Luter Branch of Atlee Family

Mrs. James H. French's "Texas Genealogy"

Mrs. James H. French, wife of famed San Antonio mayor, wrote a newspaper column called "Texas Genealogy". The genealogist's husband, James H. French, "the best mayor San Antonio ever had," moved to San Antonio in 1851, first working as a merchant before he was elected mayor in 1875, and he served in that position  through 1885. Because of political connections within the national Democratic Party, he was thereafter appointed Postmaster for the city and was also elected city councilman before his death in 1893. His widow (the former Sarah L. Webb), began writing a genealogy column about society-minded Texans for the Sunday San Antonio Light newspaper in July 1906.

In December of that year Mrs. French explained how those members of the branch from which Mary Parson Atlee sprang made their way to Texas. She had already written about the Maverick and Maury families into which Dr. Luter married almost a year earlier. Mrs. French may have been surprised that the child of a third-generation Pennsylvanian, Edwin Augustus Atlee, would find her husband in the wilds of Goliad, Texas. But that was where E.A. Atlee's third child, Anna, lived after her marriage to John Solomon McCampbell, a lawyer and later judge in Corpus Christi.

Edwin's  fourth child, Sarah Catherine, in 1856 married Giles Exum Luter, district clerk in Goliad County.

Catherine Atlee Luter had a son born in 1866, Dr. William Edwin Luter, who, in the late 1880s, had given his address simply as "Mexico". His brother, Henry Exum Luter, had a mail contract between Goliad and Cibolo in 1854, but later lived in Corpus Christi until his death in 1941.

Before moving to San Antonio, Dr. W. E. Luter was a pharmacist and assistant manager of John Sealy Hospital in Galveston. The census of 1900 records him at 119 N. Alamo, in San Antonio, which was still used as his office in 1910. Today this is the old Post Office at E. Houston and N. Alamo. By 1902 he was president of the West Texas Medical Association which met in that city.

He married Eleanor Stribling Maury in 1906, and became a member of the staff of the Santa Rosa Infirmary (Incarnate Word). He was also for a time physician and surgeon of the Mission Home and Training School for Girls in San Antonio. After their wedding, the Luters lived at 205 E. Pecan, at Navarro Street, next door to St. Mark's Episcopal Church on the north side of Travis Park Plaza.

St. Anthony Hotel, 1910

The lot on the south side of Travis Park (now 300 E. Travis Street) was in the process of being chosen as the site of the still standing St. Anthony Hotel, which was completed in 1909 by Brazilla Lafayette Naylor and his partner, A. H. Jones, Jr., the youngest child of a famous Texas hero, Augustus Harris Jones, and his third wife. Naylor died in 1910, leaving his estate to his wife and daughter, Zilla, wife of Arthur Hunter Morton, who managed Naylor's properties for many years. Gus Jones was elected San Antonio's mayor in June 1912, only months before he died the following April, attended by Dr. Luter and another physician.

117 E. French Place

Eleanor Maury's parents were Stephen Price and Eleanor Stribling (daughter of Benjamin Stribling) Maury. Her maternal grandmother, Mrs. Elizabeth Alexander Stribling, widow of Thomas Haile Stribling, had been born in 1836, the year Texas declared independence from Mexico. The 1900 census shows Mrs. E. A. Stribling living in a large residence at 117 E. French Place between N. Main and San Pedro in San Antonio, where she employed three live-in servants for herself, her son, Ben Stribling, and his nine-year-old daughter "Elinor." At some point the Luters began to live separately and were divorced. Dr. Luter died in 1930.

In that same block with Eleanor's grandmother lived John L. Luter, a Texas-born man whose parents had arrived from Tennessee before 1861. His wife was Mabel Moody. In 1924 this house was sold to become an Episcopal girls' school called St. Mary's Hall, which in 1968 became the home of San Antonio Academy, a boys' school, previously affiliated with the elite West Texas Military Academy and Texas Military Institute. One alumnus of San Antonio Academy, coincidentally, was Robert Moss Ayres, the architect son of Atlee B. Ayres, who also did work on St. Mary's Hall when it was sold to his alma mater. Atlee B. Ayres' eldest sister was David Atlee Phillips' grandmother, Gussie Ayres Young, both of whom grew up in Houston and San Antonio as children of Nathan Tandy and Mary Parson Atlee Ayres, who had moved to Texas from Highland County, Ohio.

