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 Presidents Bush: The Walker Genealogy (Part III)

Part I

Part II

David Davis Walker, Nephew of Lincoln's Attorney

Bloomington Township is about six miles south from the center of today's Bloomington, Illinois. When George E. Walker packed up his family to move west from Maryland, the town he arrived at was called Blooming Grove, platted in 1831. The Walkers set up a farmstead south of Bloomington in 1838 and remained there until their deaths. George died in 1875 and his wife, Harriet Mercer Walker, in 1878; both are buried at Woodlawn Cemetery. George E. Walker was George H.W. Bush's great-great-grandfather, and Harriet was his great-great-grandmother, and both were long since dead by 1921, when Prescott Bush married into the Walker family.

The Bush family had many generations of Protestantism under their belts by that time, but the Walkers only one generation, at least on the paternal side.

The story was different though in Harriet Mercer's family. Justice David Davis, Harriet's favorite nephew, was interred on Bloomington's north side at Evergreen Memorial Cemetery. Bloomington's "greatest legal light," a history of the city's earliest settlers (published in 1874) called him. When Justice Davis was suffering his last illness in 1886, his own favorite nephew, Davis Davis Walker, by then a 30-year resident of St. Louis, returned to sit with the judge's immediate family by his uncle's bedside.

The Walker family owed everything to Davis, Abraham Lincoln's friend and personal attorney.

In the early 1850's Davis worked on financing the Alton & Sangamon Railroad that would provide transportation services for Bloomington, a railroad which would a few years later be rescued by E.H. Harriman.[1] In those days Walker had lived in Bloomington and was close to first cousin, George Perrin Davis, who had childhood memories of riding in Lincoln's horse-drawn buggy during circuit court rounds as early as 1850. George P. Davis and his  Walker cousin were together for a short time at school in Beloit, Wisconsin, but, while George received additional training at Illinois Wesleyan to become an attorney, his poor relation, D.D. moved to St. Louis in 1857 to become an apprentice wholesaler. Nevertheless, the two remained in contact over the years.

After Lincoln's murder, Davis, who had been appointed to the Supreme Court by President Lincoln in 1862, was named  Administrator of Lincoln's estate in Springfield, Illinois (see 1867 clipping, right).

Walker's Dry Goods Business

911 Washington Avenue

D.D. Walker was a hard worker at St. Louis' largest wholesale merchant--Crow, McCreery & Co.--a partner by the age of 25. Other partners in the firm included Wayman Crow, William A. Hargadine, Hugh McKittrick, Frank Ely and Isaac Gibbons, the latter of whom was sued by Walker and his partners in 1876.

The firm engaged in business under various names for several years, and, according to litigation, several surviving original partners incorporated Ely, Walker & Co. around 1878, with D.D. serving as its president until 1892. William A. Hargadine, for whom Walker's second son (George Herbert's older brother) was name, died that year. Hargadine-McKittrick had incorporated a company in 1889, leasing a newly constructed building at 911 Washington Avenue until 1923, when the building bore the name of its tenant, Lammert Furniture. The corporation was sold to Ely, Walker & Co. in 1915.

D. D. Walker's short biographies state he retired once or twice between 1876 and 1910 to recover from exhaustion. It seems possible that during one of those retirements, or perhaps simply a summer vacation to Lake Minnetonka in Minnesota, the Walkers boarded the May Queen, which ironically suffered a boiler explosion during their ride. The irony was that, some 21 years earlier, Mrs. D.D. (Martha) Walker's father, Joseph Beaky, had died on a similar steamship, the Minnehaha. Joseph Beaky, only 39 when he died in 1858, was a dealer in wood-burning stoves. The four-year-old boy mentioned in the Bloomington newspaper, The Pantagaph (above, left) would have been little Bertie Walker, while Martha's mother, "Mrs. Beaky," was the former Mary Ann Bangs.

The Jesuit Connections of the Beakey Family

Two weddings--1839 and 1840

In 1862--the same year David Davis moved to Washington, D.C. to take his seat on the U.S. Supreme Court--D. D. Walker married Martha Adela Beaky. Though it has not yet been discovered how they  met, it is intriguing to note one common denominator linking each set of grandparents, two Catholic institutions in two separate locations:

1. Mount Saint Mary's in Emmitsburg, Maryland, where D.D. Walker's father had attended school 1811-12 while D.D.'s future wife's father, Joseph Ambrose Beakey, was a youngster in that town; Joseph also became a student in 1826.
2. St. Augustine Catholic Church, Philadelphia, where D.D. Walker's first cousin, Mary Scanlan, married in 1839; Martha Beakey's parents married there in 1840.

