social reformer had moved out “the temple of social reform and universal peace has been turned into a boarding house,” reported the newspaper later.

The rooms where Mrs. Grannis had held meetings of other virtuous women and church leaders were now decorated by Eloise “in the highest form of boarding-house art with bows and arrows of primitive peoples and the heads of savages in war paint.”

But she wasn’t done yet.

In May 1903 Eloise sued Elizabeth Grannis for $249 saying that “when she moved out, [she] took with her a bathtub and the chandeliers.”

Mrs. Grannis appeared baffled and unruffled.  “How silly,” she told reporters.  “Think of going to court for just one little bathtub.  It is my personal, individual tub.  Of course I took it with me.  I told  them I was going to, but offered to sell it to them with the chandeliers.”

The reformer complained that the Breese family had always been a problem.  “What a flibberty-gibberty commotion it is.  I lived beside the Breeses eighteen years and never met them, but they were forever sending in to complain of smells they thought they smelled and to see if there wasn’t a fire or a leak or something in my house.”

The town house does not survive, but the carriage house that Eloise built exists in a glorified state.

150 East 22nd Street

She married late, in 1907 when she was fifty, to Adam Gorman Norrie, a widower.

Her nephew, William Lawrence Breese, had become a naturalized British subject and died in battle in 1915. She gave an ambulance in his memory.

She made an important bequest to the Metropolitan Museum:

Upon her death on January 28, 1921 she added significantly to the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art by bequeathing two important paintings, one by Rousseau and another by Corot (his “The Wheelwright’s Yard on the Bank of the Seine”).  Even more importantly, she left the museum the incomparable 17^th century Audenarde tapestries representing the history of the Sabines.

The Wheelwright’s Yard on the Bank of the Seine

Eloise Lawrence Breese

Among the far twigs of the family tree is Eloise Lawrence Breese (1890-1953), my wife’s eighth cousin twice removed.

After her father, William Lawrence Breese (1854-1888) died, her mother, the former Mary Louise Parsons, in 1893 married Henry Vincent Higgins, a solicitor and manager of Covent Gardens. They moved to London, where Eloise studied signing under Signor Allenesi.

William Lawrence Breese

Mary Louise Parsons

Henry Vincent Higgins

Like many American heiresses, Eloise was married off to a titled European, Gilbert Heathcote-Drummond-Willoughby (1867-1951). He was twenty-three years her senior. In this case both were wealthy.

Gilbert Heathcote-Drummond-Willoughby

The marriage was a major social event, the account sounds as if it had been written by Saki, so I have highlighted the more interesting tidbits.

When Eloise Breese, the charming daughter of the late William Lawrence Breese, of New York, married Lord Willoughby de Eresby [pronounced Dursby] of London, it was considered a most desirable match, as the young Lord was the heir of the wealthy Earl of Ancaster.  The Earl of Ancaster died on Christmas Eve in 1910, and his eldest son, Lord Willoughby, succeeded to the title and an American girl became the Countess of Ancaster.  Lord Ancaster also succeeded to three magnificent country seats; Grimsthorpe Castle, in Lincolnshire; Normanton Park near Stamford, and Drummond Castle, in Perthshire, Scotland.

Grimsthorpe Castle

Normanton Park

Drummond Castle

Lord Willoughby and Eloise Breese were married on December 5, 1905, at St. Margaret’s Church, Westminster.  The ceremony drew a large and distinguished gathering, and was one of the brightest ever seen. The church was crowded with a fashionable throng that included nearly all the prominent members of the American Colony and Royalty, to name a few, the Duke and Duchess of Connaught, Princess Patricia of Connaught, Ambassador Whitelaw Reid, Miss Reid, Prince Francis of Teck and the Ladies Dartmouth and Cheylesmore.  A detachment of the Lincolnshire Yeomanry lined the aisles.

Seldom has been seen a more beautiful dress than that worn by the bride.  It was made of ivory satin, with full Court train of Brussels lace chiffon.  The bridesmaids, looked remarkably pretty in lavender gowns trimmed with sable, and picture hats.

Lord Willoughby de Eresby used to be known as a dashing young fellow and fond of a frolic, but represented the Horncastle Divison of Lincolnshire in the House of Commons as a Conservative.

The title of Lord Ancaster has only existed in the family for about a quarter of a century, the father having succeeded to the title in 1898.  The Dukedom of Ancaster came into existence in 1715.  It became extinct in 1809 with the death of Brownlow de Eresby, to be revived again in 1892 when Baron Willoughby was so signally honored.

The present Earl of Ancaster is descended from Gilbert Heathcote, who was a Court jeweler and Lord Mayor of London in the reign of Queen Anne.  The Ancaster estates formerly belonging to the Dukes of Ancaster, the Drummond estates, formerly belonging to the Earldom of Perth, and the Willoughby de Eresby have all come into the possession of the present Earl of Ancaster’s family through marriage within the last hundred years, and there is no Peer of the British realm whose properties, especially the Drummond estates, have been more frequently claimed by people hailing from America. 

Among them have been a Mrs. Bond of New York, who claims to be the daughter of Frederick Burrell Drummond, who she alleges came to America in 1836 and married in New York.  While the Peerage and works of reference make no mention of his death, and leave it to be supposed that he disappeared in the United States, it is a fact that if he had survived his mother, he would have inherited the Willoughby de Eresby Peerage as well as the Drummond estates in lieu of his sister Annabella, who married Sir Gilbert Heathcote, 1^st Lord Aveland, and grandfather of Lord Ancaster.

One of the other claimants has been the daughter of the late Earl of Perth.  She resided for many years in Brooklyn, LordDrummond died in St. Luke’s Hospital after having earned his living for a time in New York as ticket chopper on the elevated railroad and as a reporter of one of the leading metropolitan daily newspapers.

The Earl and Lady Ancaster reside, when in London in Chesterfield Gardens, but their favorite residence is Drummond Castle, their Scotch estate, the whole of great architectural beauty.  It is situated in a park of some 75,000 acres, richly wooded.  The southeastern tower dates back to the time of Henry III.

Drummond Castle stands about three miles southwest of Creif, and the castle gates are reached through grand old avenues, which are stated to be without equal in the United Kingdom.  The oldest part of the castle dates from 1491, when it was built by the 1^st Lord Drummond, a nobleman whose ancestors descended from the ancient Kings of Hungary; came to Scotland with Prince Edward Ætheling of England, when they fled from the latter country after the death of King Harold and the Battle of Hastings, in 1066.

The castle is still surrounded by the world famed Drummond Gardens, laid out by John, 2^nd Earl of Perth, in the middle of the 17^th century.

There are few abodes in the United Kingdom more replete with historic memories, for the House of Drummond furnished several women to the Scotch Royal House, including, Annabella, Queen of Scotland, the last known of all, being that of Margaret Drummond, mistress of King James IV.  

It was rumored she was poisoned at Drummond Castle along with her two sisters, in order to enable her husband to marry Princess Margaret of England.  Mary, Queen of Scots was a frequent visitor to Drummond Castle, and her son, King James I of England, likewise often stayed there, and the Jacobite Pretender slept there on the eve of the fateful Battle of Culloden.

Eloise Breese was the eldest daughter of William Lawrence Breese and Mary Louise Parsons. Several years after the death of her father, her mother married Henry Victor Higgins, an English solicitor.  She was his second wife, his first being a daughter of the Earl of Winchelsea and Nottingham.  The Higgins’ reside at present in London.

At the wedding of Eloise to the Earl, the stepfather gave the bride away.  The bridesmaids were the Ladies Alice Willoughby and Dorothy Onslow, the then Gladys Fellowes and Miss Anne Breese, the latter having married Lord Alastair Innes-Ker in 1907.

The bride was also attended by four children, the Ladies Blanche and Diana Somerset, daughters of the Duke of Beaufort, and the Misses Moyra Goff and Peggie Cavendish.

The Countess is a keen angler and ranks high among the most expert women salmon fishers.  She is an enthusiastic sportswoman and has taken great interest in yachting and automobiling.  Prior to her marriage she was a flag member of the New York Yacht Club, as well as  member of the Seawannaka Corinthian Yacht Club.  She is handsome, of classic type, and very witty and cultivated.

Willoughby was a Conservative politician

In 1910 the old Earl died and she became Countess of Ancaster.

Eloise and the infant James

Her brother, William Lawrence Breese, who had become a naturalized British subject in 1914, joined the British army and died in France on 1915.

Eloise’s son James Heathcote Drummond Willoughby (1907-1983), my wife’s ninth cousin once removed, was the last holder of the earldom; on his death the title became extinct.  His son and heir Timothy Gilbert had been s lost at sea in 1963.

James Heathcote Drummond Willoughby

Anne Parsons Breese (1889-1959) was the daughter of  William Lawrence Breese and Mar Louise parsons. And therefore the eighth cousin, twice removed of my wife. Anne moved to England when her widowed mother married Henry Vincent Higgins, the impresario of Covent Garden.

Like her sister Eloise, Anne married (October 10, 1907) into British aristocracy: Alistair Robert Innes Ker, the younger brother of the childless Duke of Roxburghe. Alistair was not wealthy, and according to the papers neither was Anne.

The wedding is the culmination of a genuine love match. Lord Alistair, though belonging to one of the noblest families of England, is by no means wealthy. The bride is not wealthy either, and the young people will have to live quietly, but, it is said, the Duchess of Roxburghe, who was Miss May Goelet of New York, will give them a small but completely furnished house in Mayfair.

In October 1908 Anne gave birth to a son, the heir presumptive of the title of the Duke of Roxburghe.

However on September 7, 1913 the Duchess gave birth to George Innes Ker, who became the ninth Duke, Anne professed relief. She

is in no way disgruntled, being among the first to proffer congratulations and declaring frankly she considers the Goelet millions really necessary to maintain such a palatial residence as Floors Castle.

Floors Castle

Her husband, Lieut. Col. Lord Alistair Robert Innes Ker, seems to have been a career military man. He received both the King’s and Queen’s medal for his service in the Boer War, and received the Distinguished Service Order in November 19144. He retired from the army in 1930 and died in 1936, only 55 years old.

Alistair Robert Innes Ker

Their son, Alistair James, was killed in action in Normandy on July 6, 1944 when his tank burst into flames. His body was never recovered, and he is commemorated  in the Bayeux Memorial.

Anne lived until 1959. Her other children, David Charles (1910-1957) and Eloise (1915-1996), survived her.

James Lawrence Breese

James Lawrence Breese (1851-1934) was the son of Josiah Salisbury Breese and Augusta Eloise Lawrence. He was the brother of the two Breese sisters who married into the British aristocracy, and also the seventh cousin three times removed of my wife.

As a Lawrence he was related to my wife. He was also a descendant of the Sidney Breese who epitaph is found in Trinity Churchyard on Wall Street.

The Firm

The young James

James studies engineering at Rensselaer. James inherited some money, and founded the brokerage firm of Breese and Smith. He did well for himself. One case disclosed that between 1909 and 1916, he made $2,000,000. ($50,000,000 in 2015 dollars). His firm mostly stayed out of the papers, which is a good sign. He got into trouble in other ways.

The Carbon Studio

James took up amateur photography and specialized in the difficult technique of carbon prints.

carbon print is a photographic print with an image consisting of pigmented gelatin, rather than of silver or other metallic particles suspended in a uniform layer of gelatin, as in typical black-and-white prints, or of chromogenic dyes, as in typical photographic color prints.

The process can produce images of very high quality which are exceptionally resistant to fading and other deterioration. It was developed in the mid-19th century in response to concerns about the fading of early types of silver-based black-and-white prints, which was already becoming apparent within a relatively few years of their introduction.

James was the first amateur photographer to work in color.

James was the nephew of Samuel Finley Breese Morse, the inventor and painter, who also brought Daguerre’s process to America.  James worked with Rudolf Eickemeyer, who became a member of Alfred Stieglitz’s Photo Secession and the Linked Ring. James and Stieglitz were the only two Americans invited to the photo exhibition in Vienna in 1893 and James won first prize.

James built a luxurious studio at his house at 5 East 16^th Street.

The Carbon Studio

There he did society portraits.

May Handy

Yvette Guilbert

He liked to photograph beautiful women and could be very persuasive.

Ruth St. Denis with clothes

Ruth St. Denis (whose real name was Ruthie Dennis) was one of leading figures in American modern dance.  She and her husband, Ted Shawn, started one of first modern dance touring companies (Denishawn).  She was born in 1878 or 1880 in New Jersey and lived till 1968.  In 1939 she wrote an autobiography entitled, An Unfinished Life.

“On the night of the Opera Club I met the man who was to be the first of a long line of distinguished photographers who have honored me with their art.  He was James Lawrence Breese, Stanford’s running partner in the various exploits which made them so famous at this time — more than that, he was an excellent amateur photographer.  He asked me to come to his studio on West Sixteenth Street.  I went eagerly, with one object and only one in mind.  I knew the value of beautiful photographs and I also knew that I could not possibly afford them at this time.  Breese had, for that period, very advanced apparatus for taking art pictures.  Also he had, to my great joy, some hats and fichus and veils, with which his lady sitters adorned themselves.  He said I looked like an early Gainsborough, and he arranged a beautiful wine-colored Gainsborough hat on my head and a fichu around my shoulders.  I was enchanted with myself.
He asked me to come a second time, and on this occasion he stopped his restless pacing up and down the room and inquired in a charming, caressing voice if I would pose in the nude.  He made it all very artistic and plausible.  I had, he was sure, a beautiful body with long lines which he was anxious to capture.  I was in a flutter of indecision for a moment or two, but vanity won out and I very chastely stepped out of my clothes.”

