The Presidents Bush: Walker Genealogy Part V

Part I               Part II               Part III               Part IV     Read previous segments.

Polo and Power?

St. Louis began polo in 1892.

Referring back to Part IV, you will remember that G. H. (Bert) Walker returned from his studies in England and Scotland to enroll in law school at Washington University in St. Louis, around 1894. His eldest brother, Sidney, single until 1898, was working at the dry goods firm, while also playing polo at the newly organized St. Louis Polo Club.

Bert also took up polo and far surpassed his brother, Sidney, as shown in society clippings such as the one below. Marked in red are references to members of the Walker family: Bert (G. H.) Walker; his father, D.D., who attended the match in Chicago; brother Sidney, as well as Bert's later wife, Lulu Wear, her mother and married sister--in Chicago to applaud Bert, the star of the team.

It is interesting to note that E.C. Simmons also traveled from St. Louis to Chicago to attend the polo event. Simmons, owner of St. Louis' premier hardware stores, would send three sons to Yale, each of them tapped to Skull and Bones, and he would become the employer of Bert and Lulu Wear Walker's future son-in-law many years after this polo match. Simmons was already an ardent and admiring fan of Bert Walker in 1898 -- more than two decades before Prescott Bush moved to St. Louis to work for Simmons Hardware.

Another name of note is George C. Hitchcock, an attorney, whose family had lived across the street (Vandeventer Place) from D.D. Walker's family. His paternal uncle, Ethan Allen Hitchcock, graduated from William Huntington Russell's military school in New Haven in 1855, and then moved to St. Louis to work with his brother, George's father, Henry Hitchcock. Ethan left St. Louis in 1860 to join Olyphant & Co., a China trading company in which he became a partner in 1866, and from which he retired in 1872, soon returning to St. Louis. President McKinley appointed him the first U.S. Ambassador to Russia in 1897. He was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa fraternity. Both Hitchcock brothers married daughters of Missouri pioneer, George Collier of St. Louis.

Through polo, Bert became interested in horses, and after his starring performance on the polo field in 1898, Bert agreed to chair St. Louis' Horse Shows for several years, beginning in 1899, assisted by his brother Sidney and brother-in-law, Joseph Walker Wear.

David Davis Walker had by that time invested a great amount of his personal funds educating his sons in Catholic institutions. Will had married a Catholic girl from a French background, even though the marriage wasn't entirely successful and eventually ended in divorce after Will's parents died. Maysie had married a Protestant, though he agreed to be interred beside her in a Catholic burial. Sidney announced his engagement to a Protestant, whose father was an eminent doctor, six months before Bert's own small wedding which took place at the home of his bride's mother, her father, James H. Wear having died in late 1893.

Lulu Wear photo

Although "Lulu" had three attendants, Bert had only his brother David at his side. Brother Ted was then in his last semester at Yale, set to graduate in the summer. Also at Yale at the time were three of Lulu's brothers--James H. (Jim) Wear, who had been captain of Yale's freshman football squad in 1897 (class of 1900); Joseph W. (Joe) Wear (class of 1900); and Arthur Y. Wear (class of 1902), who would later die in WWI. 

As for how Bert moved from running his own investment bank in St. Louis to working with or for Averell and Bunny Harriman, the authors of George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, Anton Chaitkin and Webster Tarpley surmised as follows:

Prescott Bush weds Dotty Walker.

Bert Walker formally organized the W.A. Harriman & Co. private bank in November 1919. Walker became the bank’s president and chief executive; Averell Harriman was chairman and controlling co-owner with his brother Roland ( “Bunny” ), Prescott Bush’s close friend from Yale; and Percy Rockefeller was a director and a founding financial sponsor.

In the autumn of 1919, Prescott Bush made the acquaintance of Bert Walker’s daughter Dorothy. They were engaged the following year, and were married in August, 1921. [Columbia University Interview in the Oral History Research Project conducted by Columbia University in 1966, Eisenhower Administration, p. 7.] Among the ushers and grooms at the elaborate wedding were Ellery S. James, Knight Woolley and four other fellow Skull and Bonesmen from the Yale Class of 1917. [St. Louis Globe Democrat, Aug. 7, 1921. p. 16. This is the sequence of events, from Simmons to U.S. Rubber, which Prescott Bush gave in his Columbia University Interview; pp. 5-6. The interview was supposed to be kept confidential and was never published, but Columbia later sold microfilms of the transcript to certain libraries, including Arizona State University), pp. 7-8.] The Bush-Walker extended family has gathered each summer at the “Walker country home” in Kennebunkport, from this marriage of President Bush’s parents down to the present day.

When Prescott married Dorothy, he was only a minor executive of the Simmons Co., railroad equipment suppliers, while his wife’s father was building one of the most gigantic businesses in the world. The following year the couple tried to move back to Columbus, Ohio; there Prescott worked for a short time in a rubber products company owned by his father. But they soon moved again to Milton, Mass., after outsiders bought the little family business and moved it near there.

Thus Prescott Bush was going nowhere fast, when his son George Herbert Walker Bush–the future U.S. President–was born in Milton, Mass., on June 12, 1924.

Perhaps it was as a birthday gift for George, that “Bunny” Harriman stepped in to rescue his father Prescott from oblivion, bringing him into the Harriman-controlled U.S. Rubber Co. in New York City. In 1925 the young family moved to the town where George was to grow up: Greenwich, Connecticut, a suburb both of New York and of New Haven/Yale.