Battle of Flowers Queen

Eleanor Maury Luter's paternal aunt, Ellen Maury, married James Luther Slayden, Congressman from San Antonio during 1897-1919. Ellen Slayden originated the Battle of Flowers, in 1891 "as an April 21 salute to the heroes of the battles of the Alamo and San Jacinto." The parade quickly became a week-long fiesta which culminated with the crowning of a queen, and eventually a king as well. The Battle of Flowers Association was set up to plan the event as part of Fiesta San Antonio, and the city's women in society all worked together to make it a success. It remains as one of San Antonio's biggest traditions.

The Maurys intermarried with the family of Texas hero Samuel Maverick, an 1825 Yale graduate and Virginia-trained attorney, who sought his fortune by moving to San Antonio in 1835. Ellen Maury Slayden kept diaries, which revealed how observant Mrs. Slayden had been during her husband's tenure within the Texas delegation in Washington, D. C. Much of her knowledge of Texas lore no doubt was passed to her sister, Jane L. Maury, who married Samuel Maverick and became the mother of  F. Maury Maverick, another Texas Congressman.

Cong. Maury Maverick's wife, Terrell Louise Dobbs, after his death in 1954, married Walter Prescott Webb, editor of the Slayden diaries. University of Texas professor Webb died in a one-car accident on March 8, 1963, at almost the same time the diaries were published.

Webb's historic property, Friday Mountain Ranch, was sold that same month to Rodney Kidd, long-time Texas University Interscholastic League director, who turned it into a camp for boys, which would later (1983) be sued when a counselor allegedly sexually abused a young male camper.

The Story of DAVID ATLEE PHILLIPS (Part VI)

The Atlee Family in Texas

David Atlee Phillips' descent from Mary Parson Atlee (click to enlarge)

David Atlee Phillips was born and bred in Texas, but his great-grandmother, Mary Parson Atlee, born in Athens, Tennessee, was a direct descendant of William Augustus Atlee and Esther Sayre, the Pennsylvania-born progenitors of the Atlee clan.

The Children of Edwin Augustus and Sarah Gilbert Atlee

Amelia Varian Atlee - Atlee Marriage to Ayres

Named for Edwin's eldest sister, Elizabeth Amelia, who had married Episcopal minister Alexander Varian, Amelia Varian Atlee, was born in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in 1829 but lived in Athens, Tennessee, at the time she was married in 1850 to Rev. Alexander Findley Cox.

Their eldest daughter, born in 1852 in Athens, was given the name of a popular poet, Felicia Hemans  Cox. The Coxes' second child, Peery At Lee Cox, was born in Virginia in 1854, and a third child, born a year later in Tennessee, died at six weeks of age. Less than a year after the death of the baby, Rev. Cox was sent to do mission work in Texas, where a fourth child, Mary Eliza Cox, was born at Goliad, Texas in late summer of 1857--twelve years after the Republic of Texas had been annexed to the Union as a state. Felicia Cox grew up to marry in 1868 Youngs O. Coleman, one of the bosses at the Coleman ranches in Rockport, Texas, started by Margaretta Atlee's husband, Thomas M. Coleman and his father, Youngs Levi Coleman, who died in 1881.

Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware, OH

Their younger daughter Mary was married in 1881 to John H. Williamson in Lockhart, Texas, and a son, Alexander Bascom Cox, would be born in Goliad in 1861. When he was 30, he married Martha Rischke, a German-born citizen of Texas. A widow since 1910, Martha and her daughter Amelia Katherine Cox had for many years lived in San Antonio only a mile or two from Bascom Cox's uncle, the architect Atlee B. Ayres. Katherine, single, was a schoolteacher supporting her mother when Atlee's first wife died in 1937. A few years later the cousins married. Martha died in 1952 at their home in San Antonio at 201 Belknap. Katherine's brother, A. Bascom Cox, Jr., became a Brownsville, Texas, attorney. Martha's sister, Anna, had married another cousin, Alex. O. Coleman, son of Youngs O. and Felicia Cox Coleman, and but she had died in 1909.