But James really liked to take erotic photograph of young girls.

At the Carbon Studio James held recitals and also held his famous and later infamous parties, the ”One of 1001 Nights,” which began at midnight every Wednesday. There he invited his friends, Dana Gibson, Louis Saint Gaudens, John Singer Sargent, Nicola, and especially his best friend, Stanford “Stanny” White, who liked underage girls.

James enjoyed costume parties.

James painted by Eliot Gregory

One nearly ended in disaster.

Perhaps the most celebrated of the “1001 Nights” costume parties took place on December 17, 1896. It involved a pyrotechnic mishap that captured the attention of the press and the public at large. In the words of a society columnist of the day:

“The host received his guests in the costume of an Arab sheik. He is a man of commanding presence, with a dark beard and looked the part very well, indeed. Mrs. Breese, made up as a Spanish dancing girl, helped him to welcome the guests.

“They were a gay and a picturesque horde who invaded the studio as the clock struck twelve. James J. Van Alen and Hermann Oelrichs impersonated Dutch burghers; Winthrop Chanler and Miss Wilmerding posed as members of the Salvation Army and rattled their tambourines incessantly; James Gerard, Jr. was a handsome Hungarian hussar: Craig Wadsworth and Willie Tiffany were court jesters; Miss ‘Birdie’ Fair wore the ruff of Folly; Cooper Hewitt and Whitney Warren were turbaned Turks; Creighton Webb’s well-known legs were displayed to advantage beneath a long Spanish cloak; Dickie Peters was as proud of his appearance in a suit of pajamas and a high hat as if he had uttered an epigram …”

The presence of so many costumed guests provided Breese with an opportunity to take individuals aside and pose them for a portrait. Here we see a signed print of Miss Emily Hoffman in all her regal splendor.

On this particular December night, the cold winter wind may have been blowing outside, but within the sanctum of the Breese studio, a good time was being had by all. Then things began to go awry. The gaiety had kicked into high gear when Mrs. Clinch Smith, wearing a loud plaid calico dress and a huge hat, unrecognizable in cork “black face,” commanded center stage with her spirited version of a “cakewalk.” Mrs. Cadwalader, wearing loose, loud checked trousers, big shoes, and a red necktie, took the part of Sambo. The two otherwise reserved and proper ladies brought down the house to the accompaniment of a group of “genuine negro banjo players.”

Somewhere along the way a mischievous guest began tossing lit matches in a negligent manner. Suddenly Mrs. George B. de Forest, who was dressed in a light and gauzy Oriental costume, began to scream as flames lept from her attire. No water being readily available, a quick thinking guest seized a champagne bottle from an ice bucket, knocked off its neck against the wall, and sprayed the contents onto the flaming dress. Several other champagne bottles were similarly employed.

Sobbing and trembling, with her charred skirts clinging to her body, Mrs. de Forest was led to Mrs. Breese’s apartments to “recover her composure.”

Then came the most famous party of them all.

The Girl in the Pie

At the approach of dawn, four negroes entered, bearing a huge pie, which they placed on the table. A faint stir was observed beneath the crust just as the orchestra struck up the air of the nursery jingle:
“Sing a song of sixpence, a pocket full of rye,
Four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie.”
The pie was burst asunder, and from inside there emerged the beautiful figure of a young girl, clad in black gauze draperies. She turned her pretty childish face upon the astonished guests, and poised as a bird about to fly, while two dozen canaries, released by her hand, flew about the room.
Then, when the tableau was complete, a man forced his way to the side of the table and with a smile assisted the child tothe floor. The man was Stanford White.

The young girl, a model, then 15 years old, lived with her mother, but on the night of the banquet she disappeared, and remained in hiding for two years. Efforts of the police to find her were unsuccessful.

Another version. Stanford White is the man on the right with a knife

At last she returned, to tell a story of revolting mistreatment and desertion by the man who met his death at the hands of Harry Thaw.
“When I was lifted from the pie to a seat at the table I found myself queen of the revel,” she said. “It was dazzling at first,” she said, “but in the end it became a sad queendom.
“Mr. White was kind for a time, but when he went to Europe he instructed his clerks to get rid of me with as little trouble as possible. I never saw him again.”
Turned into the street to live as she might, this girl, not yet 18, finally married, but her husband, when he learned of her part in the “pie” banquet, brooded over the affair, and deserted his girl wife without attempting to avenge her wrongs. She died soon afterward.

Some say she committed suicide.

That is one version, fueled by the animosity of Joseph Pulitzer.

A few months after the Pie Girl Dinner, in an attack on the New York high society that refused to admit its publisher, Joseph Pulitzer’s World blasted the “bacchanalian revels in New York fashionable studios” and men who corrupted young girls for their pleasure. This opinion was contradicted by one of the participants, Edward Simmons, who wrote that the whole affair was “very moral and dignified.”

Simmons of course had legal reasons to make this claim. The whole gang cleared out of town and made themselves scarce after the affair became public.

Some claim that James Breese led Stanny astray. But Stanny didn’t take much leading. He met his end when the jealous Harry Thaw killed him on the rooftop of Madison Square Garden.

 The Automobilist

Another way James Breese sought thrills was through the new sport of automobile racing.

The White Mountain Race

At the 1904 Vanderbilt Cup Race, James Breese  walking on the Jericho Turnpike Course

James Breese, William K. Vanderbilt, Jr., and other participants of the 1904 Daytona-Ormond Beach Automobile Races.

James Breese at the 1904 Eagle Rock Hill Climb held in Edison, New Jersey.

James Breese at the 1905 Daytona-Ormond Automobile Races.

On August 9, 1904 at 2 PM James Breese arrived at St. Louis for the World’s Fair. He had driven his forty horsepower touring car from Buffalo to St. Louis in 36 hours, averaging 25 mph. His Son James Breese Jr, his valet, and a machinist accompanied him. The others in the race arrived a day later.

His daughter Frances remembers:

Of me, he was known to say, “Frances is the best of my boys,” and he liked to show me off. As soon as I was tall enough to sit behind the wheel of a car, he put me in the driver’s seat and taught me to shift gears and manipulate the hand throttle.

James also used his engineering knowledge to experiment with the manufacture of planes.

The Penguin was a non-flying trainer.

The Houses

James built a house, The Breeses. in Tuxedo Park in 1887. It was designed by Robert Henderson Robertson.

The Breeses

However, his antics were not altogether welcome in Tuxedo Park and in 1900 he decided to move to Southampton.

Stanford White’s last commission was to redo The Orchard, James Breese’s estate in Southampton. There was  an existing 1858 house, which White added onto to give it a Mount Vernony feeling outside. but inside was over the top.

The Orchard, 151 Hill Street, Southampton

Garden Facade

Frog Fountain by Janet Scudder 

In 1916 James and the electrical engineer Glenn Marston installed hundreds of hand-made lights in the garden, one of the first in the world to be so illuminated.

The Hall

The Living Room

The Dining Room

The Music Room

The Conservatory

The Grounds Today

He also had a triplex moved into an apartment in the Hotel des Artistes in Manhattan.

The living room is 60 feet by 30 feet. Its furniture includes some enormous pieces of old English silver. Venetian columns of red, blue, and gold lend indescribable richness to the walls. Mr. Breese finds comfort on a divan covered with old Spanish brocade. One of his many fancies is  to have his fire screen decorated with live smilax, fresh every day, all year ’round.

The Denouement

James and his wife Frances Tileston Potter (1858-1917) had four children Sydney, James, Robert, and Frances. Mrs. Breese was the niece of the Bishop Potter of the Christian saloon.

Frances Tileston Potter (1858-1917)

After she died, at age 64 he married the Southern belle Grace Lucille Momand (1894-1946), 23. They married in 1919; she divorced him in 1927.

Grace Lucille Momand

Grace as Mrs. Breese

Grace on left

Grace (left) and Marion Tiffany (Mrs Martin Saportas)

James’s daughter Frances reminisces:

In 1935 [actually, 1934] he lost his last fortune, and “The Orchard”, our summer home in Southampton, was sold to Charles Merrill. Papa took an around the world trip by steamer, became a short wave radio enthusiast, and on his return built a two-bedroom house that he called “Breese In” on Hill Street, next to his former home. He did much of his own cooking, and old Mrs. Raccosta, who had been with our family for many years, cleaned house for him. Even though Papa was in his late seventies, the change in circumstances did not phase him. He was still attractive to women, and, when he could no longer drive a car, he acquired a beautiful young companion-housekeeper-chauffeur and toured the country with her. When he died at the age of eighty, she committed suicide.

James with grandchildren 

Frances Tileston Breese “Tanty” – daughter (1893-1985)

Frances wrote this poem:

Tanty, his youngest child 

How well do I remember
The year of ninety-three
when Father and my Mother
Had just created Me.

T’was from my painted iron crib
while blowing bubbles in my bib
I used to look with wonder on
The costumes that my Pa would don.

For fancy dress at every party
Was much the vogue if you were “arty”
In the eighties and the nineties
And the naughty nineteen oughties

Then later, when a little tot,
(You may believe I was, or not)
I used to watch and have much fun
When Jimmy made his horses run.

For trotting then was much the fad
And moving slow was not for Dad.
Give him action, give him speed,
He likes them fast… yes Sir, indeed.

In horses, women, games and sport
Slow movers never were his sort.
(Of course all this is merely heresay,
But rumors sometimes reach the nursray.)

So, by the time I could count ten
I’d heard a thing or two. For instance when
A little fairy flitting by
Told me the tale about the Pie.

She said no crows came out that night.
Instead, a vision of delight;
A fancy from the brain of him
Who all my friends call Uncle Jim.

But in the fear that I might tell
Too much, it would be well
Only to mention with a word
Some of the the things that I have heard.

About his prowess and his skill;
The birds he’s shot, the fish he’s killed,
The boats he’s sailed, the cars he’s driven,
And his immense success with women.

So if you lesser men are spurned
Because as yet you haven’t learned
To charm the birds from off the trees,
You’d best tune in on Jimmy Breese.

Jim Breese

James Lawrence Breese, Jr., (1884-1959) my wife’s eighth cousin twice removed, was the son of James Lawrence Breese and Francis Tileston Potter. He was Princeton ’09. He married Marjorie Howard Gorges (1894-1974); they had four children, Anne, Frances Potter (1916-1998), Mary NC, (1919-199), and James Lawrence (1927-2009).

In 1919 he was engineering officer and co-pilot in the NC4, the plane which made the first  transatlantic flight from New York to Lisbon (Lindbergh made the first solo flight).

Lt. James Breese

 The NC4 Crew

The transatlantic capability of the NC-4 was the result of developments in aviation that began before World War I. In 1908, Glenn Curtiss had experimented unsuccessfully with floats on the airframe of an early June Bug craft, but his first successful takeoff from water was not carried out until 1911, with an A-1 airplane fitted with a central pontoon. In January 1912, he first flew his first hulled “hydro-aeroplane”, which led to an introduction with the retired English naval officer John Cyril Porte who was looking for a partner to produce an aircraft with him to attempt win the prize of the newspaper the Daily Mail for the first transatlantic flight between the British Isles and North America – not necessarily nonstop, but using just one airplane. (e.g. changing airplanes in Iceland or the Azores was not allowed.)

Emmitt Clayton Bedell, a chief designer for Curtiss, improved the hull by incorporating the Bedell Step, the innovative hydroplane “step” in the hull allowed for breaking clear of the water at takeoff. Porte and Curtiss were joined by Lt. John H. Towers of the U.S. Navy as a test pilot. This Curtiss Model H America flying boat of 1914 was a larger aircraft with two engines and two pusher propellers. The members of the team hoped to claim the prize for a transatlantic flight.^[1]

Development of this project ceased with the outbreak of World War I in Europe later that year. Porte, now back in the Royal Navy‘s flight arm the RNAS, commissioned more flying boats to be built by the Curtiss Company. These could be used for long-range antisubmarine warfare patrols. Porte modified these aircraft, and he developed them into his own set of Felixstowe flying boats with more powerful engines, longer ranges, better hulls and better handling characteristics. He shared this design with the Curtiss Company, which built these improved models under license, selling them to the U.S. Government.

This culminated in a set of four identical aircraft, the NC-1, NC-2, NC-3 and the NC-4, the U.S. Navy‘s first series of four medium-sized Curtiss NC floatplanes made for the Navy by the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company. The NC-4 made its first test flight on 30 April 1919.^[2]

World War I had ended in November 1918, before the completion of the four Curtiss NCs. Then in 1919, with several of the new floatplanes in its possession, the officers in charge of the U.S. Navy decided to demonstrate the capability of the seaplanes with a transatlantic flight. However it was necessary to schedule refueling and repair stops that were also for crewmen’s meals and sleep and rest breaks — since these Curtiss NCs werequite slow in flight. For example, the flight between Newfoundland and the Azores required many hours of night flight because it could not be completed in one day.