Unfortunately, Chaitkin and Tarpley failed to answer the following questions:

• What was the name of the rubber company Prescott worked for that took him to Milton, Massachusetts?
• Where is the documentation that Bert Walker organized W. A. Harriman & Co. in November 1919?
• And where is the evidence that Prescott was "rescued" by Bunny Harriman?

Our research makes it seem much more likely that the man who threw Prescott a lifeline was his wife's father, Bert Walker, who was closely associated with Lulu Wear's brother, Joseph Wear, in a linoleum and rubber business based in Philadelphia. Joseph Wear's wife's father, William Potter, in 1920 oversaw the sale of his family-owned company to a Certain-teed, incorporated in St. Louis, which manufactured roofing materials.

The Walker Family Vacations

Even before his retirement, D.D. Walker and his wife enjoyed their travels and were often mentioned in local news accounts, frequently accompanied by daughter Mazie (spelled variously as Maizie, Maisie or Maysie) and granddaughter Martha, while husband, Asa Pittman, remained in St. Louis to work.  

As early as 1886 D.D. Davis' family had a summer cottage in Kennebunkport, and that same year they spent the spring in St. Augustine, Florida, accompanied by Mazie and Martha's mother, Jane Beaky, all according to society news items. 

The three youngest sons--David, Bert and Teddy--were sometimes mentioned in the local gossip accounts as well. For example, when Teddy was a 12-year-old boy, attending St. Vincent's Seminary, a Catholic school run by nuns for girls and primary school boys located at Grace and Locust Avenues in St. Louis, he was mentioned in an 1889 feature item and described as "one of the youngest reporters on earth," as he helped interview youngsters who saw the Olympic Theatre's matinee of Little Lord Fauntleroy, then on tour. Ten years after being cited for his reporting skill, Teddy was named to Phi Beta Kappa for his studies in economics at Yale (the same fraternity his great-nephew, George H. W. Bush, would attain in 1948).

We know from vacation accounts that all three of the younger boys attended Stonyhurst in England, David having been enrolled during the fall of 1887 had been taken on a tour of Europe with his parents and sister the following summer. Bert and Teddy skipped Europe that year, going instead to Kennebunkport, their usual vacation place, possibly with family servants supervising, while presumably the two eldest sons, by then in their early twenties, were working at the dry goods business with other members of the firm. 

Bert's summer break from Stonyhurst

Bert's tenure at Stonyhurst, mentioned in a previous segment, thus was not a circumstance special to him, but something the Walker family had chosen for each son by that time. Bert would follow David to Stonyhurst in 1890, as indicated in the local paper's account (inset, left) of their summer plans. Later, Teddy would follow Bert to the Jesuit institute.

After Bert returned to St. Louis and while he was at law school, during the winter of 1895, the St. Louis newspaper published reports that D.D. and Martha Walker had toured California for three months  with their only daughter, Mazie, and her daughter, Martha Walker Pittman, in tow. After two months back in St. Louis, the four had then gone to Kennebunkport to spend the summer months at the D.D. Walkers' cottage. Two years earlier the paper had mentioned that Bert was staying at the Ocean Bluff  House in Kennebunk, Maine, then a popular summer hotel. Perhaps there was not room for him in the family cottage. Perhaps Bert and his father were already experiencing a conflict of personalities which was to plague them in future years.

Mazie died in 1896, however, leaving her daughter in the care of her father, Asa Pitmann, who tragically died from influenza three years later. Martha Walker Pittman thereafter lived with her maternal grandparents when not off in boarding schools in Paris and Briarcliff, New York. She still spent most holidays with her Walker grandparents for many years to come, and was a bridesmaid in Dorothy Walker's Kennebunkport wedding in 1921--when Bert's daughter married Prescott Bush. Four years later, Martha married a Diplomatic Courier Officer from Baltimore society, John Mortimer Duval, Jr.

Bert's In-Laws--the Wear Family

In January 1899 Bert Walker married Lulu Wear, a daughter of one of his father's former competitors. While Wear and Walker had both made their fortunes in the wholesale dry goods trade, the two fathers were unlike in many other ways. The Walkers were Catholic, while the Wears were Presbyterian. Although the Walkers preferred to summer in Maine, the Wear (sometimes misspelled as Ware) family traditionally vacationed at Jamestown island in Rhode Island.

James Hutchinson Wear, Lulu's father, had been born in central Missouri and moved to St. Louis around 1863. Like David Davis Walker, Wear learned the wholesale dry goods trade for fifteen years before he formed a partnership called Wear, Boogher & Co. with Murray Carleton, whose mother had been a Boogher. Shortly before he died, Wear sold his interest to Carleton in 1893. 

John Holliday Wear

John Holliday Wear, the eldest of James H. and Nannie Wear's sons, was born in 1868 and started his career working as a salesman for Murray Carleton, his father's successor, and was still so employed when he married Susan Leigh Slattery in 1903. A year after his sister Lulu married Bert Walker, John Wear obtained a passport with the intent of traveling out of the country, listing his address as Carleton's Dry Goods, 9th Street and Washington Avenue, an address which placed him only a few steps away from Ely & Walker's building, then at the southwest corner of N. 8th and Washington. John H. Wear would thereafter remain in the dry goods business, while his three youngest brothers attended Yale in the late 1890s, as did Bert Walker's youngest brother, Ted. The above addresses today sit across the street from St. Louis' convention center complex.  

Click to enlarge

John Wear resided with his mother, while G.H. and Lulu Walker lived only a mile or so away at 3800 Delmar. A few years after his own marriage in 1903, John's work address became 708 N. 4th Street, while he and Susan lived at 4643 Berlin, changed to Pershing during World War I. The map above also locates the banking office of D.H. Byrd's uncles, mentioned in a previous post at this blog. As we can see, the investment banking offices of Wear, Walker, and the Byrds were within close walking distance from where the Federal Reserve complex was eventually built, and directly across the street from the Wear and Walker dry goods warehouses the city happened to build its convention center, with upscale hotels built at the site of the warehouses.