Genealogy of Emanuel Behe

The Beakey name was an adaptation from "Biechi," the French spelling of the German name "Büchi" under which the family came to America. The German  form eventually became  Behee or  Behe. Emanuel Büchi, who had been born 1751 in the French section of Alsace and baptized a Roman Catholic, grew up to marry Marguerite-Jea (Mary Jane) and  lived for a time in Germany before emigrating to America during the French Revolution when he was in his late 30's.

It is believed, however, that Emanuel first came to  America during the revolutionary war as a Hessian mercenary soldier, before he brought his family to live in Pennsylvania in about 1789, the year of the French Revolution. His son Joseph (father of Joseph Ambrose) was then a lad of nine years.

Emanuel had first gone to the Lancaster area of Pennsylvania before eventually settling in the town of Loretto in Cambria County, Pennsylvania. There he worked as a gunsmith and tinner, training his sons in the same profession. Loretto had been initially set up in 1799 at the community known as McGuire's Settlement by a priest who spoke German and was thus put in charge of German Catholic settlements, which included Lancaster.

Bishop John Carroll, Jesuit

This priest, Father Demetrius Augustine Gallitzin, also known as Augustine Smith, was actually a Russian prince whose father had been Russia's ambassador to the Netherlands. Though baptized in the Greek Orthodox Church, he made a decision to become a Catholic priest around 1787, when he traveled to America with Rev. Francis Xavier Brosius. He began studying for the priesthood in 1792 in Baltimore at St. Mary's Seminary under Bishop John Carroll, who ordained him in 1795. Bishop Carroll was also mentioned in Part II of this series. It was this same Bishop Carroll who in 1803 performed the wedding ceremony between Elizabeth (Betsy) Patterson, a Presbyterian, and Jerome, the younger brother of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Father Augustine Smith was placed in charge of a Catholic colony to be set up in 1799 at the location of Loretto in the Allegheny mountains on 20,000 acres. Refusing at the behest of his family to return to Europe to litigate his Russian claims, his titled inheritance was cut off in 1808 by the Emperor of Russia. Nevertheless, Gallitzin's Catholic colony thrived, and numerous town sprang up with his church being the only Catholic church between Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and St. Louis. It is quite likely, therefore, that Joseph would have been of the right age to serve under Father Gallitzin, who drilled the 142nd Pennsylvania Militia which fought in the war of 1812. [2]

It was also in Loretto where the Behe family would come in contact with another Catholic family named McMullen from Ireland (See Chapter V of linked book by Leo A. McMullen, LLD. who wrote concerning the land on which Emmitsburg, Maryland, was founded:

The land was originally owned by the famous Charles Carroll of Carrollton. Emmit's property extended about four square miles, from Middle Creek to Toms Creek to Friend's Creek to Pennsylvania. The genesis of Emmitsburg dates to influx of settlers in 1730, 1746, and 1757. The town was laid out in 1785.

Emanuel's son, Joseph, (born in Germany in 1773) moved east to Maryland, and after his marriage to Catherine Schreiner, he had remained. Catharine's father, Johannes Schreiner, born in Frederick County, Maryland in 1766 to parents from western Germany, had been baptized as a Lutheran rather than a Catholic. Before Johannes' death, he had moved to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he died in 1828.

Joseph's employer, it was reported, was Mount St. Mary's Catholic school in Emmitsburg:

Joseph Beachi (Senior) was a "tinner" and was responsible for tin, copper, and downspouts for both buildings [at Mount St. Mary's]. He apparently enrolled his sons while he worked here. A copy of his account is in the college's ledger for 1826.[2]

Catharine had given birth to several sons in Emmitsburg before Joseph Ambrose Beaky was born there in 1818,
six years after George E. Walker had left Mount St. Mary's. Because their father worked at the school, John Beakey, Martha's uncle, studied at the Mount in 1823 before Joseph did in 1826. The parents then watched one child after another move west to St. Louis, beginning with James, who is said to have moved in 1836. Both he and his brother John had been trained in tinning by their father and were working with a partner named Andrews in 1838.