The U.S. Navy’s transatlantic flight expedition began on 8 May 1919. The NC-4 started out in the company of two other Curtiss NCs, the NC-1 and the NC-3 (with the NC-2 having been cannibalized for spare parts to repair the NC-1 before this group of planes had even left New York City). The three aircraft left from Naval Air Station Rockaway,^{[N 2]} with intermediate stops at the Chatham Naval Air Station, Massachusetts, and Halifax, Nova Scotia, before flying on to Trepassey, Newfoundland, on 15 May. Eight U.S. Navy warships were stationed along the northern East Coast of the United States and Atlantic Canada to help the Curtiss NCs in navigation and to rescue their crewmen in case of any emergency.^[3]

The “base ship”, or the flagship for all of the Navy ships that had been assigned to support the flight of the Curtiss NCs, was the former minelayer USS Aroostook (CM-3), which the Navy had converted into a seaplane tender just before the flight of the Curtiss NCs. With a displacement of just over 3,000 tons, the Aroostook was larger than the Navy’s destroyers that had been assigned to support the transatlantic flight in 1919. Before the Curtiss NCs took off from New York City, the Aroostook had been sent to Trepassey, Newfoundland, to await their arrival there, and then provide refueling, relubrication, and maintenance work on the NC-1, NC-3 and NC-4. Next, she steamed across the Atlantic meet the group when they arrived in England.

On 16 May, the three Curtiss NCs departed on the longest leg of their journey, from Newfoundland to the Azores Islands in the mid-Atlantic. Twenty-two more Navy ships, mostly destroyers, were stationed at about 50-mile (80 km) spacings along this route.^[4] These “station ships” were brightly illuminated during the nighttime. Their sailors blazed their searchlights into the sky, and they also fired bright star shells into the sky to help the aviators to stay on their planned flight path.^[5]

After flying all through the night and most of the next day, the NC-4 reached the town of Horta on Faial Island in the Azores on the following afternoon, having flown about 1,200 miles (1,920 km). It had taken the crewmen 15 hours, 18 minutes, to fly this leg. The NCs encountered thick fog banks along the route. Both the NC-1 and the NC-3 were forced to land on the open Atlantic Ocean because the poor visibility and loss of a visual horizon made flying extremely dangerous. NC-1 was damaged landing in the rough seas and could not become airborne again. NC-3 had mechanical problems.

The crewmen of the NC-1, including future Admiral Marc Mitscher, were rescued by the Greek cargo ship SS Ionia. This ship took the NC-1 in tow, but it sank three days later and was lost in deep water.^[5][6]

The pilots of the NC-3, including future Admiral Jack Towers, taxied their floatplane some 200 nautical miles to reach the Azores, where it was taken in tow by a U.S. Navy ship.^[5]

US Navy warships “strung out like a string of pearls” along the NC’s flight path (3rd leg) 

Three days after arriving in the Azores, on 20 May, the NC-4 took off again bound for Lisbon, but it suffered mechanical problems, and its pilots had to land again at Ponta Delgada, São Miguel Island, Azores, having flown only about 150 miles (240 km). After several days of delays for spare parts and repairs, the NC-4 took off again on 27 May. Once again there were station ships of the Navy to help with navigation, especially at night. There were 13 warships arranged along the route between the Azores and Lisbon.^[4] The NC-4 had no more serious problems, and it landed in Lisbon harbor after a flight of nine hours, 43 minutes. Thus, the NC-4 become the first aircraft of any kind to fly across the Atlantic Ocean – or any of the other oceans. By flying from Massachusetts and Halifax to Lisbon, the NC-4 also flew from mainland-to-mainland of North America and Europe. Note: the seaplanes were hauled ashore for maintenance work on their engines.

The part of this flight just from Newfoundland to Lisbon had taken a total time 10 days and 22 hours, but with the actual flight time totaling just 26 hours and 46 minutes.

Jim is second from left

NC4 award

James named a daughter Mary NC.

His father had gotten James interested in automobiles After leaving the military, James  took a job in a company that tried to build steam cars. One was built, but it was too expensive. However, in this model there was an oil burner with automatic controls to heat a boiler for steam power.

James said he studied the candle flame to see how a female could be the right temperature to vaporize enough grease to power the flame without creating smoke, He adopted the principle to the oil burner. Jim adopted it to home furnaces; it was the first thermostatically controlled heater.

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James first visited Santa Fe when he was flying a tri-motored Ford plane to Winslo, Arizona. Headwinds delayed him and he was running out of gas. Someone remembered that there was a town called Santa Fe nearby. He saw and arrow on a roof and followed it to a landing strip. As he taxied down the runway the engine quit; he had run out of gas. He liked the town and bought property on Upper Canyon Rd., where he built a house.

Jim developed and tested the units in Santa Fe, but the manufacturing was farmed out to factories around the world. By 1954 he had sold three million units, many to the US Army to heat troops during wartime, then throughout the US and Europe.

Jim in WWII Civil Air Patrol

James and Marjorie were divorced.  James married a nurse, Irene Rich (Anna Josefa Irine Sobczyk, 1902-1989) in 1940. They were divorced in 1948; he then married the journalist Florence Welch (1883-1971), the widow of Robert Wagner, founder of Rob Wagner’s Script. She survived him. He died April 1, 1959 in San Diego.

Augustine Hicks Lawrence

Augustine Hicks Lawrence (1769-1828), the son of Augustine Lawrence (1719-1794) and of Joanna Annajte van Zandt (1729-1809).  He is my wife’s fifth cousin, five times removed. He married Catherine Abramse Luquer (many variant spellings) (1729-1809). They had many, many children and numerous descendants.

The picture above, painted by Gilbert Stuart, was given to the New York Historical Society by his granddaughter, Eloise Lawrence Breese Norrie.

Like many of the Lawrence clan, he was involved in the finances of New York.  He was the youngest founder of the New York Stock Exchange, which met under the Buttonwood tree on Wall Street.

The Buttonwood Agreement, which took place on May 17, 1792, started the New York Stock & Exchange Board now called the New York Stock Exchange. This agreement was signed by 24 stockbrokers outside of 68 Wall Street New York under a buttonwood tree. The organization drafted its constitution on March 8, 1817, and named itself the “New York Stock & Exchange Board”.

We the Subscribers, Brokers for the Purchase and Sale of the Public Stock, do hereby solemnly promise and pledge ourselves to each other, that we will not buy or sell from this day for any person whatsoever, any kind of Public Stock, at a less rate than one quarter percent Commission on the Specie value of and that we will give preference to each other in our Negotiations. In Testimony whereof we have set our hands this 17th day of May at New York, 1792.

Augustine was prominent in business and government.

A stock and insurance broker, banker, and commission merchant, he was in business by 1790 and was a partner in the firms of [Francis] Lewis & Lawrence ; Augustine H. Lawrence & Co. ; and Augustine H. Lawrence & Augustine N. Lawrence, with his son. By 1795, his firm was located at 40 Wall Street, and Lawrence had European business ties in London, Paris, and Amsterdam. According to Walter Barrett in The Old Merchants of New York, Lawrence was a close friend of DeWitt Clinton, Mayor of New York in 1803-07/1808-10/1811-15, who called him “The Chancellor of the Exchequer,” for “his financial abilities as the manager of the city funds and chairman of the finance committee, [and] alderman of the third ward.” The latter refers to his service as assistant alderman in 1809-13 and as alderman in 1814-16. He also was a director of the New-York Insurance Co., Bank of America, Farmers’ Fire Insurance & Loan Co., Globe Insurance Co., and other companies. In 1801, the Lawrence family moved to 23 Robinson Street. According to the 1810 census, the family owned two slaves at that time . Exemplifying his wealth and social status, Lawrence’s portrait was painted by the eminent artist Gilbert Stuart.

It is fitting that Augustine has left his mark on the physical structure of the city. In 2009 his house was designated an historical landmark:

94 Greenwich Street, New York

Around the corner is an extraordinary triplet of Georgian row houses, 94-96 Greenwich Street, built by Augustine H. Lawrence in 1798-99. The very existence of a cohesive 18th-century group is astonishing enough, but the corner house — once home to a merchant and alderman named Jonathan Lawrence — is also in remarkably good condition above the loud storefronts on the first floor. Nine windows overlooking Rector Street have elegant splayed lintels with double keystones. Above them, the outline of the original steeply pitched roof can be discerned.

What makes this house highly significant is that it is among only five surviving houses of Manhattan’s most elite neighborhood of the post-Revolutionary War era, the others including the Watson House (1793, 1806), 7 State Street, and Dickey House (1809-10), 67 Greenwich Street, both designated New York City Landmarks. No. 94 Greenwich Street is among the relatively rare extant Manhattan houses of the Federal period and style, is one of the oldest houses in Manhattan, and is one of only seven pre-1810 houses located south of Chambers Street, the oldest section of New York City.

Its history has been reconstructed:

The Federal style rowhouse at No. 94 Greenwich Street in Lower Manhattan was constructed c.1799-1800 as an investment property, right after this block was created through landfill and Greenwich and Rector Streets had been laid out. At the time, this was the most fashionable neighborhood for New York’s social elite and wealthy merchant class. The owner of No. 94 was Augustine Hicks Lawrence, a prominent stock and insurance broker, banker, and commission merchant, who served as director of a number of banks and companies, as well as an assistant alderman and alderman in 1809-16. What makes this house highly significant is that it is among only five surviving houses of Manhattan’s most elite neighborhood of the post-Revolutionary War era, the others including the Watson House , 7 State Street, and Dickey House , 67 Greenwich Street, both designated New York City Landmarks. No. 94 Greenwich Street is among the relatively rare extant Manhattan houses of the Federal period and style, is one of the oldest houses in Manhattan, and is one of only seven pre-1810 houses located south of Chambers Street, the oldest section of New York City.

As constructed, the house was three-and-a-half stories with a high peaked gambrel roof – the outline of the original roofline is still visible on the Rector Street facade. It features Flemish bond brickwork and splayed lintels on the second and third stories, those on the Rector Street facade are marble with double keystones, while the Greenwich Street facade has splayed brick lintels. By 1810, No. 94 had become a boardinghouse for merchants and professional men , housed a porterhouse by 1837, and was listed as a hotel in 1841. The building was raised one full story prior to 1858, and has a two-story rear addition dating from c. 1853/1873. The building remained in the possession of Lawrence family descendants until 1921, and has housed a variety of commercial tenants. Despite alterations, the 94 Greenwich Street House is recognizable as a grand early Federal style rowhouse, made particularly notable by its height, corner location with two primary facades, the visible outline of the original gambrel roofline on the Rector Street facade, and its splayed marble lintels with double keystones .
Beginning in 1810, today’s Nos. 94 and 94-1/2 Greenwich Street were combined internally and operated as an elite boardinghouse primarily for merchants and professional men.

At the death of Augustine H. Lawrence in 1828, his three houses at Nos. 94, 94-1/2, and 96 Greenwich Street, among his most valuable assets, were bequeathed to his three married daughters, and to their future heirs: No. 16 Rector was left to Joanna Lawrence McCrea; No. 94 Greenwich to Sarah Middagh Lawrence Benson; and No. 96 Greenwich to Eliza Lawrence Mactier; his son and business partner, Augustine Nicholas Lawrence, inherited the Stuart portrait of his father.

1850-51, No. 94 Greenwich was the Union Hotel, under the proprietorship of J[ean]. Baptiste Pelissier & Co.

Between 1860 and 1888, Nos. 94 and 94-1/2 Greenwich Street were jointly leased and occupied by the extended families of the Irish-born James and Thomas Cherry, presumably brothers. City directories listed James Cherry at No. 94 as a liquor dealer between 1860 and 1884, but an 1870 commercial directory listed the address as No. 94-1/2; Capt. Thomas Cherry was a policeman. The censuses of 1860, 1870, and 1880 indicated that between eight and eleven families lived in the two buildings. From 1862 to 1872, Otto Hemken operated a drugstore at 94 Greenwich Street, definitely this building as it was located on the corner; and Charles Wilson, oyster saloon/eatinghouse, was listed at that address in 1864-66. A shoe store was located in No. 14-16 Rector Street between c. 1868 and 1883, under Lewis Wenith , Patrick Casey , and John Kirwan . In 1873, James Cherry added a second story to the building’s Rector Street wing. From 1885 to 1921, Michael L. Shannon, liquor dealer , was listed at No. 94 Greenwich Street.

A tenant, the Pussycat Lounge, occupied one of Augustine’s buildings and campaigned for its historical designation:

The proprietor of a topless bar is attempting to prevent a hotel developer from developing his space two and a half blocks south of ground zero by invoking the Landmarks Preservation Law.

Robert Kremer, who holds the lease on the Pussycat Lounge, spoke in favor of landmark designation of one of Manhattan’s oldest houses at a public hearing yesterday at the Landmarks Preservation Commission.

Preservationists say 96 Greenwich Street House, along with the adjacent 94 and 94 1/2 Greenwich St. buildings, are rare examples of a row of Federal-style houses, offering a glimpse of early New York. The area south of ground zero has suffered from being blocked off from the rest of the city by the 16-acre void left at the site of the former World Trade Center. Recently, developer Joseph Moinian has begun work on a 53-story hotel and condominium nearby. Much of the financial district has seen conversion to residential from office space in the past few years as the nature of downtown has changed toward a more full-time environment.

The Pussycat Lounge, long a neighborhood watering hole for Wall Street brokers and civil servants, sits on an eclectic block that also has a boxing gym and delis. A long bar runs most of the length of the Pussycat Lounge, behind which is a stage where scantily clad women perform. A small knight and a cat are design props upon the stage. The second floor is a rock ‘n’ roll club.

The executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, Andrew Berman, said these structures, built when John Adams was president, were among the few surviving relics of the first era of development in New York.

At the hearing, architect Gene Kaufman, whose client is Greenwich Hospitality LLC, an affiliate of developer Sam Chang, said that because relatively little of the fabric and design of the original building at 96 Greenwich St. remain, the building did not merit designation.

Simeon Bankoff, who said he was speaking on his own behalf and not in his capacity as executive director of the Historic Districts Council, said that regardless of the alterations, the 18th-century building’s significance was not diminished. He said, metaphorically, “You don’t throw out your grandma just because she has new teeth.”