Mildred Wear (Mrs. Max) Kotany

Lulu's sister, Mildred, four years older than Lulu, was 25 in 1895 when she married 42-year-old Max Kotany, a Hungarian-born stockbroker who immigrated to the U.S. in 1867 at age 14. By 1870 Max was listed in the St. Louis census as a messenger boy in a bank, living in the home of Amelia Abeles, widow of Adolph Abeles, and he still lived in her home on Delmar in 1880. By then he had become a naturalized citizen and a stockbroker.

Mrs. Abeles had been born in Prague around 1831, and arrived in St. Louis in 1849 with the Taussigs, part of her extended family. She married Adolph Abeles almost immediately upon her arrival, and he went into the lumber commission business with Charles S. Taussig. Adolph was unfortunately among those killed in 1855 when the Gasconade Bridge collapsed, and thereafter, Amelia seems to have continued the partnership on her own until her son was old enough to take her place. According to the Find-a-Grave website:

Adolph and Charles developed a vertically integrated business around the Pacific Railroad supplying land, timber and capitol for its development. Adolph was elected state representative to the Missouri General Assembly in 1850 and served two years. Among other things, he promoted the Pacific Railroad's incorporation, which ultimately led to his death.

Amelia's father is shown by some genealogists to have been John Low Taussig, a wholesale dry goods merchant in 1860, as was his brother J. Seligman Taussig. Nevertheless, Amelia was quite close to a family named Singer, who lived in Hungary, and to Minna Singer, married to Alexander Sandor Kotanyi, who remained there. Amelia Abeles obtained a passport in 1867 and made a trip to eastern Europe; that same year Max Kotany arrived in the United States from Hungary to take up residence with Amelia Abeles' family for more than a decade. He told passport officials in 1905 that he was naturalized in 1876. He married Lulu Wear's sister in 1895.

Max also had a younger brother named Ludwig, who moved later to St. Louis and, after studying economics and working with G.H. Walker & Co., was employed as early as 1918 as treasurer of Robert Brookings School of Economics and Government, which had before 1924 been part of Washington University in St. Louis.  

In 1904 Bert Walker was president of the St. Louis Stock Exchange, as well as a member of the New York Stock Exchange. Max Kotany was one of about 50 members of the St. Louis Exchange, and had his own brokerage office on Olive Street, while his brother Ludwig went to work for Max's brother-in-law at G.H. Walker & Co. the year it opened. Bert and Max each served on several committees, with each other and with J. D. Perry Francis, son of former mayor of St. Louis, governor of Missouri, who was then serving as chairman of St. Louis' World's Fair planning committee, after having served in Grover Cleveland's administration. The governor was also a director of the Chicago & Alton Railway, E. H. Harriman's railroad which ran through St. Louis. The connection to the Francis family was powerful indeed for young Bert.

Other wealthy connections came through Bert's wife, Lulu and her sister Mildred Kotany, who had been close to each other and to other girls their age within their father's network of business associates. One such friend, Bertha Dibblee of Chicago, was a daughter of Laura Nash Field Dibblee, Marshall Field's niece and later heir to part of his estate. Bertha had visited Lulu during Christmas holidays in 1897, before her wedding to Bert Walker. Marshall Field was Chicago's biggest retail department store, which bought merchandise from wholesaler Wear, Boogher, while firms like Sears Roebuck and J.C. Penney purchased their dry goods stock from Ely-Walker.

The summer prior to Bertha's visit to St. Louis, Mildred Kotany had chaperoned her sister (inaccurately called Miss L.J. Ware in the newspaper) at the Wentworth Hall casino in Jackson, New Hampshire.[*] Max Kotany was primarily involved with the Taussig brothers in a silver mining syndicate, Good Hope Mining. James J. Taussig was an investment banker who was part of a Montana silver mining syndicate with other wealthy St. Louis businessmen as early as 1879, but his eldest brother William was a physician, who had studied chemistry in Prague before locating in St. Louis. Later Dr. William Taussig was named a director of the newly consolidated St. Louis Union Trust. James Taussig and his family often spent summers at Kennebunkport before acquiring in 1898 a summer home at Shoreby Hill on Jamestown, the island wedged between Newport and Narragansett, Rhode Island. 

James E. Taussig was president of the Wabash Railroad before his death in 1949. James Taussig, a legal associate of Charles Nagel (then married to Fanny Brandeis), in 1878 became a "mentor" to young future Justice Louis D. Brandeis. After Fanny's death, Nagel married Anne Shepley, sister of John Foster and Arthur Shepley and of Louis Shepley (Mrs. Isaac) Lionberger. The Shepleys were grandchildren of Ethan Shepley, U.S. Senator from Maine who resigned to become that state's chief justice. All were part of the power elite in St. Louis.

Both John F. Shepley and Isaac Lionberger, who had been law partners for several years, in 1896 abandoned the Democratic Party of William Jennings Bryan to become Republicans in favor of the gold standard. By this time, Shepley had been at the St. Louis Union Trust for six years, and was married to Sarah Hitchcock, daughter of Ethan Allen Hitchcock, soon to be named by William McKinley as minister to Russia, and also to serve in Teddy Roosevelt's cabinet as secretary of the interior.

James H. Wear, Jr.