Amelia V. Atlee Cox was the first of this branch of the Atlee family to arrive in Texas as early as 1855. Rev. Cox, a Virginian and a Methodist, arrived in Athens, Tennessee (home of East Tennessee Wesleyan College), and there he met Amelia, whose younger brother, Edwin Augustus Atlee, Jr. had recently attended Ohio Wesleyan University, not founded until 1844. In Ohio he met an Ohio native, Nathan Tandy Ayres, the man who would marry Mary Parson Atlee, Edwin, Jr. and Amelia's youngest sister. In Goliad the Coxes would meet John S. McCampbell, an attorney, who would marry another relative.

John Smith Gillett, of Karnes County, who for 36 years was secretary to the West Texas Conference's board of missions of the Methodist Church, wrote Rev. Cox's obituary in the Beeville, Weekly Picayune,  9 Apr 1897:

"AN AGED PREACHER GONE
Rev. A. F. Cox Passes Peacefully Over the River."

According to this piece, Cox lived in that region of Texas around 40 years, "having reached Goliad December 1, 1856, and being a minister and most of the time actively engaged in preaching... He was born in Washington county, Va., December 1, 1823, was at the time of his death 73 years, 4 months and 4 days old. On May 1, 1850, he was married to Miss Amelia V. Atlee, who, with seven children survive him." It adds that Cox was a preacher for over 52 years, as well as having been for seven years "editor and publisher of a weekly paper in the town of Goliad, called the Goliad Messenger, which was finally changed to the Goliad Guard by the father of the present publisher (R. T. Davis). For about twenty-five years Bro. Cox has been a member of the West Texas conference."

 John Light Atlee

Edwin's second child, John Light Atlee, born in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in 1832, grew up in Athens, Tennessee before moving to Philadelphia to study medicine. Two uncles had studied there before him:

• John Light Atlee (1799-1885), for whom he was named, who studied medicine and 
• Washington Lemuel Atlee (1808-1878), who graduated from Jefferson in 1828 and practiced medicine at Lancaster, Pennsylvania until 1845 when he moved back to Philadelphia to teach at Jefferson's successor, Philadelphia Medical College.

After graduating in 1853 from Jefferson College in Philadelphia, where his uncles had studied and taught, he returned to Athens, Tennessee to practice. There he married Sarah Humphreys. He could easily be confused with an uncle and cousin with the same name, who were also physicians, but who practiced in Pennsylvania.

In May 1855, soon after his sister's husband was sent to Texas as a missionary, Dr. Atlee packed up his belongings and announced he too was moving to Goliad, Texas. The Athens newspaper bid him farewell and wished him well in his move to south Texas. Dr. Atlee, however, clearly did not find the wild west to his liking, as he had returned by August of the same year. In 1906 he and his wife celebrated their golden wedding anniversary in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where he died six years later. 

Anna Elizabeth Atlee

E.A. Atlee's children have reunion, 1907

Anna Elizabeth Atlee, born 1834 in Gettysburg, grew up in Athens, Tennessee, but, in 1857, while visiting her elder sister Amelia Cox in Goliad, Texas, met a lawyer named John Solomon McCampbell. They married in Athens but made their home in Texas. In 1876 McCampbell formed a partnership with Anna's younger brother, E. A. Atlee, Jr., for three years before Atlee became a politician. McCampbell  then entered into a second partnership with John S. Givens, which lasted until Givens' death in 1887. Givens' sister, it should be noted, was the widowed mother of  Archer Parr, who grew up in Givens' home after his father's death. Edwin Atlee McCampbell, born in 1856, also practiced with his father in Corpus Christi following Givens' death.

John McCampbell would also serve as a director with Richard King of the King Ranch on the railroad King and Uriah Lott were starting to build by 1876, which was sold in 1881 to a syndicate that chartered it as the Texas Mexican Railway to build westerly to Laredo on the border with Mexico. By 1890 the McCampbells were engaged with Uriah Lott in building a harbor in Corpus Christi, and by the end of the century they were in a law partnership with Robert Weldon Stayton, noted legal scholar.

Sarah Catherine Atlee

Sarah Catherine Atlee was born in Gettysburg, PA in 1836. In 1856 she married Giles Exum Luter, whose parents had moved west from North Carolina to Texas. Luter died in Texas in 1868, and afterward Sarah took her three daughters (Emma, Sarah Margaretta and Clara Augusta Luter--all born in Goliad, Texas) back to her mother's home in Athens, Tennessee. They did, however, return to Texas from time to time, including in 1907 for a family reunion in Corpus Christi, hosted by the McCampbells.