The president of the Real Estate Board of New York, Steve Spinola, had not examined these buildings on Greenwich Street, but told The New York Sun that there was a great deal of interest in building hotels in Lower Manhattan. “There’s a clear understanding that there’s not enough hotel room downtown,” Mr. Spinola said. He added that business is thriving downtown, and the residential side of real estate has grown there. He said that when the memorial at ground zero is built, anticipated visitors to the area will number in the millions.

Those speaking on behalf of landmarking the buildings included a vice president of Doremus Financial Printing, Thomas Tyrrel, who praised them as “monuments to our past.” Lisa Kersavage of the Municipal Art Society quoted architectural critic Ada Louise Huxtable, saying these buildings were among “accidental and anonymous survivors” of the city’s early years.

Mr. Kremer, who said he has owned Pussycat Lounge since 1974, has filed suit in state Supreme Court, arguing that he has an ownership interest in 96 Greenwich St. An attorney for Greenwich Hospitality LLC, Robert Davis of Bryan Cave, said his client was the bona fide purchaser of the building.

Mr. Kremer said he was prepared to fully restore 96 Greenwich St., and that he still had the original doors from Ryan’s, the predecessor bar. Alternatively, assuming the LPC did not designate 96 Greenwich St., Mr. Kaufman said his client would restore the façade to the other two buildings to standards determined by the LPC. In that case, the building at 96 Greenwich St. would become part of the footprint of a hotel slated for 98-100 Greenwich St.

As an alderman, Augustine commissioned furniture for the new City Hall.

Construction of the grand edifice of City Hall was begun in 1803, and took nine years and almost half a million dollars to complete. When the exterior of the building was nearly complete, Alderman Nicholas Fish and assistants Peter Hawes and Augustine H. Lawrence were authorized “to procure Suitable furniture” for the chamber. The furnishings committee for the chamber rushed to complete the interior in time for the Independence Day celebrations planned for City Hall, and authorized payment of Lannuier’s April 25 invoice in July. He charged fourteen dollars each for the chairs, and appropriately embellished them with inlaid brass stars and tablets carved with ribbons and crossed flags, symbols of patriotism and government.

I suspect that the reasons for the importance of the Lawrences in the financial life of the city are

1. They were there since the mid-seventeenth century.
2. They were stable. They sometimes lived in the same house foe 250 years – an extraordinary and perhaps unique accomplishment in New York. One Lawrence, a governor of the New York Stock Exchange, not only lived in the ancestral house; he lived his whole life in the same room. He was born and died in the same bedroom. Such stability gave confidence that a Lawrence was not going to abscond to Brazil.
3. They were Quakers for a long time. This gave them both connections and a reputation for integrity, which may have helped in both the financial and pharmaceutical world.

His descendants to this day are active in finance, for example, Dana Lawrence Woodbury.

Dana Lawrence Woodbury

Dana Woodbury, founder and President of Buttonwood Investment Services, LLC has been in the financial services industry since 1981. He has worked as a financial planner, due diligence consultant, and high yield bond portfolio manager. In January 1989, he began his association with a national independent broker/dealer, and during his twelve-year tenure served as Director of Due Diligence, Compliance Officer, and Senior Vice President of Equity Sales.Dana has been nationally recognized for his due diligence work, being named to the All Star Team of Due Diligence Officers by the Investment Advisor Magazine (1992, 1993, 1994). He has also served on the Financial Products Advisory Council for the International Association for Financial Planning (IAFP, now the Financial Planning Association or FPA), and has spoken at numerous national meetings on due diligence analysis and asset allocation. He has been quoted in the New York Times, Rocky Mountain News, and the Denver Business Journal.Dana now leads a team of experts in the due diligence field. Specializing in the analysis of illiquid investments, Buttonwood is known for generating a concise and prompt review of alternative products. Providing Financial Professionals with a sound knowledge of the program merits and presenting those to suitable clients is his top priority. Dana received his B.A. in Economics from Northwestern University and his M.B.A. from The University of Chicago.

Note that Dana is a specialist in due diligence, which means that he does a thorough and careful analysis of investments to avoid any unpleasant surprises. I detect a certain family preference for security and stability.

Buttonwood Investment Services, LLC takes its name from the buttonwood tree under which the agreement founding the New York Stock Exchange was signed. Dana Lawrence Woodbury’s great, great, great, great grandfather, Augustine Hicks Lawrence was the youngest founding member under that famous buttonwood tree.

James Lawrence by Gilbert Stewart

U.S. Naval Academy Museum

Captain James Lawrence, the source of the navy’s motto Don’t give up the ship!  is probably the most famous of my wife’s relatives. He is her third cousin, six times removed.

He was born on October 1, 1781 in Burlington, New Jersey, in this house:

He married Julia Montaudevert and had two children, Mary Neil (1810-1843) and James Montaudevert (1813-1814).

Julia Montaudevert

Descendant of French Privateers in the Indian Ocean

This is the official story (from Wikipedia). James was the

son of John and Martha (Tallman) Lawrence. His mother died when he was an infant and his Loyalist father fled to Canada during the American Revolution, leaving his half-sister to care for the infant. Though Lawrence studied law, he entered the United States Navy as a midshipman in 1798.

During the Quasi-War with France, he served on USS Ganges and the frigate USS Adams in the Caribbean. He was commissioned a lieutenant on April 6, 1802 and served aboard USS Enterprise in the Mediterranean, taking part in a successful attack on enemy craft on 2 June 1803.

In February 1804, he was second in command during the expedition to destroy the captured frigate USS Philadelphia. Later in the conflict he commanded Enterprise and a gunboat in battles with the Tripolitans. He was also First Lieutenant of the frigate Adams and, in 1805, commanded the small Gunboat No. 6 during a voyage across the Atlantic to North Africa.

Although Gunboats No. 2 through 10 (minus No. 7) arrived in the Mediterranean too late to see action, they remained there with Commodore Rodgers’s squadron until summer 1806, at which time they sailed back to the United States. On 12 June 1805 Gunboat No. 6 encountered a Royal Navy vessel that impressed three seamen.

Subsequently, Lieutenant Lawrence commanded the warships USS Vixen, USS Wasp and USS Argus. In 1810, he also took part in trials of an experimental spar torpedo. Promoted to the rank of Master Commandant in November 1810, he took command of the sloop of war USS Hornet a year later and sailed her to Europe on a diplomatic mission. From the beginning of the War of 1812, Lawrence and Hornet cruised actively, capturing the privateer Dolphin in July 1812. Later in the year Hornet blockaded the British sloop HMS Bonne Citoyenne at Bahia, Brazil, and on 24 February 1813 captured HMS Peacock.

USS Chesapeake

Upon his return to the United States in March, Lawrence learned of his promotion to Captain. Two months later he took command of the frigate Chesapeake, then preparing for sea at Boston. He left port on 1 June 1813 and immediately engaged the blockading Royal Navy frigate Shannon in a fierce battle.

Although slightly smaller, the British ship disabled Chesapeake with gunfire within the first few minutes. Captain Lawrence, mortally wounded by small arms fire, ordered his officers, “Don’t give up the ship. Fight her till she sinks.” Or “Tell them to fire faster; don’t give up the ship.” 

Men carried him below, and his crew was overwhelmed by a British boarding party shortly afterward. James Lawrence died of his wounds on 4 June 1813, while his captors directed Chesapeake to Halifax, Nova Scotia.

After Lawrence’s death was reported to his friend and fellow officer Oliver Hazard Perry, he ordered a large blue battle ensign, stitched with the phrase “Dont Give Up The Ship” in bold white letters. The Perry Flag was displayed on his flagship during a victorious engagement against the British on Lake Erie in September 1813. The original flag is displayed in the Naval Academy Museum and a replica is displayed in Memorial Hall at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. A replica is also on view at Perry’s Victory and International Peace Memorial, on South Bass Island, Ohio.

Lawrence was buried with military honors at present-day CFB Halifax, Nova Scotia, but reinterred at Trinity Church Cemetery in New York City.

He was survived by his wife, Julia (Montaudevert) Lawrence, who lived until 1865, and their two-year-old daughter, Mary Neill Lawrence. In 1838 Mary married a Navy officer, Lt. William Preston Griffin.

Here is my wife at her cousin’s grave:

A British designer who creates historically correct clothing has recreated the clothing of Lawrence and his British opponents as her master’s thesis:

James Lawrence’s uniform

Captain James Lawrence, USN. ~ Seaman Robert Bates, USN. ~ Captain Philip Bowes Vere Broke, RN. ~ Bo’s’un William Stevens, RN

A great story. It gave the American Navy a hero and a motto. But…

Tom Halsted, a Gloucester writer and sailor, is the great-great-grandson of James Curtis, a midshipman who, as a 15-year-old, was Lawrence’s aide-de-camp on the Chesapeake. Halsted in this article in the Globe described what actually happened:

Given the way it has echoed through the years, you might think Lawrence’s memorable plea marked a heroic moment in the history of American armed forces. It didn’t. Not only did Lawrence’s surviving crew give up the ship almost immediately after his exhortation, but historians and military analysts would later conclude that Lawrence had disobeyed orders to avoid combat in the first place, then committed a series of tactical blunders that all but guaranteed he and his ship would lose.

Rather than a heroic stand, what took place that day and after was one of the most spectacular—and fraudulent—public relations coups in American military history. It was carried out with the full support of the public. And to look back on what really happened, as it has been pieced together by historians since, is to appreciate how little has changed about one aspect of war: our need to transform even the most pointless losses into a noble, defiant message.

IF TELEVISION had existed, the battle between the Shannon and the Chesapeake would have been a prime-time event. The skirmish took place about a year into the War of 1812, which had broken out over several grievances with Britain, including onerous trade restrictions imposed by the British and the illegal boarding of American vessels in search of British deserters. Once war was declared, the British Royal Navy began hobbling American trade by blockading ports, including Boston, with warships based in Nova Scotia.

In late May 1813, Captain Philip Broke sailed the HMS Shannon, flagship of the blockading British squadron, into Massachusetts Bay alone, knowing the Americans had only one frigate ready for sea in Boston. On June 1, the Chesapeake rose to the bait.

Unlike most sea battles, which take place far from land, the whole encounter seemed made for public consumption. Spectators lined the rooftops in Boston and along the North Shore, and commanders of both ships repeatedly had to warn a boisterous spectator fleet of yachts and small boats to stay clear.

The first shot was fired at 6 p.m., the last at 6:11. The colors were struck at 6:15. The roar of cannon fire, the stabbing flames from the cannons’ mouths, and the smoke of battle could be heard and seen all along the coast.

Nearly every American observing the preparation for battle was confident the Americans would win. American ships had astonished the world in recent months by repeatedly defeating supposedly superior British naval forces, starting when the US frigate Constitution defeated the HMS Guerrière.

In Boston, plans were laid for a banquet to celebrate the anticipated victory of the Chesapeake over the Shannon, including places at the table for the defeated British officers. But none of the         unnecessary defeat. He had had strict orders to avoid contact with the enemy and instead to slip through their blockade in order to harass enemy merchant ships in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. These he totally disobeyed, losing a frigate and his life in the process.

His famous exhortation, too, was breached immediately. With no American officers on deck to formally surrender, the British officers now in command of the Chesapeake’s quarterdeck simply declared the fighting over, raised the British colors over the American flag, and imprisoned the surviving American crewmen below decks. The two ships sailed off in tandem to the British naval headquarters in Halifax, Nova Scotia, leaving the American spectators dumbfounded.

No American heroes emerged from the engagement. The first and second lieutenants were wounded, the fourth lieutenant killed. Third Lieutenant William Cox was never able to regain the deck after taking Lawrence below, and was therefore made the scapegoat, convicted of leaving his place of duty, and dismissed from the Navy in disgrace. (His family and descendants tried for years to clear his name. Finally, in 1952, President Truman pardoned Cox and posthumously restored him to his former rank.)

Lawrence died en route to Halifax. Having committed a succession of bad decisions that all but guaranteed the loss of his ship and many of her crew, he should have been disgraced. Instead, he was lionized: given a funeral in Canada with full military honors, buried there, then disinterred and brought back to Boston for another funeral, reburied in Salem, dug up once more, and finally buried for good at Trinity Church in New York.

Though the true disgrace was Lawrence’s, the American public would not allow it. They had wanted a victory on June 1, and if they could not have a victory, at least they wanted a hero—and a story that helped them find nobility in defeat. The details of the war might seem distant, but the impulse to create heroes in the wake of pointless loss is as familiar as Custer’s Last Stand or the saga of Pat Tillman in Afghanistan. Two centuries ago, we were already seeing the picture we wanted—and, in that spirit, Lawrence’s failures were forgotten and his memory reshaped to position him as the hero he always wanted to be.

The Moral of this Story

Countries at war need Heroes, and if they don’t exist, they are manufactured (see the dreadful Trimmer in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honor). Lawrence’s physical courage was real, but, as Aristotle would point out, it was not governed by reason and became recklessness, a vice, with disastrous results for him and his ship.

Henry Effingham Lawrence

Henry Effingham Lawrence was born 1829, the son of Joseph Lawrence (one of the first presidents of the U.S. Trust Co. and president of the New York State Bank) and Rosetta Townsend. He married Lydia Greene Underhill; they had four children: Edith, Joseph, Margaret, and Mary Trimble.

Lydia was a Quaker but was read out of meeting for marrying Henry, and Episcopalian.

Lydia Greene Underhill

Mary Trimble was apparently named for Merritt Trimble, the husband of her mother’s sister, Mary Underhill.