James Hutchinson Wear, Jr., Yale class of 1901, married in 1909 Ellen D. Filley, daughter of John Dwight Filley of St. Louis. James played football at Yale and was scorer for the baseball team, according to Yale's yearbook.

Joseph Walker Wear

Lulu's brother, J. W. Wear, finished his studies at Yale in 1899 and married Adaline Coleman Potter, daughter of William Potter of Philadelphia in 1903. William (and Jane Kennedy Vanuxem) Potter lived in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Chestnut Hill, and Adaline's parents both descended from illustrious families in Philadelphia, her father acting as the attorney for his father's company--Thomas Potter & Sons oilcloth and linoleum flooring business. It was a dangerous business, judging from the blazes which occurred on their premises in 1898, 1905, 1915 and 1917. Nevertheless the sale of the Potters' stock to the roofing company owned by George M. Brown of St. Louis, put $3 million in their pockets only a few month after an announcement had been made in March 1920 that Bert Walker was creating a new company to be known as Morton and Company.

In 1920 the company was sold to Certain-teed Products of St. Louis, a move which earned both Bert and William Potter a seat on the new board, while his brother-in-law, Joseph Wear, became treasurer of the new company.

Joseph himself had a patent issued in his name in 1917 for a linoleum product. But before moving to Philadelphia in 1914 to work for his father-in-law, he returned to St. Louis to work in the dry goods company with his older brother John. Two years after John's death, he and his wife moved to her hometown of Philadelphia where J.W. was a very active tennis player at the Cricket Club, especially in doubles competition. He and Dwight F. Davis of St. Louis, who had played on Harvard's team, won the doubles title in 1914, and in 1920-1924 J.S. partnered with Jay Gould II, son of George J. Gould, to capture the championship each year.

In 1892 William Potter had been named Minister to Italy during the administration of President Benjamin Harrison. He later was named president of the Jefferson Medical College and sat on the Board of the Philadelphia City Trusts. At the end of WWI he also went to the Far East in 1919 when Japan was in the process of invading Manchuria.

Arthur Yancey Wear

He played on the Yale baseball team graduated from Yale in 1902 and was tapped to Scroll and Key. President of the St. Louis Club at Yale in 1902. He would be killed in France during WWI.
He was a cousin of Joseph G. Holliday (B.A. 1884), Samuel N. Holliday (B A. 1908), and Joseph Holliday (B.A. 1913).

To be continued.

The Story of DAVID ATLEE PHILLIPS (Part V)

Continued from Part I , Part II, Part III, and Part IV

The Atlee Genealogy

The genealogy of the Atlees is set out in Genealogical record of the Atlee family, The descendants of Judge William Augustus Atlee and Colonel Samuel John Atlee of Lancaster County, Pa by Edwin Atlee Barber. The Atlees were proud of their ancestry and their closeness to national leaders in both England before the revolution and in American after that date. In Part IV we described the nine children of the first American Atlee. Of the three sons, only one is followed in this Part V, being William Pitt Atlee, born in 1772. Edwin Augustus Atlee, born in 1776, having been chronicled in Part IV. About the third son, little is known.


William Pitt Atlee (1772-1815), the eldest son, had been a young lad while his father and uncle took their places in the war of the revolution and within the new government they had fought to create. With both parents dead by 1793, however, as the eldest son, he became head of the family at only 21 years of age.

The man who was elected from 1799 to 1808 as governor had formerly been Chief Justice of Pennsylvania, Thomas McKean. Until his death in 1793, William Augustus Atlee had been the Senior Justice at the same court where McKean was Chief Justice of the circuit. It is McKean, Atlee's mentor, who is given credit for establishing the "spoils system" of political appointments in Pennsylvania, telling Thomas Jefferson in 1801 that "it is not right to put a dagger in the hands of an assassin." Even then, it seems, politics was a very personal affair. Not only did Governor McKean give his colleague's son-in-law the plum position of prothonotary in Cambria County, but he ensured that his own son, Joseph M. McKean, was appointed district attorney.

McKean had never been idle, having commanded a battalion which served in the Jersey campaigns of 1776-77, been a promoter of and signer of the Declaration of Independence, a member of the 1778 convention which framed the Articles of Confederation, President of Congress (1781), and in a delegate to the Pennsylvania convention to ratify the federal constitution in 1787. He was a member of the Pennsylvania constitutional convention of 1789-90, and under it became its second executive, filling the gubernatorial office three terms, from December 17, 1799, to December 20, 1808. He also was named a trustee of the University of Pennsylvania and died in 1817.

His associate, William A. Atlee, before 1779, had also been named as a trustee of the University of Pennsylvania, then known as the College, Academy and Charitable School of Philadelphia, which had been founded by Benjamin Franklin and William Shippen. The newly elected General Assembly formed and elected following independence, passed an Act which illegally attempted to place ownership into the hands of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, rather than the original proprietors who had established the College in 1740. That attempt was partially repealed in 1789, but other provisions remained as before. The U.S. Supreme Court held in a landmark decision in 1819, in Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 518, that a privately funded college could not be changed into a state university. The appointing of trustees must proceed as set out in the original charter.

The significance of this case to our study is that the choice of who would handle appointment of trustees for the University of Pennsylvania would remain in the hands of persons close to the man who was a direct ancestor of David Atlee Phillips, i.e. William Augustus Atlee. The purpose of this study is to determine whether that fact had any influence on what choices Atlee's infamous descendant made during his life.