Margaretta Susan Atlee

Born 1839, Margaretta, at the age of 20, married Thomas M. Coleman of Rockport, Texas. She died in 1872, leaving one son, Thomas Atlee Coleman.

Letitia Smith Atlee

Letitia Atlee's husband

Born in 1841, Letitia married Percival Clark Wilson in 1856, a year after he graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University. He joined the university's faculty in 1861, but soon became an officer in the army as the civil war began. After the war, they moved to Athens, Tennessee, where he became a merchant, but he soon became involved in the organizing of the Athens Female College. Letitia's father, Edwin Atlee, helped in the founding of the college. However, the first President of the college bought additional lands with his own personal funds, which he then loaned to the college, on which he held a lien. It was Atlee who bid at the foreclosure sale to acquire the lands for the Methodist school in 1866. The next year the charter was granted, merging the female school into East Tennessee Wesleyan. It became coeducational in 1868.

 Mary Parson Atlee

Mary Parson Atlee was the sixth daughter, born 1843 in Athens, Tennessee. When her two youngest brothers were sent to Ohio Wesleyan College in 1865 for their education, they met a young man named Nathan Tandy Ayres, also a student at Ohio Wesleyan College in Delaware, Ohio, about 30 miles north of Columbus. According to an article that appeared in 1966 in the Hillsboro, Ohio, Press-Gazette, Nathan's father died when he was one week old, and his mother, having already lost two husbands to death, married William Plummer Bernard, a wealthy man of Hillsboro, Ohio, located east of Cincinnati. When the civil war began, Nathan joined the 89th Ohio Voluntary Infantry, which served three years during 1862-65. In December 1863 he was in Chattanooga, sending reports of the regiment's action back to his hometown newspaper in Ohio. He remained in Athens, Tennessee, to attend the Methodist college and in 1867 married Mary P. Atlee, whom he eventually brought back to his home in Ohio.

In 1869-70, Tandy Ayres was recording secretary for the city of Hillsboro, Ohio, when he and an associate bought a glassware and china store. He sold his interest in the store to his partner in late 1873 and went into the dairy business, with 30 cows from whose milk he made his own cheese. In 1876 he made an exploration tour from St. Louis to south Texas on the Iron Mountain Railroad, writing a report, the first of several, for the local newspaper. He remained in Texas from February until late May that year, as he was said to suffer from asthma, which was relieved by the drier climate. This routine continued every winter until September 1879, when he packed the family up and moved to Houston.

During her marriage to Tandy, Mary Ayres gave birth to four children, though the first son died as an infant:

• William E. Ayres in 1872, and died the same year;
• Atlee Bernard Ayres in 1873;
• Anna Mary Ayres in 1878; and
• Clara Augusta "Gussie" Ayres in 1880.

Edwin Augustus Atlee, Jr.

Edwin Augustus Atlee, Jr., born 1846, was a student at Ohio Wesleyan College in 1866, when he met Nathan Tandy Ayres. In 1872 Edwin taught Latin and literature East Tennessee, before he relocated to Texas and became state senator from 1885-1901 for a district including Duval, Webb, Nueces, Cameron, Hidalgo and other counties bordering Mexico. This is the same district which would later be controlled by Archer "Archie" Parr, who began his career working for the Coleman-Fulton Pasture Co.,  owned by Thomas Coleman, Edwin Jr.'s brother-in-law. Around 1907 Archie, assisted by his uncle, John Givens, law partner of another of Edwin's  brothers-in-law, began a political career Duval County. By 1915 he was noted for election fraud, political corrupution and manipulation of the court system, protecting Democratic politicians. His son George Parr succeeded Archie and became known as the Duke of Duval. The Parr political machine was mentioned in a piece I wrote in 2000, relating to its role in stealing an election for Lyndon Johnson.
  
Bernhardt Gilbert Atlee

Named for his maternal grandfather, Bernhardt, the youngest of the siblings, was born in 1848 and attended preparatory school in 1866 at Ohio Wesleyan, along with his slightly older brother, and later studied dentistry there.

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.

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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.