Beakey Family's Diplomatic Connections

Martha's father, Joseph, was first listed in the St. Louis directory in 1848. That year's directory also included the name of Clement W. Coote, the new engineer and surveyor for the city, who had followed his brother Thomas Coote west around 1840 from Washington, D.C. to be St. Louis deputy city engineer. In short order Clement had married Joseph's sister, Sarah Beakey, who had traveled west to visit her brothers.

Sarah's new father-in-law was Clement Tubbs Coote, an attorney and low-level magistrate in the nation's capital who arrived there from Cambridgeshire, England. In fact Clement had actually been born in Washington in 1810, but then the Coote family returned home to England and did not return to live until 1817, becoming American citizens in 1822. Marian Coote, Clement's older sister, married Navy Purser William Speiden, whose biographical sketch also sets out details of the life of the elder Coote. Marian's son, William Speiden, Jr., at the age of eighteen accompanied his father, to the China Sea and Japan with Commodore Matthew C. Perry during 1852-55.

We read about much of the Coote and Speiden families' history in an article by Harold Langley which states that in 1838 "Mary Coote, Marian's mother, was taken sick with some unidentified problem and was not expected to live very long. Her daughters took care of her and her son, Clement, left his position as an assistant engineer on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal to come to his Mother's bedside."[3] Langley also mentions that the wedding of the youngest Coote daughter, Ann, to James Barry, a Catholic, took place that year at St. Patrick's Catholic Church in Washington, D.C., and was performed by Very Rev. William Matthews.

The Langley article reveals the reason Clement W. Coote had left his home in the fall of 1840 bound for St. Louis, where he would eventually meet and marry Sarah Beakey:

The lure of the west affected members of her [Marian's] own family. Her brother Thomas found himself unemployed. He frequently lamented that he did not go on the [Charles Wilkes] Exploring Expedition with William Speiden, perhaps as a Purser's steward. He went to St. Louis to try his luck and almost immediately got a position that he liked. So favorable were his reports that Marian's other brother, Clement, set out for St. Louis. He had been unemployed for nine months after his layoff on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal.

Marian Coote's letters also give a brief snippet in six sentences of the last two decades of her husband's life:

As for William Speiden, he remained in the Navy. His duties kept him on the Washington scene for a few years. Then he was off again for the Mexican War and later participated in the expedition of Commodore Matthew C. Perry to open up Japan. He had two years duty in Norfolk before he joined the East India squadron. Here he became ill and was sent home. He died in Washington on December 18, 1861, at the age of sixty- four.

While his brother-in-law, William Speiden, pursued his career as a naval officer, the younger Clement Coote left his bride in St. Louis, just as the gold rush began at Sutter's Mill in California, to work as a surveyor in nearby Sacramento. His name appeared on the first plan of that city dated 1849, and in 1850 he had been elected secretary of Sacramento's first city council. As early as 1853 he was named city surveyor for Sacramento, but, tragically his death came at the age of 35 in January 1855.

During this time, however, Sarah Coote (sister of Joseph Ambrose Beakey), had moved back to Emmittsburg, Maryland with her eight-year-old son, Clement W. Coote, Jr., where she was busily caring for her aging parents, the Beakeys, paternal grandparents of Martha Beakey Walker; Sarah's mother died in 1850 and her father in 1854, followed shortly thereafter by the death of her husband.

Joseph Ambrose Beakey had gone from Emmitsburg to Philadelphia to look for work about two years after his brothers set out for St. Louis. Perhaps, being the youngest child left at home, he wanted to remain somewhat close to his parents in the event they should need him. Working for a supplier of stoves in Philadelphia, most likely Powell Stackhouse, he met his chosen wife, Mary Ann Bangs, who had been orphaned when her mother, Powell's younger sister Esther Stackhouse Bangs, had died in 1819, while her father was away at sea. Powell Stackhouse switched from making furniture to manufacturing stoves in about 1831. Is it possible that Powell's niece, Mary Ann Bangs, a distant descendant not only of the elite Whitney clan from Connecticut, but also of Edward Bangs, who came to America in 1623, met her future husband who was in Philadelphia to learn about stove manufacturing?

Joseph Ambrose and Mary Ann Bangs married in 1840 at St. Augustine's Catholic Church in Philadelphia, the same church, you may recall from Part I where another wedding had been held the previous year (1839) when Mary Scanlan married William Axton  Stokes there.[4] Joseph soon took his new wife back to Emmittsburg, Maryland, where the Beakey family lived, and he was sure to have heard about his new nephew, his brother John Beakey's son, Augustine James, christened in a Catholic Church in St. Louis in 1840. Another nephew had already been born there in 1838.