Atlee was not above using his connections. As soon as the revolution was complete and the peace treaty was in the works, he had requested Judge McKean to use his friendship with John Adams, then a peace negotiator for the new federal government, to investigate whether Atlee's father had an inheritance in England. Adams replied to McKean, asking for funds to be sent to him, which he would then deliver to Dr. John Brown Cutting. A pharmacist in the Continental Army during the revolutionary war, Cutting had subsequently studied law under Judge John Lowell in Boston until 1786, at which time he made his way to London to study at the Inner Temple. Although the funds Cutting requested appear to have been received in London by Adams, there is no indication that Cutting ever actually investigated the property records for Atlee, nor that that was any estate remaining in the Atlee family.

The year before his death, Justice Atlee and his colleague, Thomas McKean, were named with others as Electors chosen to cast their votes in the Presidential election for George Washington's second term. This honor occurred only a few months before Atlee's death. Many of those electors named were also trustees of what was then called the College of Philadelphia.

William Pitt Atlee Branch
 
William Pitt Atlee was 26 years of age in 1798 when he married sixteen-year-old Sarah Light, whose New York born father, John Light, a Major during the revolutionary war, had settled at Lancaster in 1783, operating a pub. Major Light joined the St. James Episcopal church attended by the Atlee family. He was elected chief burgess in 1803, becoming a stalwart in Democratic politics, named as an elector on the ballot in 1824 in support the candidacy of William Crawford of Georgia for president and Albert Gallatin as vice-president. Sarah's father died in 1834.

Sarah Light Atlee had lost her husband in 1815 when he was only 43, leaving his wife to rear six minor children without his assistance. Like his father-in-law, William Pitt Atlee had served as a soldier, though not in the revolutionary war but in the War of 1812, attaining the rank of Colonel. During his life apart from the military he worked as a coppersmith, deputy sheriff and a marshal for the Lancaster district before the war, which possibly influenced his being placed in charge of British prisoners during the war. His wife, Sarah Light Atlee, who survived him by 35 years, watched as the eldest of their four sons followed in the footsteps of William Pitt's younger brother, Edwin A. Atlee. who was already on his way toward an eminent medical career before 1812, as shown in our previous post. 

The names below are the children of William Pitt and Sarah Light Atlee.

John Light Atlee
John Light Atlee (1799-1885), studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, married a daughter of Judge Walter Franklin and practiced gynecological surgery in Lancaster until his death there in 1885. Unlike his uncle, Edwin Atlee, John remained a member of the Episcopal Church.


Elizabeth Amelia
Elizabeth Amelia Atlee (1801-1848) married in 1824 Rev. Alexander Varian, an Episcopal minister and missionary to Vincennes, Indiana, who was transferred from the diocese in Ohio. Rev. Varian and his daughters, Sarah and Harriet, operated a boarding school for young ladies there in the 1850's.

William Lewis Atlee
William Lewis Atlee (1803-1880), the second son, may sometimes become confused with the youngest of the four Atlee sons of this generation because he used the initials W. L. for his name, which were the same as those of Washington Lemuel Atlee, five years younger, who, to avoid confusion, apparently tried to use his full name rather than only the initials. 

W. L. was married in 1828 in Gettysburg to Sarah Gilbert, a sister of his younger brother's wife, Delilah. William and Edwin Atlee went into business together in Gettysburg, making equipment for horse-drawn carriages as well as saddles and bridles. In 1840 much of the extended family of Atlees and Gilberts had also relocated to Athens, continuing in the same business begun in Gettysburg--manufacturing saddles, harnesses and other equipment used in horse-borne transportation. But they were no longer Episcopal or Quaker; all of this branch had become Methodists.

Their eldest daughter, Sarah Elizabeth Atlee, in 1847 married Rev. William Reynolds Long, and they reared twelve children in rural McMinn County, earning their living by farming. One of their children, Rev. Carroll Summerfield Long, however, served as a Methodist missionary to Japan after studying at East Tennessee Wesleyan. Arriving in Japan in 1880, Rev. Carroll Long served a total of eight years, mostly in Nagasaki, where he founded Cobleigh Seminary (1881), was presiding elder of the Nagasaki and Nagoya districts. He even founded a school for girls in Nagoya (October 1888) before his death in 1890.

Edwin Augustus Atlee
It is easy to confuse Edwin Augustus Atlee (1804-1868) with his uncle with the same name--the  youngest son of William Augustus Atlee. This second Edwin, however, was not a physician but a saddle and harness manufacturer. In 1826 he married Delilah Gilbert, a young lady who lived in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania (born 1809), whose father, Barnhart (Bernhart/Bernhardt) Gilbert, had owned a pub across the street from the courthouse in Gettysburg since 1812. The pub and its contiguous land was sold in 1827 to the Bank of Gettysburg (later called Gettysburg National Bank), of which Gilbert had been a founder and shareholder in 1814, also a director for four years. Delilah's younger sister, Sarah Gilbert, would marry Edwin's older brother, William Lewis Atlee two years later.

Catherine Esther Atlee
Catherine Esther Atlee (1806-1879) married Henry Pinkerton in 1825.

Washington Lemuel Atlee
The youngest son was Washington Lemuel Atlee (1808-1878), would also become a medical doctor, an 1828 graduate of Jefferson College. He practiced medicine in Lancaster, Pa. until 1845 when he moved to Philadelphia as chemistry professor at Jefferson's successor, the Philadelphia Medical College, later known as Pennsylvania Medical College. He resigned in 1852 to specialize in surgery to remove ovarian tumors. Dr. Washington L. Atlee was the last surviving member of the Pennsylvania Medical College where the surgical chair was in 1845 occupied by Dr. David Gilbert. Others in that department were Dr. William R. Grant, William Darrach, H. L. Patterson, and J. Wiltbank, besides Dr. Atlee.