Henry was taken into the dry goods firm of Lawrence, Trimble, & Co,  where his father Joseph was a partner. Daniel Trimble committed suicide in 1850 by jumping from the Hoboken ferry in a fit of despondency. The firm was renamed Lawrence, Taylor, and Co., 314 Broadway, and went through several other renamings.

Henry’s house in Manhattan was at 57 East Twenty-fifth St. near Madison Square; Merritt Trimble lived next door, and other Lawrences also occupied houses on the block. The family went to Grace Church, where they occupied the pew immediately behind the future Edith Wharton. Henry summered with his family at a farm named Arcadia at Snedens Landing, opposite Dobbs Ferry.

Snedens Landing, 1858

He purchased a mile of Hudson River waterfront and in 1876 built Cliffside. It was designed by J. Cleveland Cady , who also designed the old Metropolitan Opera House. The house had a pipe organ and contained Henry’s collection of Hudson River School paintings. Henry imported ginko and paulownia trees for his garden.

Map 1874

Cady’s Drawing of Cliffside

Cliffside Today

Henry was living at Cliffside when he died  in 1890. He left to each of his four children $30,000 ($800,000 to each in 2015 dollars, a total of $3,200,000 in 2015 dollars) and the remainder to his wife.

Whenever one’s marital affairs occupy a full newspaper page, it is a bad sign.

Elizabeth Lanier Fenno (1916-1969) in 1936 married my wife’s first cousin, one removed, Samuel Adams Clark, Jr. (1910-1998).  It did not work out.

Elizabeth Lanier Fenno Clark Walters Ambrose

The San Antonio Light of December 3, 1944 reported:

When Pat and Betty Walters reached trail’s end last May and went riding off in opposite directions, they left behind a record unmatched in all the long history of ladies who pay alimony.

Cowboy Patrick Walters

And it is refreshing to report – in a world in which American heiresses have paid king’s ransoms to dispose of husbands who have outlasted their welcome – that a lone cowboy gave up his rich wife for a jackass.

For a jackass named Jamaica – or more properly, half a jackass, because Jamaica was their joint property.

While it is true that the divorce-bound Mrs. Waters tossed in a couple of horses to cement the deal, Jamaica was the real basis of agreement. For the cowboy husband had learned to love his long-eared friend and had made Jamaica one of the best known trick performers in all the West.

So the marital knot was severed and Betty got her freedom; Pat, his jackass. A little later the loved-and-lost wrangle broke his shoulder when an unruly horse rammed into Jamaica at a Tahoe Lake rodeo.

Betty showered him with sympathy and Pat, arm in a sling, arrived in Reno again with high hopes for a reconciliation. But nay, nay, said Betty, and to prove her point she got herself a brand-new husband.

Now she’s Mrs. Vernon L. Ambrose, wife of an army sergeant with a chest-full of medals. The sergeant comes from Oakland, California. And over at the Reno Army Base they call him (of all things) Pat. Sgt. Pat and Betty were united in the imposing residence of Lloyd Root.  The sergeant won’t talk about his exploits, but it is said he was one of the last men to leave the Philippines and that he later served with valor in the several campaigns for the Dutch East Indies.

So much now for Pat No. 2.

As for Betty, when she first went to Nevada she was the fashionable Mrs. Elizabeth Fenno Clark. Stepdaughter of wealthy and socially prominent George K. Livermore, her sojourn in the land of single blessedness was intended for the usual six weeks and good-by forever to Mr. Clark via the usual divorce route.

Time passed and Samuel Adams Clark Jr. passed out of her life. But by then Betty had gone Reno. There was no turning back East for her. So she bought the old Mayberry ranch five miles west of Reno on the shores of the Truckee River – often referred to as a repository for used-up wedding rings tossed by ex-wives to jubilation and relief.

Betty won her first divorce in 1941 and afterwards began keeping company with Pat Walters, cowboy, in the fashion set by so many other elegant ladies from the East. She had met the cowpuncher at the Washoe Pines Ranch, where she had bided her time till the day of her divorce came.

Washoe Pines Ranch c. 1940

The days with Pat were filled with fun and the nights with moonshine.

The cowboy was an expert horseman and rodeo rider in the best traditions of the West. Besides that, he was personable and chivalrous and had the same fatal attraction that all hard-riding, bronco-busting young Westerners have for young women brought up in the far less vigorous East.

Gradually, one by one, the lone cowboy shortened the line sf suitors for Betty’s jeweled hand and heart and after a while he was the only one allowed in her corral. There he paid humble tribute to her beauty and charm in the manner of men form the Harold Bell Wright country.

He proposed and she accepted him on the spot. The stars over the cow country shone brighter. Heaven came very near. Then Betty remembered the folks back home. She wondered what her step-papa would say about her marriage to a cowboy.

So she traveled all the way back to New York for parental OK, got it, and the wedding took place on December 29, 19842, without any further ado.

The Mayberry ranch is one of Reno’s oldest landmarks and is reputed to have cost Betty $60,000. Afterwards, she ladled out more thousands to modernize it.  And when the cowboy and his lady settled down for life (?) they spurned any suggestion they operate it as a dude ranch and kept it as a love nest.

Hither came scores of Betty’s New York friends to see her new husband and get a touch of Western atmosphere with all its “heartiness.”

Betty’s friends accepted Pat as a real cowboy with spurs that jingled, jingled, jingled, and Pat liked them too. Liked some of them a little too much, it was whispered around Reno.

Anyway, whether he did or didn’t, Betty finally roped, tied and delivered him to the Reno divorce court. On May 19 last, she was awarded her decree on grounds of mental cruelty.

At the time Mrs. Walters was planning her course of action, the cowboy, a master at breaking and training wild horses, if not women, was practicing his art near the Tanforan racetrack in California.

Jamaica the Jackass

Jamaica the jackass was with him, performing for the amusement of the many cash customers at a rodeo.

The cowboy said he’d be glad to oblige Mrs. Walters on condition that she relinquish all rights to Jamaica, which had been given to the couple as a wedding gift by Deborah Hull, owner of the Washoe Pines Ranch.

Betty said it was a bargain and Pat duly made his appearance in court. After the customary time the mills of divorce ground out the customary decree and Pat and Jamaica were free.

And so it was another cowboy failed to make the grade in Reno’s vast and ever-milling matrimonial roundup. So far as is known the smashed-up romance was the last of the so-called successful marriages of cowboys and great ladies from the big city.

Definitely it is the only case on record where a man turned in his wife for half a jackass.

Betty’s marriage to Ambrose lasted at least long enough to produce a daughter, Elizabeth Ann Ambrose (1946-2006). The daughter tried to break the spendthrift trust that her mother had set up for her, but to no avail.

Frederick Francis and Regina Matilda

at the 1938 Horse Show Ball

My wife’s great uncle, Frederick Francis Alexandre (1894-1968) married Regina Mathilde Saportas (1898-1957), and therefore my wife is related to the Saportas family. They seem to be descended from Sephardic Jews who made their way to Brazil and married into the Maxwell (of Maxwell House Coffee) family. Regina’s niece was Ann Marie Saportas (1923 -?). As I said in a previous blog, whenever a newspaper gives a full page to one’s marital affairs, it is a bad sign. Ann Marie managed to get two full-page stories and mentioned in a tragic story. The newspapers were always interested in the American version of morganatic marriages, the unions of Society women and working class men.

Mrs. Marion Tiffany Saportas and Ann Marie

The Course of True Love

Ann Marie at Coral Beach, Bermuda 1938

Ann Marie was the daughter of stockbroker Martin Brown Saportas and Marion Tiffany. After her divorce from Martin, Marion set up housekeeping for herself and put Ann Marie, fifteen years old, in her own hotel apartment, and enrolled her in a business school to learn typing (perhaps the alimony was not all Marion had hoped for). This was a mistake. There Ann Marie fell for the twenty-year-old Gordon Watson Gillam, the son of a Scottish stationary engineer (i. e., janitor).

Gordon Watson Gillam

Six months after meeting George, Ann Marie wrote to him (September 1938):

Just think, only seven more days and we will be off to Maryland, Delaware, or Virginia, or someplace. It is all so wonderful I can hardly believe it. I was looking up Tennessee on the map and we’ll never get there.

How much did you get for the dear old typewriter? For goodness sake, whatever you do, don’t go and spend it for then we’d be lost – and save all you can.

Gordon pawned the typewriter, and with that money the lovers eloped to Elkton, Maryland, East Coast Capital of quickie marriages.

The marriage and honeymoon were over in a weekend, and Gordon and Ann Marie returned to business school, Gordon to his parents house and Ann Marie to her hotel apartment. They did not inform anyone of the new marital arrangement.

But Marion came across one of Ann Marie’s letters to her new husband and was extremely unhappy. She wrote to Gordon:

I have just heard from my daughter of her marriage to you in September. I can’t tell you what an awful thing this was for you to do. You know she is only 15 a minor you took her out of State and married her a criminal offense. I think the best thing to do for both of you is to have it annulled as soon as possible, and until that is done I expect you to leave her alone, not phone or write or try to see her.

Please send me the marriage license immediately I will expect it by Friday or I will send my lawyer over to see you and your parents, if you have any.

It won’t be very pleasant for you if I have to go to law about it, which I shall do if you don’t do what I demand. You know you have broken the Mann Act, as any lawyer will tell you.

Marion rusticated Ann Marie to her aunt’s in Lawrenceville, Long Island. There Ann Marie wrote to Gordon:

Now, we have to sometime so why not now discussing the practicle [sic] side of things. We have to live someplace, don’t forget.

Ann Marie continued to be inconsolable.

But then something happened. The annulment was in process and Gordon wrote back

However, Gordon changed his mind and tried to contest the annulment, describing the last incident as a lover’s spat. But the court granted the annulment, and in October 1944 the lovelorn Gordon enlisted in the Army. When war came he rose in the ranks.

2^nd Lt. Gordon Gillam

Luck smiled on Second Lieutenant Gordon W. Gillam of Astoria when the Joseph Hewes went down off North Africa and he smiled right back, Gillam made shore safely, stopped at a bar In Casa Blanca for a drink and met a shipmate who carried word home to the army officer’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Alexander Gillam of 27-72 12th street, that their son was safe.

Gordon was promoted to Captain and received the Bronze Star and the Italian Order of the Crown Chevalier.  But his luck ran out. He is listed as a war casualty. He died June 28, 1946 and is buried in the American Cemetery at Florence.

Double Trouble

Wartime often produces matrimonial muddles (as was shown in the very touching movie The Miracle at Morgan’s Creek). Ann Marie got involved in an interesting one.

Ann Marie secretly married Marine Corps flying officer Lieutenant Allen Thomas Sturges in Vermont in July 1941. Sturges was a “playboy, ” a “socialite,” a member of what my late mother-in-law called Café Society; they were not respectable.

Allen Thomas Sturges

Sturges went off to war, Ann Marie got lonely, and in early 1942 she married First Sergeant Jerome Mark; but she neglected the formality of a divorce from Sturges. Four days after the marriage Jerome was shipped overseas. When her mother Marion heard of the arrangement, she expressed her bewilderment. Ann Marie explained why Sturges didn’t count:  “Why we went really married. We were just kids.”

In 1944 a man called her and asked if she were the wife of Allen Thomas Sturges. This time she said yes. She learned that the man on the phone was the father of Judith Scott, who had married Sturges, who had told her he was single. So Ann Marie had married Allen and then married Mark.  Allen had married Ann Marie and then married Judith. No divorces intervened. Double bigamy?

Sturges received a medical discharge from the Marine Corp. In 1945 he was tried for stealing diamond cuff links and a gold cigarette case from the home of actor Bruce Cabot. Sturges pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity; he was fined $500 and ordered to leave California.

In 1949 Sturges was working in upstate New York for HydroCarbon Reesarch and then moved to Brownsville. Texas, where he worked in the aluminum welding division in at a plant his company was helping to build. Soon local police were seeking Sturges on charges of removing a mortgaged automobile and passing bad checks. He had forged Ann Marie‘s name to several checks.

In October 1949 Sturges drove the stolen car to Houston and checked into an expensive hotel under the name of Stevens. Through mutual friends Sturges met Braniff airline hostess Marion Yturria and told her of his legal problems in Brownsville. He told her “it would be a lot less worry for everyone if I just ended it all.” She was frightened; he telephoned her at her office and she called the police. They told her not to go home alone; she took two friends, and they discovered that Sturges had broken in and shot himself through the right temple. Yturria was greatly upset by the indent, but she told the papers

He was a gentleman the whole time I knew him. He made no amorous attempts toward me.  I don’t think you can blame anybody but the war. It’s just an unfortunate tragedy that could have happened to anyone.

He survived, but the bullet lodged in his brain. To his surgeon’s astonishment, Sturges survived and recovered,

He had left three suicide notes in his pocket, one with identifying information, one to Miss Yturria:

I want to thank you for your help. You are the best friend a man could want – if I had known you longer I would have loved you – But, you are too good a woman for a person like me – Just say a prayer for me once in a while.

And one to his mother:

My last will and testament: To my mother I will everything, insurance, etc. Mu body must be cremated. Mother, I love you.

His mother expressed doubts that Allen had shot himself, despite the three suicide notes, and she admitted that he was suffering from a “war neurosis.” Four hours before the shooting, a New York paper had received an anonymous tip that Sturges had killed himself, but there were no long distance calls from Houston to that newspaper. Mrs. Taveniere said she had gotten a telephone call that gamblers had pursued her son to Houston and shot him. But the allegations were never resolved.