When their daughter Martha, the eldest, was about seven, the youngest of the Beakey progeny followed his siblings to St. Louis, nine years before David Davis Walker arrived there from Bloomington by way of his Beloit, Wisconsin, school. Four years later, in 1852, Mary Ann Bangs Beakey gave birth to Clement William Coote Beakey, named for his Aunt Sarah's husband.


End Notes:

[1] Its name was changed to Chicago & Alton, under president Timothy Blackstone, who had headed the Union Stock Yards in Chicago before 1866. In 1899 it was purchased by the Illinois Central under the leadership of Edward H. Harriman. By 1901 Harriman was a director not only of the Illinois Central, but also of the Northern Pacific Railroad, Union Pacific Railroad, the Kansas City Southern Railroad, Guaranty Trust Company, National City Bank, Mercantile Trust, Brooklyn Rapid Transit (with August Belmont), United States Shipbuilding Company, Western Union Telegraph, Pacific Coast Company, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, and was chairman of the executive committee of the Chicago & Alton Railroad.

[2] Sheldon Spear, Pennsylvania Histories: Two Hundred Years of Personalities and Events, 1750–1950, p. 32. 

[3] Harold D. Langley, "A Naval Dependent in Washington, 1837-1842: Letters of Marian Coote Speiden," in the Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Washington, D.C., Vol. 50, The Fiftieth Volume (1980), pp. 105-122 at JSTOR.

[4] Thereafter they resided at 121 South Sixth Street. Mary's mother, Rosetta Walker Scanlan, had moved back to Philadelphia after her husband died in Cecil County, Maryland, in 1825. Rosetta had met her Catholic husband, James Scanlan, who was allegedly in the city to visit an uncle, Rev. William Matthews, said to be a Quaker minister. It appears to have been a mere coincidence that there would be a Catholic priest by that name installed as Bishop of Philadelphia Diocese in 1828, since the Scanlans met and married in 1807. By all indications Rosetta Walker Scanlan moved back with her minor children after 1825 to live with her  "Uncle Tommy," as they referred to Thomas Walker. A banker, he lived in the middle ward of Philadelphia, according to the 1840 census, which listed his name on the same page as Edward C. Biddle and Francis M. Drexel, a Catholic immigrant from Austria. Drexel's son, Anthony Joseph Drexel, would eventually become a banking partner of J. P. Morgan.

The Presidents Bush: The Walker Genealogy (Part I)

George E. Walker, from Slave Trader's Son
to Jesuit-Educated Farmer

We all are aware that John Newton wrote the lyrics to the hymn "Amazing Grace" to the tune of an African slave tune he heard when he was captain of a slave-trading ship. However, few of us have heard that the first of Presidents George H. W. and George Walker Bush's ancestors on their Walker genealogical line to move to America was also a slave trader--Captain Thomas "Beau" Walker from Clifton, a suburb of Bristol in Gloucestershire, England. Captain Walker married Catherine McClellan (or McLelland) in 1785, and their first two children were born there in Bristol.

Beau, a ship captain engaged in trade from the Bristol port to the West Indies, in 1792 moved his wife and two children to America and applied for citizenship, buying land in New Jersey in 1795--a move which occurred the year following the historic slave revolt in Saint Domingue (Haiti) in 1791. America had only recently won its independence from Britain, the thirteen colonies having ratified the new Constitution in 1789.

At that time slaves were being imported at the New Jersey port at Perth Amboy and sold to Dutch farmers in the Passaic and Raritan river valleys, who "had a long history of slave ownership." Burlington, New Jersey's port at Camden saw fewer slaves being brought to the county because of the Quaker influence across the river in Pennsylvania. In 1797, however, the same year Catherine gave birth to their third child, George, Captain Walker was lost at sea while engaged in bringing slaves from the Sierra Leone coast, according to research published at Slate, which attempted to confirm that Thomas Walker and Beau Walker were, in fact, one and the same man as mentioned October 24, 1797, in Life and Letters of Zachary Macaulay:

Slave ship in British trade

“You have heard of the noted Beau Walker, an English Slave-Trader of these parts. He arrived at the Isles Du Los [off present-day Guinea] lately in an American Brig being bound to Cape Mount [in present-day northwest Liberia] for slaves. He had scarce arrived at the last place, when exercising his usual barbarities on his officers & crew, they were provoked to conspire against him. As he lay on one of the hencoops a seaman came up & struck him on the breast with a handspike, but the blow being ill directed, did not produce its intended effect and Walker springing up would soon have sacrificed the mutineer to his fury, had not a boy at the helm, pulling a pistol from his breast, shot him dead on the spot. His body was immediately thrown overboard. Thus ended Walker’s career, an end worthy of such a life. The vessel left Cape Mount, and it is supposed has gone for the Brazils or South Seas. There could not possibly have been a more inhuman monster than this Walker. Many a poor seaman has been brought by him to an untimely end.”

If the verification of Walker's identity is true, it sounds as though the infant George was better off for having lost his father, at least in Macaulay's estimation of the "inhuman monster" of a man called Beau Walker. Had he not died when he did, history may have been changed forever. For whatever reason, his death led the widow Catherine Walker to relocate across the river to Philadelphia.

George's mother (Beau's widow) is recorded as being married in 1801 to her second husband, Robert Hodgson, in Philadelphia, about 30 miles from Burlington, N.J., in the historic Christ Episcopal Church. The service was performed by assistant rector Dr. James Abercrombie. When Catherine died in 1806, she left behind three children: 

• Rosetta, born in Clifton, Gloucestershire,  in 1785, was 21 when her mother died;
• Thomas McLellan Walker, born in England in 1787, became the man of the family, sometimes known as "Uncle Tommy"; and
• George E. Walker, born an American citizen in Burlington, N.J. in 1797, was ten years younger than his brother and twelve years younger than his sister, and a mere nine years of age when his mother died.

George's Catholic Upbringing by Scanlans

Within a year after Catherine's death in 1806, Rosetta met Dr. James Scanlan, a physician, who appears to have been in Philadelphia visiting his uncle, Dr. William Matthews, Jr., brother of the former Susannah Matthews, who had died in 1792. The Matthews family, who were also related by marriage to Kitty Knight, is mentioned in the Cecil County Historical County Bulletin No. 31, dated May 22, 1967 at page 159:

Susannah Matthews Scanlan's brother, Dr. William Matthews' estate

Scanlan was in Philadelphia, visiting his mother's brother, Dr. William Matthews (1735-1808), whose death occurred only a year after James' marriage to Rosetta Walker. Many of the papers relating to lands owned by Dr. Matthews (Bohemia Manor, Vulcan's Rest, and Worsell Manor), adjoining St. Xavier's mission in Old Bohemia, were donated to Georgetown University archives. About the mission land's history, as quoted from a book by Myndie Burgoyne, Haunted Eastern Shore: Ghostly Tales from East of the Chesapeake (Haunted America), who wrote:

Fr. Mansel sailed up the Chesapeake and up the Bohemia and obtained land between two branches of the Bohemia River.  There he founded his mission and named the tract of land St. Xavier.  On a high piece of ground, he built a chapel and log cabin. He named that St. Francis Xavier - after the most famous Jesuit missionary. In 1774 Fr. Thomas Pulton founded a Jesuit Academy on the property for educating young men. John Carroll attended the Academy around 1747, and went on to found Georgetown University.  He later became the bishop of the first established Diocese in the Colonies – Baltimore – making him the first American Catholic Bishop.

After a ceremony at St. Augustine’s Catholic Church in historic old town Philadelphia, James took his new wife and her youngest brother, George E. Walker, to Sassafras Neck, an area located between two branches of the Bohemia River, in Cecil County, Maryland.

Read Biographical & Historical Memoirs of Mississippi

Dr. Scanlan, a dedicated Catholic, saw to it that young George had a proper Catholic education by sending him in 1811 at the age of fourteen to  Mount Saint Mary's Jesuit school, in Emmitsburg, Maryland. There Rosetta gave birth to their first child, James William Scanlan in 1809, whose birth had been followed by three daughters (Mary, Catherine or Kate, and Rosetta Ann). Finally, in 1821 another son, Edward Barto Scanlan, was born only four years before Dr. James Scanlan died in in 1825.

The  widow, Rosetta Walker Scanlan, who had by then resided in Maryland for eighteen years, chose to return to Philadelphia, where her eldest son was beginning medical studies at Jefferson Medical College (now called Sidney Kimmel Medical College), in the area where Rosetta's brother Thomas Walker lived.