His wife since 1830 was Ann Hoff, granddaughter of a German clockmaker who had settled in Lancaster in 1765. Her father, John Hoff, was born in Lancaster the year the revolution began. Their first child, named George McClellan Atlee for the doctor who founded Jefferson College, died as an infant, but subsequent children did survive.

• Eliza Varian Atlee (1836-1899) married John Foreman Sheaff in 1858.
• Ann Catherine Atlee (1832-1882) married David Burpee, M.D.
• Mary Louise Atlee (1833-1901) married Thomas Murray Drysdale, M.D. of Philadelphia, who served as Dr. Atlee's literary executor upon his father-in-law's death in 1878.
• Margaret Atlee (1839-1917) married George A. Hoff in 1879.
• Dr. Washington Lemuel Atlee, Jr. (1841-1900) married Anna M. West in 1864. 

In Part VI, we will move the family to Texas, where the most notorious descendant lived out his life, his notoriety being the fact that he spent a career in the Central Intelligence Agency and has been documented to have been involved in not only setting up fellow Fort Worth resident Lee Harvey Oswald as the patsy blamed for killing President John F. Kennedy, but very likely was himself involved in planning that murder.

The Story of DAVID ATLEE PHILLIPS (Part IV)

Continued from Part I , Part II, and Part III

Nine Children of William Augustus Atlee

William Augustus Atlee's wife, formerly Esther Sayre, began having children in 1764. His mother, Jane Alcock Atlee, died in 1777 in Lancaster, where she had lived as a widow for more than thirty years. The same year his mother died, William A. Atlee had been named a circuit justice of the Supreme Court of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, established under a new Constitution, written pursuant to an expressed wish of the Continental Congress. The first four Atlee children were girls who, although they would not pass on the Atlee surname, did give their children traditional Atlee names, while their marriages connected them to eminent families.

Elizabeth Amelia Atlee White
The eldest child, Elizabeth Amelia Atlee, in 1786, married Major Moses White from Rutland, Massachusetts, an aide-de-camp during the war to his cousin, Brigadier General Moses Hazen. Their marriage resulted in her move to Massachusetts, where White worked diligently for decades as Executor of the Hazen estate. Moses White's mother, Miriam Hoyt Hazen, had been the widow of of Moses Hazen's brother, Richard Hazen,before her marriage to John White, in 1753. 

Phillips founded Academy at Exeter and Andover.

In 1803 Elizabeth Atlee White's younger sister, Charlotte Hazen Atlee, who had been four years of age when her sister married, was wed to Moses White's younger brother, Nathaniel. It is possible that she had moved to live with the Whites in Massachusetts after her parents died. 

The White brothers were related by marriage to some of the most elite members of colonial society, including the person for whom the youngest child was named.


Hazen's first was wife, Abigail White, daughter of  John and Lydia Gilman White, married Rev. Samuel Phillips of Andover, brother of John Phillips, who in 1781 endowed and chartered the elite Phillips Academy in Exeter, N. H. and in 1783 the Phillips Academy in Andover. In fact, three White siblings married Phillips siblings. See The Genealogy of William White, which shows the intermarriages between the White, Hazen and Phillips families.

John Phillips, Exeter founder

John and Lydia White's son, William, married John's sister, Sarah Phillips, while son Samuel White married Ruth Phillips. A daughter, Abigail White married General Moses Hazen, mentioned above. 

One daughter, Elizabeth Amelia White, in 1824 married a son of Oliver Peabody, trustee of the Academy from 1794 until 1828, its treasurer from 1808. Elizabeth and her husband, Rev. William Bourne Oliver Peabody, had a son who, with her husband's twin brother, Oliver W. Peabody, helped found the investment firm Kidder, Peabody & Co.1

Meanwhile the Phillips Academies founded in Exeter, New Hampshire, and at Andover, Massachusetts, were becoming among the schools where the most elite of the revolutionary patriots chose to have their sons educated for university preparation for college at Harvard and Yale. 


Mary Rachel Atlee James
The second daughter, Mary Rachel Atlee, married in 1798, several years after her parents died and just a year before her late father's close colleague, Judge McKean, became Pennsylvania's governor. McKean appointed Mary's husband, Edward Victor James, prothonotary for Cambria County, Pennsylvania, created in 1805, although Mary died before he could take office in 1808.

Settlement had already begun to move westward, and Edward James had acquired a tract of land in the county and set out to develop the village of Munster, Pennsylvania, which he hoped would become the county seat once Cambria County was carved out. Munster unfortunately lost out to Ebensburg, almost twice its size. Also in the running was Loretto, the Catholic area dominated by a Catholic priest, Father Demetrius Augustine Gallitzin, a Russian prince whose father had been Russia's ambassador to the Netherlands. Gallitzin was the sole priest at Loretto--the only Catholic church between Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and St. Louis, and he played another role as well, also leading drills for the 142nd Pennsylvania Militia, which would fight in the war of 1812. 2

Jane Atlee Rigg
Jane Atlee (born 1769) married Elisha Rigg, who had been sent by the Episcopal Church as minister to the St. James Church in Lancaster prior to marrying his young parishioner in 1790. By 1799 he and Jane moved to Queen Anne's County, Maryland, where he was transferred to St. Paul's Church to serve under America's first Episcopal Bishop Thomas John Claggett. Rev. Henry Lyon Davis was nearby in St. Mary's County and in Cecil County, serving under Bishop Claggett. Previously, while researching the Presidents Bush Walker family, we noted that Rev. Davis was the brother-in-law of Ann Mercer Davis, Harriet Mercer Walker's sister. Harriet had married George E. Walker in Cecil County and later moved to Illinois, where her son David Davis Walker was born. (See genealogy chart here.) After her husband's death in Maryland in 1804, Jane apparently returned to Lancaster with her children. 