Allen Thomas Sturges 1955

Sturges, “unemployed mechanical engineer“ in 1955 was sent to Bellevue for observation after he robbed an East Side bar. He died in 2002.

The Last Ones

Ann Marie married  Wayne W. Dickinson on October 1959 in California. Joseph Chamberlain was Ann Marie’s (third? fourth? fifth), in any case, last husband. They got hitched in Nevada in 1970.

Mary Trimble Lawrence Tonetti

Mary Trimble Lawrence, my wife’s third cousin three times removed, was born in December 1869 in New York, the daughter of Henry Effingham Lawrence and Lydia Greene Underhill. Her middle name came from her mother’s sister’s husband, Merritt Trimble. The Trimbles lived next door to the Lawrences on 25^th St., and Mrs, Trimble. Annie Underhill, was Mary’s favorite aunt. The Lawrences attended Grace Church, where they sat in the pew behind the future Edith Wharton. Henry bought a farm, Arcadia, at Snedens Landing, opposite Dobb’s Ferry on the Hudson, a place that was to play an important role in his daughter’s life and indeed in artistic life to this day. There he built Cliffside.

The Lawrence family had a connection with the St. Gaudens because they bought their shoes from Bernard St. Gaudens, the father of Augustus. Augustus, when he was twenty-five, came to Snedens Landing to tutor children in drawing when Mary was seven; she may have been in his class. Mary converted a summer house on the property to her studio; her first sculpture, of her dog Dandy, survives.

   Dandy

Mary with Friends

Mary and Anna and Friends

The Family at Snedens Landing

L to r: Edith Lawrence, Grandmother Underhill, Mrs Merritt Trimble, Merritt Trimble, Joseph Lawrence, Lydia Greene, Annie Underhill, Mrs. Henry E. Lawrence

Aunt Ann by Mary

The family encouraged her work, and in 1886-1887 did the Grand Tour with sister Edith and her aunt, Annie Underhill, who lived next door on 25^th St. Mary illustrated her travel journal.

Mary was amused by those who knew what to admire because it had a star in the Baedeker.

She observed the parade of humanity at the grand hotels

and had to run the gauntlet at hotels.

In Paris she visited a dressmaker who had her own ideas of what a wealthy young women should wear while strolling.

Mary, having grown up much of the time in the country, had her own ideas of what walking clothes should be.

She returned home briefly and then in April 1887 entered the Academie Julien in Paris (the Ecole des Beaux-Arts did not accept women until 1897). Within a week of her arrival in Paris, Mary Lawrence was invited to Auguste Rodin’s art studio which he shared with his student and young mistress Camille Claudel. Together they strolled through the studio where Mary got to see the models for The Burghers of Calais and some of the figures from The Gates of Hell.

The Studio by Académie Julian student Marie Bashkirtseff.

Mary studied at the Academie until the summer of 1888 when she began teaching under St. Gaudens at the Art Students League in New York. In 1890 plans for the Columbia Exhibition in Chicago began, and in the fall of 1891 St. Gaudens asked Mary, only twenty-three years old, to do the main statue of Christopher Columbus.

The Art Students League

Mary is seated, second from left.

St. Gaudens is standing, second from right.

Mary in a work smock

The Model

The Court of Honor

Frank Millet, a fair organizer, objected to the prominent placement of the statue and arranged to have it moved to a spot near the train station. The architect Charles Follen McKim, who had fallen in love with Mary in New York, had enough sway in Chicago to get the statue of Columbus returned to its former place. Lawrence never forgave Millet and is quoted as saying, “I could stamp on his face and grind it into the gravel until it bled.” St. Gaudens said that “Miss Mary Lawrence, now Mrs. François M. L. Tonetti, modeled and executed it; and to her goes all the credit of the virility and breadth of treatment which it revealed.” The statue was executed in staff (a temporary artificial stone), and like much of the art for the Exhibition, no longer exists. Mary then helped St. Gaudens with the General John A. Logan monument for Grant Park in Chicago.

General Logan Monument, Chicago

She returned to the Academie Julien in December 1893 to continue her studies. Charles Dana Gibson (also a distant relative of my wife’s) gave a ball, where Mary met François Tonetti. She encountered him again at James Whistler’s home at 110 rue de Bac.

François Michel Louis Tonetti

François’  grandfather  moved to Paris and opened a marble shop because in Genoa he had beaten to death his wife’s lover, a priest. He therefore found it expedient to use someone else’s passport and name, Sr. Dozzi, so sometimes the Tonettis were known as the Dozzis.

Tonetti had a dreadful childhood. He was born in Paris in 1864; his father died when he was about six. His mother took in laundry to support him and his two sisters, but during the siege of Paris in 1870-1871 she and his sisters died of starvation. François survived by begging.

After the war François’ grandfather took him into the marble shop. A member of the French Academy visiting the shop saw a statue François had done and invited the boy to move in with his family. There he was exposed to artists and writers. When he was old enough he was sent to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. After school François became an assistant to sculptor Frederick MacMonnies who had been an early assistant to Augustus Saint-Gaudens.

Mary returned to New York in September 1894. There she worked with St. Gaudens and when he moved to Paris she took over his classes at the Art Students League.

When he met Mary, François was working on a 10 1/2 foot plaster sculpture representing Art, one of eight figures created for the Main Reading Room of the Library of Congress.

François, who was taken with Mary, persuaded Monnies to send him to New York to assist with the completion of sculptures for the Brooklyn Memorial Arch on Grand Army Plaza.

Mary and François were engaged in 1899. St. Gaudens was delighted. He wrote to Mrs. Lawrence:

I never knew two people more made for one another, and that they should have been brought together is a smile of fortune. Besides the qualities that befit him peculiarly for Mary, he is a most affectionate and loveable man…I know they will be happy together.

They married in 1900 at Grace Church; she was thirty-two and he thirty-six. They moved into the former Murray Hill Presbyterian Church (where the Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion sermon was preached) at 135 East 40th Street that they had converted into a home with a spacious studio. Summers and weekends were spent at Snedens Landing. They had six children: Oliver Pellier, who died a few days after in birth in July 1901; Ann Elizabeth (1903-1990), who married the architect Eric Gugler; Lydia Lawrence (1904-1943), who married Robert McKee Hyde; Joseph Lawrence (1905-1963), who married Susan McKee Hyde, the sister of Robert; and Marie Françoise, also known as Chrissie because of her December birth (1907-1972), who married first John Drury Ratcliff and then Allan B. Sheldon; and Alexandra (1909-1991), who married Harwood A. White.

Mary and the children

The Tiffany Twins Immortalized in Manhattan

Louise and Julia Tiffany and Admirers

About 1900, judging from the age of the models, Mary did a sculpture of Louis Comfort Tiffany’s twins, Louise Comfort and Julia DeForest. Katherine Cornell, the actress, who had a house at Snedens Landing apparently liked the sculpture so much that when she moved from Snedens Landing in 1965, Mary’s daughter Anne Gugler gave the sculpture to her as a housewarming present. Cornell installed it over the door at her new residence at 328 East 51^st St., where it can be seen today.

The Tiffany Twins, reproduction in wood

Mary and François, along with Chester French, Saint-Gaudens and a number of other sculptors, were chosen to create statues for the façade of the U.S. Custom House at Bowling Green and Broadway designed by architect Cass Gilbert (now the National Museum of the American Indian). François sculpted the Doge as a representation of Venice and Queen Isabella personifying Spain. He used Mary’s mother as a model for the Doge’s imperious head.

Venice

Mary collaborated on this as well as on the “Birth of Venus” fountain in 1901 for the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo.

François was inspired by the rugged beauty of the Palisades to do a sculpture of  American Indian Life: a twenty foot high statue of two Indians, one carrying a dead deer. François’s attempt at realism gives an idea of the tenor of life at the Tonettis’ studio:

To model the deer, François borrowed a fine stag from his friend, Dr. William T. Fornaday, director of the Bronx Zoo, who sent the animal to him in a cage. As it arrived on a hot day and seemed overcome by the heat, François thought it would be more at ease if released from the cage.  Once outside the bars, however, the stag ran amok, butted over and smashed things generally in the studio and created havoc, until François, in real terror, seized a shotgun and killed it. Then, thrifty Frenchman that he was, he walked around the corner to his friend the butcher for help in skinning it and carving it up. Mary, meanwhile, arrived back at the studio, found it a bloody mess, with the stag dead in the middle of the chaos and no François, and was herself reaching the panic stage when he walked in happily with the butcher. Together they skinned and quartered the animal and removed it.

François paid the zoo for the  stag, and was fined by the investigating police for shooting dear out of season, but for days there was venison at the studio…and his girls, that winter,  had intriguing new coats with deerskin collars, miffs, and cuffs. (Savell)

Mary was also interested in the dance. She took Ann (who had a career in the theater) and Alexandra to see Isadora Duncan at the Met, and the girls were stagestruck.

Alexandra on left and Chrissie (Marie) on right

They attended Elisabeth Duncan’s School of the Dance where they associated with Maurice Stern, Pablo Casals, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Gertrude Stein, and of course Isadora. They became Isadorables, and toured Europe in a dance troupe.The Tonettis gave many and large parties; and Mary’s status as a Lawrence assured that invitations were coveted. In 1909 Mary hosted “Une Heure de Danse” at her studio for the benefit of a dancing class for shopgirls. Society members danced :Japanese, Egyptian, Sicilian, and Spanish dances.” The New York Times listed various relatives and acquaintances of my wife’s family: Leonie Alexandre (first cousin) did a Spanish dance; Robert Potter Breese (eighth cousin) did a “buck dance” and an Irish jig; Harvey Ladew (a hunting companion of my wife’s uncle) did a clog dance. Miss McLaughlin  “gave a humorous recitation of Salome.” The children were nonplussed by all this. As they grew up in an artists’ studio which often had models in various stages of nudity, they assumed everyone had people walking around naked in their houses.

The staff that took care of the house and five children were varied: an Irish cook; a useful handyman given to benders; Siegfried, a doorman who had been a giant in Barnum’s circus; Siegfried’s Swedish wife; and an Indian prince who studied calculus.

Mary also helped found the Cosmopolitan Club. It began as a club for governesses, who were not interested, so literary and artistic types took it over. Mary installed it in townhouses adjacent to her studio.

François’s life was to be drawn into the events of the great world and prematurely ended,

When John D. Rockefeller, Sr.’s Kykuit was built at Pocantico Hills, François did a number of pieces for the house and grounds. Several years later in 1913 when the façade was changed, he was commissioned to design and execute a pediment that runs across the front facade and two groupings of four cherubs holding baskets of flowers that now stand on either side of it atop side balconies. The Tonettis’ youngest daughter Alexandra was the model for the angelic figures.

Mary finished the figures and oversaw the installation; François, feeling it his duty, had left to serve in the French Army in the First World War as a doctor’s aide.

Among other duties (one involved drawing wounds in color so doctors could judge how they were healing), he used his knowledge if anatomy and the transport of statues to design a brace to allow wounded soldiers to be moved safely.

While in France he contacted pneumonia and returned in ill health at war’s end, dying in 1920 at the age of fifty-six.  His last work was a plaque in honor of the Best & Co. employees who served in the First World War.

When Mary sold the Manhattan studio she had a number of his works (including the Indians with Deer) brought out to Snedens in the dead of night, had a hole dug and the sculptures buried.

Snedens Landing

At Snedens Landing Mary built and rented out a variety of houses on her property to artistic friends, thereby permanent stamping the place as an artists’ colony.

Ding Dong House today

View of Hudson from porch of Ding Dong House

She lived first in the Ding Dong House, so called because of a bell that hung at the entrance gate. Aaron Copland later lived there, as did Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke, Jerome Robbins, and Margot Kidder

Many famous and forgotten artists and celebrities have lived in Snedens Landing: Ethel Barrymore, Marcel Duchamp, John Steinbeck, Ginger Rogers, Noel Coward, Orson Wells, Jerome Robbins, Peter Seegar, John Dos Passos, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Al Pacino, Diane Sawyer, Bill Murray, Björk,  Phish Frontman Trey Anastasio, Lorraine Bracco, Bill Murray,Uma Thurman, Ethan Hawke, Angelina Jolie Pitt, Hayden Panettiere  etc. Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh lived in the Captain Coastes House; they sailed in a little boat called Fiddle-Dee-Dee; they left it to the town and children continued to sail the Hudson on it.

Captain Coates House

Laurence Oliver on the Fiddle Dee Dee

But Mary rented the houses out for a pittance, $15 a month to start, so she could have creative types around her. After the Cosmopolitan Club moved uptown she mortgaged her properties on 40th St. to pay for remodeling. But in the Depression she lost all the Manhattan properties and retired to Snedens Landing. There she had her gardens.

The Gardens

The Lawrence property included a waterfall, “The Cascade.”

The Cascade

Guest would arrive at Dobbs Ferry, be taken across the Hudson, and stroll to the Cascade where violins and dancers greeted them. Tonetti’s specialty party dish was new and exotic: spaghetti.

Her grandson John Ratcliff describes the gardens:

In the early 1920’s, my grandmother, Mary Lawrence Tonetti, a talented sculptress of the era, designed and built two swimming pools at the base of the waterfall. There was a children’s pool, which when filled, water would cascade over into the larger adult pool adjacent to it. On the Hudson River’s edge, she built an oval-shaped pergola. Arriving at the waterfalls by a path through the woods, one would first come to the two pools, descend a series of staircases to a gravel walkway lined with boxwood hedges and daylily plantings. At the base of the staircase one would pass a fountain with two lions head spigots she had sculpted, that were fed by the pools above and would spew water into the fountain. Proceeding down the path, one would enter the pergola which had columns all around it that supported several grape vines that would bear grapes during the summer.