Yale graduate Dr. George McClellan,[1] who studied surgery at the University of Pennsylvania, had founded Jefferson in 1824 as part of a college near the western state line. Once James Scanlan's medical studies were completed, he moved to Mississippi to practice medicine, reportedly dying in Thibodaux, Louisiana in 1838. Rosetta's youngest son, Edward Barto Scanlan, also ended up in the deep south, seemingly disconnected from his uncle, George E. Walker, and the rest of the Scanlan family.

George Walker's Nieces--Mary Scanlan Stokes
and Kate Scanlan Minahan 
and Great-Niece, Agnes La Roche

Rosetta's eldest daughter, Mary Scanlan, was ardently courted in 1839 by William Axton Stokes, son of merchant Charles Stokes, whose devout Catholic family was on Philadelphia's Social Register. The original papers describing their courtship, as donated to Villanova, indicate that Mary Scanlan lived in Philadelphia with her uncle, a Mr. Walker, who could only have been Rosetta's brother, Thomas Walker.[2] One genealogist reveals research indicating Thomas was a bank clerk and living at 181 S. 9th Street in Philadelphia before he relocated to Bloomington, Illinois, reconnecting with younger brother, George E. Walker. The 9th Street location is adjacent to the medical school which Mary's brother, James W. Scanlan, attended at the same time. Other genealogy reports show that "Uncle Tommy" was buried in the David Davis plot in the Evergreen Cemetery in Bloomington in 1870.

William Stokes in 1839 was already an attorney, later becoming chief counsel for the Pennsylvania Railroad. He moved to Western Pennsylvania soon after Mary Scanlan Stokes died in childbirth in 1849, only two years after the death of her mother (Rosetta Walker Scanlan). Her widowed husband was quickly remarried to a woman named Nancy and, during the civil war, received a Major's commission.[3]

Soon after the war, Stokes resumed his position with the railroad, but in about 1870 he returned to Philadelphia. The body of his wife Mary, originally buried at the now defunct new St. Mary's cemetery, was moved at some point to Vault No. 12 at St. John's Churchyard, apparently by daughter Catherine (Kate) Scanlan. William Stokes' brother, Dr. Thomas P. J. Stokes, who had studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania during the 1840's, died at age 41 in 1856 and was also interred in this vault. Agnes Stokes La Roche's remains also reside there since her death in 1904.

Uncle Tommy is also mentioned in a letter, part of a collection at Illinois Wesleyan University, from Catherine Scanlan Minahan to Judge David Davis' son, George Perrin Davis (who will be discussed in Part II), asking for help for her nephew Tom, son of Edward Barto Scanlan. Kate (shown in the 1850 census as a 35-year-old single woman in Greenburg, Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, keeping house for her recently widowed brother-in-law) in order to help a recent widower, Daniel F. Minahan, take care of his infant son born in 1853, married him and continued to live in Western Pennsylvania until at least 1870. Minahan was a civil engineer and railroad contractor, as well as author of several mathematical works, and was said to have "laid out the first road between Latrobe, Pa., and Chicago." Kate is referred to in a biography of his son, Thomas Boromea Minahan, as  "his stepmother, a talented Southerner," who helped him to become

proficient in classics, history, orations and poetry, subsequently attending a parochial school. He was graduated at St. John's College, Fordham, N. Y., in 1876, with the degree A.B., carrying the honors of his class, and in 1902 Fordham University gave him the degree LL.D.

René de la Roche

Mary and William's daughter, Agnes Stokes, grew up to marry in 1873 Dr. C. Percy La Roche, son of René de la Roche, who obtained a medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1820, after first working as an accountant for a shipping firm and then serving in the War of 1812. Percy's father's biography states that he served thirteen years on the Board of Health of Philadelphia and that he spent twenty years as a Trustee of the University of Pennsylvania. He also boasted membership in numerous other medical societies and charitable organizations. He married in 1824 Mary Jane Ellis, daughter of Colonel (Judge) John Ellis of Natchez, Mississippi, and died in 1872. Percy's biography mentions that he had been educated at St. Mary's in Baltimore until 1852, thereafter attending Georgetown in Washington, D.C., then studied medicine at the University of Philadelphia. He did his medical residency at St. Joseph's in Philadelphia in vaccines.