There were three sons who followed.

William Pitt Atlee
The first William Pitt Atlee (born in 1770) died at the age of two--the same year a second son was born and given his deceased brother's name. It is this second William Pitt Atlee whose branch will be followed in the next segment. It is from his branch that David Atlee Phillips is derived. For simplicity, a chart is inserted below to compare this branch (bracketed in red) with the other siblings, since the same names appear in various generations.

Click here for pdf format file.

John Sayre Atlee
John Sayre Atlee (born 1774) was a craftsman who lived in Columbia, Pennsylvania, who made clock cabinets, and appears to have married Elizabeth Fritz in 1848 at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and died there in 1852, having little contact with the rest of the Atlee family.

Edwin Augustus Atlee
Edwin Augustus Atlee (born 1776) went to Dickinson College at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, graduating in 1792 in the same class with future Supreme Court Justice Roger B. Taney, who also had ties to Mount St. Mary's in Maryland. Edwin married in 1798 Margaret Snyder, whose uncle became Pennsylvania's third governor, Simon Snyder. Not officially elected to the governorship until 1808, Snyder had opposed McKean in 1805, when his Jeffersonian friends attempted to oust "the old patriot," by means of a plan hatched in a Lancaster tavern, described in the Gettysburg press as "sudden, daring and dangerous attempts to demolish the fabric of government and to overthrow the present Republican Administration."

President's Residence in Philadelphia

Returning to Lancaster after graduation from Dickinson, Edwin, a member of a Lancaster militia, was called up during the Whiskey Insurrection, 1791-1794, which required security to protect President George Washington in Philadelphia. During his military experience, Edwin witnessed the terrible consequences of a yellow fever epidemic in 1793, which resulted in his father's death, and likely was the stimulus for his change from a study of law to a career in medicine. 

He then enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania's Institutes of Medicine, which Dr. Benjamin Rush (page 131) had organized to give medical care to revolutionary soldiers and studied under Dr. Benjamin Barton (page 138), a boyhood friend from Lancaster. His son, Edwin Pitt Atlee, born in 1799, would also graduate from the University's medical institute and practice medicine in Philadelphia. 

Dr. George B. McClellan

Both Edwin Atlees (E. A. and E. P.) joined the Society of Friends, departing from the Atlees' tradition in the Anglican and Episcopal church. Both Drs. Atlee were in Philadelphia in 1817 at the time George B. McClellan (page 160) entered the city for his medical studies, and they would often be named with him as doctors who recommended certain patented medications, such as the hernia truss and Parker's Panacea. Dr. McClellan established his surgical practice in 1821 and, in 1824, sought and received the charter for the Jefferson Medical College. Edwin A.'s nephew, Dr. Washington Lemuel Atlee (sometimes known as Dr. Washington Light Atlee), was a private pupil of McClellan's and graduated in 1829. 

It is most interesting here to note that Dr. (later civil war General) McClellan came to Philadelphia from Connecticut, where he had studied under Dr. Thomas Hubbard, the head of surgery at Yale. Hubbard's daughter married William Huntington Russell, co-founder of Skull and Bones. I have written about Hubbard and Russell previously here and here. Incidentally, Dr. James William Scanlan, nephew of Bush ancestor George E. Walker, received his medical degree from Jefferson during the same time Dr. Atlee was in Philadelphia. The pattern which is emerging indicates that both the Walker/Bush family and the Atlee family have a strong historical connection to the University of Pennsylvania, where America's medical establishment was founded.
In 1829 Dr. Edwin A. Atlee moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, where he was pastor of the First New Jerusalem Society (Swedenborgian denomination). His medical practice was at W. 4th and N. Main streets, while he also had the title of vice president at the First District Medical Society of Ohio. By 1832, his son, Dr. Edwin P. Atlee, had become a professor at the Ohio Medical College in Cincinnati as well as being pastor of the Cincinnati Society church.
In 1822 Edwin Pitt Atlee was married to Margaret Collins Bullock, who gave birth to seven children. Following her husband's death in 1836, Margaret married William W. Longstreth., a hardware merchant whose interest coal transportation developed into his becoming president of the Lehigh Valley Railroad in 1864.

Browne

Edwin Pitt's younger sister, Esther Barton Atlee, married in 1839 Samuel J. Browne, a miserly pioneer of Cincinnati, who died very wealthy in 1872. Several months before his death, he killed a young boy who had gone into Browne's back yard to fetch a ball. The press had a field day, and a grand jury was in the act of voting an indictment against him at the moment he died.

Browne had invested funds to buy stock in the Eastern Texas Railroad Company to be built in Texas at Sabine Pass, and a stepson, Edwin Augustus At Lee Barker, had moved to east Texas to oversee the investment for several years immediately prior to the start of the civil war. Barker's own two sons had, in fact, been born in Sabine Pass, Texas in the early 1860s.

Unfortunately, the war had devastated that investment, and the rails, removed to hide them from looters, were then stolen by the Confederate army. Browne's will left the land grants, which he hoped would be paid by the State of Texas for building of this road, to the children of his daughter, wife of Dr. Jacob H. Hunt. The railroad was completed after the Civil War under a different name, Sabine and East Texas Railway. [See Sabine Pass at southeast corner of Texas on map.]