Lions’ Head Fountain

Mary had admired a monastery on the Amalfi coast when she was on her Grand Tour.

Charles McKim assisted her with the design of a pergola supporting a grape arbor.

It was irresistible as a site for eurythmic dancing.

\Mary is sitting in the pergola in the 1940s.

Mary died at Snedens Landing on March 14, 1945.

Time and vandals took their toll of the gardens. The Cascade is still there.

Hurricane Sandy toppled the last of the pergola’s pillars.

Sources: Isabelle Savell, The Tonetti Years at Snedens Landing,  Mary Tonetti Dorra, Demeter’s Choice: A Portrait of My Grandmother as a Younmg Artist.

Mary Trimble Lawrence Tonetti with Lydia, Anne, and Joseph 1906

Anne (also Ann and Annette) Elizabeth Tonetti was born on March 15, 1903 at 136 East 40^th St in New York, the daughter of Mary Trimble Lawrence and François Tonetti, and therefore my wife’s fourth cousin twice removed. Anne was raised in an artistic household, as both her mother and father were sculptors, and she also lived in the family compound-artists colony at Snedens Landing.

Her mother took Anne to see Isadora Duncan at the Met, and Anne decided to be a dancer. She and her sister Alexandra attended Elisabeth Duncan’s School of the Dance where they associated with Maurice Stern, Pablo Casals, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Gertrude Stein, and of course Isadora. Ann took a leave from Miss Chapin’s School to tour Europe in a dance troop with Isadora and the Isadorables.

Anne at 17

Anne as a dancer

Anne as an actress

Anne in Saturday’s Children

She then had a brief career as an actress. She appeared in

Roadside

Between Two Worlds

The Road to Yesterday

Saturday’s Children as “proverbial keeper of a boarding house”

Mrs. Partridge Presents as Madame La Fleur

The Green Hat as Sister Clothilde

Tea for Three

He Who Gets Slapped

Lay Christalinda

Cyrano de Bergerac as the Duenna

Street Scene as “a gossipy scandal monger” with “queenie” the dog.

Roadside

Between Two Worlds

The Constant Sinner with Mae West

In 1929 she took a tour of the Soviet Union and did her Auntie Mame act:

The architect Eric Gugler rented a house from Mary Tonetti. It was directly across from the studio on 40th St, and he met Anne. They married in 1931; Judge Benjamin Cardozo performed the ceremony.

Anne Tonetti Gugler 1937

Anne had to deal with a certain amount on financial irresponsibility on the art of her mother Mary and her husband. Mary lost the properties on 40^th St to foreclosure Mary at first rented the houses that she owned in Snedens landing for $15-20 a month to artists, She therefore lost about 12,000-15,000 a year and this was in the 1920s and 1930s.  Ann tried to bring financial sanity and pay all the bills. Mary tore up the withholding checks to Social Security. Ann tried to reason with her; Mary responded “Ever since your telegram about my bank account, I have been plunged into deepest gloom.” Fortunately Mary kept the property at Snedens Landing, and after the Depression it steadily increased in value.

Actresses  Anne Gugler, Katherine Cornell, and Sandy McAllister with Dachsund, 1978 

In 1979 Anne Gugler donated the Cascade on the Snedens Landing property to Palisades Park Commission. She also gave the Metropolitan two bronzes by St. Gaudens:

Augustus Saint-Gaudens 
Mrs. Stanford White (Bessie Springs Smith), 1884, cast 1893
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Anne Tonetti Gugler, 1981

Robert Louis Stevenson

Anne died at Snedens Landing March 22, 1990.

Eric Gugler

Eric Gugler was the husband of Anne Elizabeth Tonetti, my wife’s cousin. He was born March 13, 1889, in Milwaukee, the son of Julius Gugler and Bertha Rose Bremer. According to Camoupedia

“Gugler is a prominent name in the printing industry in Milwaukee WI. It begins with a German-born engraver named Henry Gugler, Sr. (1816-1880), who came to the US in 1853. During the Civil War, he was an important engraver for the US Bureau of Engraving and Printing in Washington DC, producing, among other famous works, a life-sized steel engraving of Abraham Lincoln. In the 1870s, he moved to Milwaukee and became a partner with his son Julius Gugler (1848-1919) in the H. Gugler & Son Lithographing Company.

According to certain sources, Julius Gugler was a poet as well as a printer. Among other art-inclined family members were his daughter Frida Gugler (1874-1966), a painter who had studied with William Merrit Chase, and her younger brother, Eric Gugler (1889-1974), who achieved considerable success as a muralist, sculptor, interior designer and architect.

As an aspiring artist-architect, Gugler studied at The Armour Institute (now the Illinois Institute of Technology) and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, then also earned a BA degree at Columbia University in 1911. For three years, before the war began, he also studied at the American Academy in Rome.

While in Rome Gugler, according to David H. Wright,

developed a scheme for a monumental approach to S. Pietro,  calling for the old Borgo to be replaced  by a vast tree-lined boulevard articulated by a series of reflecting pools leading from Bernini’s piazza to a much larger obelisk and vast circular piazza by the Tiber/ At least Gugler’s project was less brutal that Mussolini’s Via della Conziliatione.

Eric was in the military from October 10, 1917 to December 6, 1918. There he had an unusual job (which is why he is in Camoupedia): designing camouflage for ships to protect them from submarine attack.

Eric Gugler, three-stage diagram (c1918) in which actual structural changes are made to the height and positioning of a ship’s masts, smoke stacks, and other features in order to throw off the course calculations of U-boat gunners.

Chicago War Memorial

Eric became a fashionable New York architect. His office address was always 101 Park Avue, the office of McKim, Meade, and White. In 1929 he won first prize for a competition for Chicago’s War Memorial.

David H. Wright comments on the design:

It was to be an island at the culmination of the axis of Congress Street and Gugler’s scheme called for a rectangular frame of a dozen square piers 200 feet high around a mock sarcophagus big enough for the bones of at least a regiment of casualties. Mussolini would have been delighted but probably would have felt it had too little classical ornament. Mercifully, it was never built.

He rented a house that Mary Lawrence Tonetti owned; it was on 40^th St, directly across from the Tonetti’s house – studio. He met Anne, and they married in 1932, with the marriage witnessed by Justice Benjamin Cardozo.

Forum Auditorium Interior, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania

Forum Auditorium under construction

In the early Depression years, Eric and his associate Richard Brooks got the commission to design the interior of the Forum Auditorium in the State Education Building in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. They

wanted to depict the march of progress of mankind and the overwhelming majesty of the heavens. The maps and adjacent tablets on the upper promenade walls commemorate the socially-significant individuals who made famous the great period of each particular locale. The ceiling was painted on individual canvas sections and decorated with constellations and depictions from the Zodiac. More than one thousand stars are shown in their proper position. Three hundred sixty five are of crystal glass, now illuminated by energy-efficient LED lights.

Forum Auditorium restored

The designers explained their plan:

In painting the ceiling of the Forum we have made an effort, however ineffectual it might be, to achieve some idea of the grandeur of the heavens…Outlined in gold against the deep blue background of the sky, they [the constellations] stir the imagination to a vivid realization of the infinite patience and awe with which both common men and philosophers have long studies the heavens. The artists, by their gold and silver and blue pattern, studded with crystal stars, have concentrated this drama of creation into a spectacle of awe and wonder. The long lines of the celestial meridians are spun out in silver like a web of a cosmic spider. The wakes of the planets as they swing through the oceans of endless blue space are traced in foamy white.

Central Sunburst

The most interesting part of the design is

the central sunburst of glittering silver rays which conceals the central ventilating shaft of the Auditorium. Upon its diagrammatic representations of the three great theories of the solar system by which men have tried to account for day and night, winter and spring, summer and autumn, the apparently independent and sometimes erratic movements of the planets and other heavenly bodies.

Eric seems to have been fascinated by astronomy.

Murals line the Promenade level. 

Afterwhiles, Ossining, 1921  Afterwhiles

It was built in 1795; Eric remodeled it in 1921. John Cheever bought it in 1961.

Waldo Hutchins Memorial 1932 

Hutchens Memorial

 Eric designed the Hutchens Bench in Central Park.

This monument to Hutchins was erected in 1932, a gift of August S. Hutchins. It measures nearly four feet high by twenty-seven feet long, and its architect was Eric Gugler. The carved white marble stonework is attributed to Corrado Novani and the Piccirilli Brothers studio, the same firm responsible for the Maine Monument at Columbus Circle and the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. The sundial component was designed by Albert Stewart, and famed sculptor Paul Manship is credited with the small bronze figure at its center.

Three semicircular lines inscribed in the paving match the bench’s shadow lines at 10:00 a.m., noon, and 2:00 p.m. at the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. Etched into the back of the bench are the Latin phrases, Alteri Vivas Oportet Sit Vis Tibi Vivere and Ne Diruat Fuga Temporium. Loosely translated, these mean, “You should live for another if you would live for yourself,” and “Let it not be destroyed by the passage of time.” 

The Roosevelt Commissions

Val Kill in Hyde Park

He and Henry J. Toombs designed Eleanor Roosevelt’s cottage Val Kill. She therefore called upon Eric when one of her pet projects, Arthurdale, ran into difficulties.

Arthurdale

The collapse of the financial and economic system during the Depression led some New Dealers to want to revive village life based on subsistence farming. Arthurdale was set up for unemployed coal miners; it did not work out. It was too isolated for small industry and the farmers could not grow enough to feed themselves.

Plans for Arthurdale; Eric on right

Franklin Parker explains some of the difficulties:

Arthurdale faced frequent disagreements, mismanagement, and lack of communication between New Deal and local officials. Louis Howe is said to have told Harold Ickes: you buy the land; I’ll buy the houses. Despite Mrs. Roosevelt’s caution, but pressed by a desire to house the homesteaders before Christmas 1933, Howe ordered by phone 50 prefabricated Cape Code cottages from Boston.

Designed for summer use and unsuitable for northern West Virginia winters, they were also smaller than the foundations prepared for them. Mrs. Roosevelt asked New York architect Eric Gugler to recut, rebuild, and winterize the cottages to fit the foundations and the weather. Costs, of course, skyrocketed.

Arthurdale suffered from too many uncoordinated committees trying to get too many things done too quickly. There was also interference, though well intentioned, from Howe and Mrs. Roosevelt. There were contradictory orders, delays, waste, and cost overruns. Interior Secretary Ickes, a frugal administrator, wrote in his diary, “We have been spending money down there like drunken sailors.”

Despite delays and some incomplete and unoccupied homes, Arthurdale opened officially June 7, 1934.

C. J. Malone in his book Back to the Land: Arthurdale, FDR’s New Deal, and the Costs of Economic Planning, takes a dim view of the project:

Finally, by July 1934, 43 of the first 50 homes were occupied, and Eric Gugler and his team packed up and headed back home. Having wrecked and wasted his way into Arthurdale’s history, Gugler was called away to Washington, onward and upward to his justly earned rewards, proving yet again that it is not war that is the health of the state; it is failure. 

The West Wing of the White House

Eric Gugler was employed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt to rebuild the West Wing of the White House. Perhaps his camouflage background recommend him: Roosevelt wanted an office that would have easier access to the living quarters and conceal as much as possible his polio. The west door opens onto a ptrvate study, minimizing time in the public corridor. There were some precedents.

President William Howard Taft made the West Wing a permanent building, expanding it southward, doubling its size, and building the first Oval Office. Designed by Nathan C. Wyeth and completed in 1909, the office was centered on the south side of the building, much as the oval rooms in the White House are. Taft intended it to be the hub of his administration, and, by locating it in the center of the West Wing, he could be more involved with the day-to-day operation of his presidency. The Taft Oval Office had simple Georgian Revival trim, and was likely the most colorful in history; the walls were covered with vibrant seagrass green burlap.

Taft’s Oval Office

On December 24, 1929, during President  Herbert Hoover’s administration, a fire severely damaged the West Wing. Hoover used this as an opportunity to create more space, excavating a partial basement for additional offices. He restored the Oval Office, upgrading the quality of trim and installing air-conditioning. He also replaced the furniture, which had undergone no major changes in twenty years.

West Wing floorplan

Dissatisfied with the size and layout of the West Wing, President Franklin D. Roosevelt engaged New York architect Eric Gugler to redesign it in 1933. To create additional space without increasing the apparent size of the building, Gugler excavated a full basement, added a set of subterranean offices under the adjacent lawn, and built an unobtrusive “penthouse” story. The directive to wring the most office space out of the existing building was responsible for its narrow corridors and cramped staff offices. Gugler’s most visible addition was the expansion of the building eastward for a new Cabinet Room and Oval Office.

West Wing under construction

Gugler took the concept of Taft’s office and expanded it in an elegant Classical / Art Moderne mode. He used built in bookcases and lighting in the cove moldings. He also came up with the idea of twin chairs flanking the fireplace, so Roosevelt could be photographed sitting and on the same level as visiting dignitaries. That arrangement has been kept.