Author Bertram Wyatt-Brown did not mention the fact that the La Roche family had also used the name "de la Roche, and his gave Percy's father's name as Dr. René Marc Marie LaRoche, leading to some confusion, since he was often known simply as "Dr. René de la Roche." Percy's grandfather, another René, had owned a plantation in St. Domingo (Haiti), the destruction of which in the slave revolt of 1791 prompted him to relocate to Philadelphia until his death in 1820, and to continue the practice of medicine for which he had prepared himself in France. 

The second Dr. René La Roche (or de la Roche), Agnes Stokes' father-in-law, drew close to Dr. Samuel D. Brown, founder of a secret medical fraternity in 1819 at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, which had among its aims promoting "harmony of the profession," and creating "a powerful underground force in medical politics." When Dr. Brown died in 1830, René de la Roche became his "ardent eulogist," according to a satirical paper prepared by Dr. Chauncey Depew Leake, read to the Wisconsin Medical History Seminar in 1921.

Called Kappa Lambda Society of Aesculapius, this secret fraternity established branches in numerous other cities, and Dr. De la Roche, along with Franklin Bache and other members in Philadelphia, in 1826 began publication of the North American Medical and Surgical Journal, which mentioned Dr. Brown's Kappa Lambda and its desire to inculcate a "higher standard of excellence" in the medical profession. The new Jefferson Medical school founded by George McClellan in that same year occurred within the prestigious era of Kappa Lambda Association. However, after publishing only twelve volumes of the journal, the Association was dissolved in 1836. These same forces, however, after attack and defeat in 1831, resurrected the same ideas into a new group formed in 1847 called the American Medical Association.

It should be recalled that Haiti, known in those days as Santo Domingo, or Saint Domingue by the French, was the same island to which Beau Walker smuggled slaves from Sierra Leone. Had Captain Beau Walker sold such "cargo to the De La Roche family? Only further research can say.

Click to enlarge.

Footnotes:

[1]  Brief research did not indicate that he had any family relationship with Catherine McClellan Walker.

[2] Possibly incorrectly transcribed as "J.W." instead of T.W., Mary's uncle's conduct was considered by William A. Stokes as either tawdry, rude, or strange, and was more specifically described in the journal as follows:

On Monday 9 Sep 1839, I called on Mr Walker by consent of Mary and had a long interview. At times during the conversation he was very much excited and at other times calm. He said that the family had deceived him and treated him as a fool and a puppet that Mary & Kitty [probably Catherine Scanlan, also known as Kate] had positively denied there was any ground for suspicion, that they must have know that this declaration was false-- that we were in no [�] adapted for each other & more particularly that our [�] and feelings are at variance and that our religious views were dissimilar -- he said that I had no idea of the pertinacious bigotry of the Catholics -- that if I am thought of the matter seriously as I probably would I would be violently opposed to Mary's religion and that my profession was one in which I could not expect to make money for some years and that Mary was far from being a young girl and that it was inexpedient that at her age She should be embarrassed by any engagement. However others had [�] that I had behaved with honor &c &c. I defended the family and the whole matter to my best ability and he finally said that though he would not oppose he would not approve the matter -- that he should always be glad to see me or a friend and would me with politeness. I left him & in the afternoon communicated the whole matter to Mary.

[3] Although Stokes had in 1847 helped author a political treatise about the writ of habeas corpus with Edward Ingersoll, a man who supported the Confederacy's legal arguments and who did not agree with Chief Justice Taney's Supreme Court opinion in the case of Ex Parte Merryman, he did not totally agree with Ingersoll. A son of Charles Jared Ingersoll, in 1865, while speaking in favor of the states' right to secede, the younger Ingersoll had been beaten, arrested and jailed on a charge of carrying a concealed deadly weapon. Four years earlier, Major Stokes, in contrast, had delivered a speech at the Union Convention in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, in September, 1861, in which he denied the right of secession, which he called a "union for disunion" at page 7. Edward Ingersoll's name, curiously enough, also appears amidst the petty bickering and medical intrigue central to the politics that surrounded the formation of Jefferson Medical College in 1826, notably regarding the dismissal of Francis S. Beattie, professor of midwifery, who subsequently sued the faculty and the trustees of the Jefferson Medical College. The Ingersolls, father and son, at various times were trustees of the college at Cannonsburg, Pennsylvania, which had sponsored the medical school.



(To Be Continued)