You may recall from this blog that the Byrd family and G. H. Walker were involved in building railroads in southeastern Missouri and northern Mississippi, and that David Atlee Phillips' ancestor, Dr. Charles G. Young, had met his wife Mary in Cincinnati, Ohio, while there studying medicine. After Dr. Young completed his studies, he moved to Louisiana, where their first child, Caroline, was born in 1844. In about 1851 he began working to build a railroad between Shreveport and Vicksburg, and in 1855 sat on a committee with Albert Pike in a "commercial convention" in New Orleans. All that had happened before he brought his family to Texas where he continued building the railroad, and where he met his untimely death in 1871.

Swedenborg

Another sister of Edwin Pitt Atlee, Mary Patience Atlee (born 1806 in Lancaster), married George Africanus O'Brien, son of Richard O'Brien, consul in both Italy and Algeria during very earliest days of the U.S. State Department. George, born during his father's duties in Africa, married Mary in Philadelphia in 1827, and they would have nine children before Mary's death in 1862. The wedding took place in the midst of the "great separation" period, as reflected in the fact that the wedding ceremony was performed by Swedenborgian pastor, Rev. Manning B. Roche, who had been deposed as an Episcopal priest in 1822. Dr. Atlee was then living in Cincinnati, where he was a licentiate. One year after Mary's marriage to O'Brien, Rev. Roche would make "an evangelistic tour" to Cincinnati, where in 1829 Dr. Atlee became resident pastor. He resigned in 1832, and by 1835 he was back in Philadelphia, preaching at the "Free Quaker" meeting house. By 1847 he was a missionary. In a letter which mentions both Roche and Atlee, Atlee's role in the Swedenborgian movement was laid out:

Atlee, Dr. Edwin Augustus (1776-1852) – prominent Philadelphia Quaker physician and religious activist. Born in Lancaster, he attended Dickinson College and was converted at a Methodist camp meeting – even serving as a Methodist pastor before turning to the simpler and more sacrificial lifestyle he saw in within the Friends. In 1825, letters were published between Atlee and Elias Hicks, leader of the 1827 Hicksite split in the Society of Friends. In 1826, Atlee embraced Swedenborgianism. After the original New Church congregation lost its temple, mainly due to the financial collapse of William Schlatter, Dr. Atlee and Manning Roche led separate societies that met in community halls. He resigned from the denomination in 1832 in a letter which reads in part: “Although I am fully persuaded and convinced that the doctrines of the New Jerusalem are Heavenly, and as a system perfect, yet I am equally convinced that by reuniting with Friends I shall best qualify myself for realizing in life the Divine Truths of the Word, and for usefulness in the vineyards of the Lord.”

Esther Bowes Atlee
Esther Bowes Atlee (born 1778) but died in 1781.

Sarah Ann Atlee 
Sarah Ann Atlee (born 1780) was left motherless at the age of ten when Esther Atlee died in 1790. A year later, Judge Atlee purchased a mill with 57 acres of land lived in the attached mansion with his daughters until his own death two years later when a yellow fever epidemic returned to Philadelphia after 30 years of absence. The youngest Atlee girls, ages eleven and thirteen when their father died, lost their home in 1795, when the Orphan's Court ordered it to be sold. A year after the mansion was sold, Sarah Ann Atlee, at the age of 16, married a wealthy surveyor named Thomas Vickroy who was more than twice her age. A widower with five children, he took his teenage bride west to Bedford Springs, Pennsylvania, where his surveying business was centered, and together they had several more children. Familiar with her family's heritage, Sarah gave her children family names: Her first son was William Atlee Vickroy. Her first daughter was named Esther Amelia, but called "Hettie," who before 1823 married Jacob W. Slick. She died in 1861 after moving to Johnstown in Cambria County, where Jacob Slick died in 1879. Edwin Augustus Vickroy became a surveyor, like his father, and often ran unsuccessfully for county surveyor of Cambia County as a Republican.

Charlotte Hazen Atlee
Charlotte Hazen Atlee (born 1782)  was named for the wife of Brigadier General Moses Hazen, 
Charlotte de la Saussaye, from Montreal, where he had married her in 1770. Following the war, Hazen was stationed in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where the Atlees lived, while he was officer in charge of prisoner guard duty there. One of his decisions resulted in an incident, known as the "Asgill Affair," which drew President Washington into a diplomatic quandary. Hazen was in communication during the incident with Edward Hand, the doctor-turned-Army officer under whom William Augustus Atlee's youngest son Edwin eventually studied medicine. It appears quite likely, therefore, that Hazen's wife, Charlotte, had followed her husband to Lancaster and had become close friends with Esther Atlee, especially since she was present as a "sponsor" at the baptism of their youngest daughter on October 17, 1782. 

As stated previously, Esther died in 1790, leaving Charlotte without a mother at the age of eight years. When her father also died three years later, it appears that Charlotte was taken into the home of either her godmother, Charlotte Hazen, or her eldest sister, who had married Gen. Hazen's paymaster and aide, Moses White. When Charlotte was 21, she married Nathaniel Hazen White, the half-brother of her sister's husband. Both he and her first child had died by 1805, and Charlotte turned to the Baptist church in Haverhill for solace, especially after her sister, Elizabeth Amelia White, died in 1808. A few years later she became a Baptist missionary chosen to accompany a missionary couple named Hough to Rangoon, India. In a letter to the mission board she explained what led her to that decision. While on the mission field in Serampore, she met and married Rev. Joshua Rowe. After his death in India in 1823, she was left with twin girls and an infant son. A narrative dated December 10, 1827, which appeared in the London Morning Herald, was reprinted in a New York newspaper in 1828.