Oval Office Plan

FDR in Oval Office

The modern Oval Office was built at the West Wing’s southeast corner, offering FDR, who was physically disabled and used a wheelchair, more privacy and easier access to the Residence. He and Gugler devised a room architecturally grander than the previous two rooms, with more robust Georgian details: doors topped with substantial pediments, bookcases set into niches, a deep bracketed cornice, and a ceiling medallion of the Presidential Seal. Rather than a chandelier or ceiling fixture, the room is illuminated by light bulbs hidden within the cornice that “wash” the ceiling in light. In small ways, hints of Art Moderne can be seen, in the sconces flanking the windows and the representation of the eagle in the ceiling medallion. FDR and Gugler worked closely together, often over breakfast, with Gugler sketching the president’s ideas. One notion resulting from these sketches that has become fixed in the layout of the room’s furniture, is that of two high back chairs in front of the fireplace. The public sees this most often with the president seated on the left, and a visiting head of state on the right. This allowed FDR to be seated, with his guests at the same level, de-emphasizing his inability to stand. Construction of the modern Oval Office was completed in 1934.

Oval Office showing cove lighting

Oval Office 2008

The White House Steinway

The White House had piano serial number 100,00. It was showing its age, so the company proposed another piano, serial number 300,000. Eric Gugler designed it. It

is more than 9 feet long, with a case of Honduras mahogany, gilt in gold leaf by artist Denbar Beck. Three large gilded eagles, designed by sculptor Albert Stewart, served as the ledgs, The case featured cowboys, New England barn dancers, African-American folk singers, and Native American ceremonial dancers.

The Battle of Castle Clinton 

Subtreasury Building, Wall Street

Interior as restored by Gugler

Eric was also interested in historic preservation. He supervised the restoration of the sub-Treasury building in Lower Manhattan. Eleanor Roosevelt on May 23, 1942 wrote

Mr. Eric Gugler called for me at 9:30 this morning in New York City and, with shame I admit, for the first time I visited the Sub-Treasury Building on Wall Street. A group of people have been interested in seeing the very beautiful rotunda restored and made a fitting place where ceremonies of different kinds can be carried on.

At present, it is used by the passport service and it is difficult to visualize how beautiful it will be when the partitions are taken out. The detail around the doors, the old iron grill work of the balcony, the beautiful pillars and really perfect proportions make it a most beautiful and dignified hall.

Castle Clinton as New York Aquarium

According to Parks Commissioner Robert Moses, the closing of the Aquarium and the entire Battery Park early in 1941 was necessary for safety reasons during the construction of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. Then in May 1941, Moses proposed demolishing the structure… Eric Gugler, a former White House architect affiliated with several civic groups dedicated to preserving the history of New York City including the ASHPS and the Fine Arts Federation, immediately contacted the National Park Service and confirmed with Acting Director A. E. Demaray that the preservation of Castle Clinton was under review. By 1942, Moses presented a Battery Park redesign with an open vista onto the Statue of Liberty in place of Castle Clinton. …Even Ole Singstad, the Chief Engineer for the Tunnel Authority, stated that Castle Clinton wouldn’t interfere with the construction of the tunnel. Despite all this effort, in July 1942, the Board of Estimate approved Commissioner Moses’ plan for the park. … However, the need for personnel and equipment for the war effort on the national level made it impossible for Moses’ plan to move forward. During this time, Eric Gugler attempted to gain support from influential people who had their roots in New York City including First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. Justice Frankfurter provided access to Harold Ickes, Secretary of the Interior. After the war ended, both sides renewed their efforts to win the fight over Castle Clinton. McAneny and Gugler’s group argued in a letter sent to the New York newspapers that the destruction of Europe during the recent war and the tragic loss of many historic structures should encourage preservation of the 1812 fort. … In August 1946, President Harry Truman signed the bill into law, creating Castle Clinton National Monument.

Castle Clinton today 

Mayo Memorial 1943-1952 

Charles and William Mayo Memorial, Rochester

Eric designed the setting for the Mayo Memorial. The sculptor wrote that  he semi-circle amphitheater symbolizes the operating room, suited to the statue of the brothers who are dressed in operating gowns.

Firestone Memorial 1950 

Harvey S. Firestone Memorial, Akron Ohio

The impetus to create a monument to Harvey Firestone in Akron began shortly after his death in 1938; however, the advent of the war temporarily delayed the project, although discussions regarding the site continued in 1944 between representatives of the Firestone company and the architect Eric Gugler. It was during these discussions that the patron expressed the desire that the work include more than just a statue of Firestone. Gugler then developed the concept of the allegorical bas relief panels on a curved exedra.

The Hall of Our History 

In 1938 Gugler conceived the idea for “The Hall of Our History.” The war intervened and he did not revive it until 1953, in the form of an open-air court of granite with walls 90 feet high enclosing an area roughly 350 feet by 420 feet at Pine Mountain, Georgia.

This was near FDR’s house in Warm Springs. The Roosevelts supposedly were going to donate a farm and the State of Georgia was going to donate 2000 acres to keep the view free from construction clear to the horizon.

Gugler waxed rhapsodic:

It will be open to the sky and set in a cathedral-like grove of pines. The walls will have portrayed on granite surfaces impressive inscriptions of great distinction, imperishable phrases from out past, and in high relief groups of figures, episodes, and events of our history.”

There would also be a 22 foot high statue of Washington and a temple housing the originals of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.

Gugler persuaded Eleanor Roosevelt and Milton Eisenhower and others who should have known better to serve on the board, but nothing came of the idea, because it was projected to cost $25 million in 1953 dollars (perhaps $300 million in 2016 dollars).

Gugler tried to revive it in 1960.

 Anzio Cemetery Chapel 1956

The American military cemetery at Anzio consists of a chapel to the south, a peristyle, and a map room to the north. On the white marble walls of the chapel are engraved the names of 3,095 of the missing. Rosettes mark the names of those since recovered and identified. The map room contains a bronze relief map and four fresco maps depicting the military operations in Sicily and Italy.

Interior of Chapel

Gugler designed the ceiling, in the same vein as his design for the Forum Auditorium.

Ceiling of Chapel

In the ceiling of the Chapel is a sculpture, 22 feet in diameter, which depicts  signs of the Zodiac in raised relief representing the constellations. The planets Mars, Jupiter and Saturn occupy the same relative positions that they occupied at 0200 hours on January 22, 1944, when the first American troops landed on the beaches of Anzio.

Chip Chop 1957

The actress Katharine Cornell had a house in Snedens Landing, and employed Eric to design her beach house, Chip Chop.

Chip Chop is located on Martha’s Vineyard, a small island just off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. There are four chops on the island which define direction or bearing for the fisherman; the house is between East Chop and West Chop, so it is Chip Chop. The house has five structures; the caretaker’s house, the main house, the great room and the two guest houses.

Chip Chop

It is understated. It is approached by a dirt road.

The general atmosphere is Beach House rather than Hampton Mansion.

Eleanor Roosevelt and Helen Keller at Chip Chop

Armillary Sphere

New York, World’s Fair, 1964

Paul Manship and Eric collaborated on the Armillary Sphere at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. 

The Theodore Roosevelt Memorial 1963-1967

Eric Gugler helped Paul Manship remodel into a home and studio the two town houses on New York’s 321 East 72nd Street (since demolished) that Manship had purchased in 1927. This began their association, and they collaborated on the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial.

Their first proposal was for an armillary sphere.

Proposed Theodore Roosevelt Memorial

The NPS describes the memorial as it was built:

Constructed between 1963 and 1967, the present memorial is a large plazaset in a clearing on the northern part of the island. Designed by architect Eric Gugler, it consists of an open granite-paved oval plaza flanked by two pools with fountains.  A water-filled moat spanned by footbridges surrounds the whole area.  Four 21-foot-high granite tablets inscribed with quotations from his writings surround a 17-foot-high bronze statue of Roosevelt.  Executed by sculptor Paul Manship, the statue shows Roosevelt with one armed raised in “characteristic speaking pose.”

David Wright is not impressed:

In his clumsy way Gugler  was still trying to outdo Bernini’s  Piazza di San Pietro, and Manship’s Roosevelt,  part from his copying an actual frock coat and basing his portrait on a death mask,  might have been one of the doughboys standing up and waving his right arm in a politician’s rhetorical gesture.

Theodore Roosevelt Memorial today

Proposed FDR Memorial

Eric also came up with plans for a memorial to FDR in which FDR was wearing the toga of a Roman senator; they were never carried out. He designed a memorial to Eleanor Roosevelt in the garden of the United Nations.

Eleanor Roosevelt Garden, United Nations

Anne and Eric Gugler by Paul Manship

The Green Barn, Snedens Landing

Eric Gugler 1971

Eric and Anne retired to  the Green Barn at Snedens Landing, where he died on May 16, 1974.

0 The Flag of Maryland

The Flag of the Maryland Confederate Units

The Flag of the Maryland Union Units

While raking up the leaves on my family tree, I came across my great great uncle by marriage, George Washington Clotworthy.

His parents, Alexander and Elizabeth, sometime in 1838-1840 came from County Down in northern Ireland,  and therefore they were probably Protestant. George attended Baltimore Male Grammar School No. 9 and the Central High School (later Baltimore City College) from which he graduated in 1860. At graduation he gave an address on Patriotism.

The Assembly Rooms, East Fayette and Holiday Sts., home of the high school

His loyalty seems not to have been to the United States, however, because come the war he enlisted as a private in the Baltimore Light Artillery, First Maryland Regiment, CSA.

It was organized at Richmond, Va. August 17, 1861 and became part of the Army of Northern Virginia under Robert E. Lee  (who had attended my church in Baltimore, Mount Calvary, when he was in the Corps of Engineers and in charge of building Fort Carroll).

“It was towards the close of a pleasant day in October 1861, that the First Maryland Infantry dragged its weary length into camp near Centreville, after a long and fruitless expedition to Pohick Church, in search of the enemy. Things seemed much changed, indeed, since their departure, for in their absence a battery of artillery had invaded the sacred confines of their camp, and a scowl was observed upon more than one face, for we were jealous of our rights and dared maintain them. Judge then our surprise when informed it was a battery manned by brother Marylanders, and called the Baltimore Light Artillery. They had just been organized at Richmond, and forwarded to the army at Centreville during our absence. They were welcomed, most heartily welcomed, and it was not long ere we discovered old friends and acquaintances among them. Before many hours had elapsed we paid our respects to the officers of the battery, and found them to be the true type of the Maryland and Virginia gentlemen.”

The unit fought in numerous battles: Harpers Ferry; Winchester; Front Royal; Cross Keys; Port Republic; Woodstock; Gaines’ Mills; Malvern Hill; Bristoe Station; Cunningham’s Ford; Groveton; Rappahannock; Second Manassas; Antietam; Yellow Tavern; Carlisle; Gettysburg; Culpepper C.H.; Mine Run; Brandy Station; Chambersburg; Leestown; Frederick; Old Town; Waynesboro; Maurytown.

There was also a Baltimore Battery of Light Artillery USA under General Lew Wallace. The two units fought against each other at Antietam and Gettysburg.

Monument at Antietam

Monument at Gettysburg

To return to George’s service in the Confederate army. Shortly after he enlisted, as he was a Baltimorean, he may have become promptly homesick and decided to visit his parents in Baltimore. Some Unionists in the neighborhood must have objected, because on August 4, 1862, George was arrested for treason.

The Union Prison at Fort McHenry

 George was shortly thereafter transferred to Fort Lafayette, but somehow  escaped and rejoined his Confederate unit.

George was captured at Culpepper on September 14, 1863 (His name is listed as George N., but there was only one Clotworthy in the rolls, G. W.) But on 15 December 1863 he escaped the Union prisoner of war camp at Point Lookout by swimming (he claimed) across the chilly Potomac. He returned home briefly and returned to his Confederate unit. His father, Alexander, was questioned by the police he admitted letting his son stay in his house, but denied giving any other aid.

Baltimore Sun 1 January 1864

After the War the Confederate unit was reconstituted as the First Battalion Light Artillery, with all ex-Confederate officers. It was incorporated into the Maryland National Guard and Clotworthy became a Captain.

George became a travelling salesman of a clothing company Daniel Miller and Co. This was the same company for which Alger Hiss’s father worked. Alger also attended the same school as George did: Baltimore City College. (I am also a graduate.)

George joined the Traveling Salesman Protective Association and in 1886 was one of the founding incorporators of the Maryland Division. In that capacity he assisted in 1877 at the inauguration of the memorial to John C. Calhoun in Charleston South Carolina, so one may assume that his political opinions had not changed.

He married Emma Evans on 21 December 1871 in New York. She died 18 October 1889. He then married my great great aunt Susan Riley (1861-1940), twenty years his junior, in 1896. He died on 6 January 1907 at his house at 414 Carrolton Ave. and was buried in a Methodist ceremony.

Susan moved to 2453 Barclay St, a few blocks south of my first house at 3017 Barclay St. On 3 June 1912, the birthday of Jefferson Davis,  at the Maryland Line Confederate Soldiers Home in Pikesville, as the widow of a Confederate veteran she received a bronze Maltese cross of honor in the final distribution of these crosses.

Maryland Line Confederate Home, Pikesville

Confederate veterans, even if disabled, did not receive a pension from the United States; the Home was maintained by private contributions.

The veterans living at the home had lost the war, and many were still suffering wounds. Dr. William Meade Dame, who had fought for the South and then entered the Episcopal ministry, attempted to console them and the widows:

I wonder what prompted George to volunteer for the Confederacy, and then to escape prison twice to rejoin his unit. His family had no connection to slavery; Baltimore was not pro-slavery — over 90% of the blacks in the city were free by 1860. Union candidates won in Baltimore in the 1860 election,  although Lincoln was strongly disliked (he received only 2.48% of the Maryland vote in 1860). George Clotworthy left no letters or journals, he had no descendants, so there is no way of knowing his motivation.

The post My Confederate Great Great Uncle in a Divided State first appeared on Leon J. Podles :: DIALOGUE.