Why George Bush Came to Texas, OR Enron - A Short History

Many years ago I became acquainted with Catherine Austin Fitts, while both of us were members of what was then called a listserv, which was managed by Kris Millegan. The three of us and many others were trying to learn how the American economy incorporated proceeds of narcotics sales into our financial system. Sometime after Catherine had visited me in Texas, the Texas corporation Enron collapsed in November 2000, the same month George W. Bush was first elected and less than a year before the September 11, 2001 destruction of the World Trade Center. (See James P. Galasyn's Bush/Enron Chronology).

The work below grew out of those debacles.

ENRON

From Hoover’s Handbook of American Business, 1993: 

Enron traces its history through two well-established natural gas companies — InterNorth and Houston Natural Gas (HNG).

InterNorth started out in 1930 as Northern Natural Gas, an Omaha, Nebraska, gas pipeline company.  By 1950 Northern has doubled its capacity and in 1960 started processing and transporting natural gas liquids.  The company changed its name to InterNorth in 1980.  In 1983 it spent $768 million to buy Belco Petroleum, adding 821 billion cubic feet of natural gas and 67 million barrels of oil to its reserves.  At the same time the company (with four partners) was building the Northern Border Pipeline to link Canadian producing fields with U.S. markets.

HNG, formed in 1925 as a South Texas natural gas distributor, served more than 55,000 customers by the early 1940s.  It started developing producing oil and gas properties in 1953 and bought Houston Pipe Line Company in 1956.  Other major acquisitions included Valley Gas Production, a South Texas natural gas company (1963), and Houston’s Bammel Gas Storage Field (1965).

In the 1970s the company started developing offshore fields in the Gulf of Mexico, and in 1976 it sold its original gas distribution properties to Entex.  In 1984 HNG, faced with a hostile takeover attempt by Coastal Corporation, brought in former Exxon executive Kenneth Lay as CEO.  Lay refocused Enron on natural gas, selling $632 million of unrelated assets.  He added Transwestern Pipeline (California) and Florida Gas Transmission, and by 1985 Enron operated the only transcontinental gas pipeline.

In 1985 InterNorth bought HNG for $2.4 billion, creating the U.S.’s largest natural gas pipeline system (38,000 miles).  Soon after, Kenneth Lay became chairman/CEO of newly named Enron (1986), and the company moved its headquarters from Omaha to Houston.

Laden with $3.3 billion of debt (most related to the HNG acquisition), Enron sold 50% of Citrus Corporation (operated Florida Gas Transmission, 1986), 50% of Enron Cogeneration (1988), and 16% of Enron Oil & Gas (1989).  In the meantime the company paid $31 million for Tesoro[1] Petroleum’s gathering and transportation businesses in 1988.

In 1990 the company bought CSX Energy’s Louisiana production facilities, which helped to increase Enron’s production of natural gas liquids by nearly 33%.  In late 1991 Enron closed a deal with Tenneco to buy that company’s natural gas liquids/petrochemical operations for $632 million.

Enron’s 1992 contract with Sithe Energies Group to supply $4 billion worth of natural gas over 20 years to a planned upstate New York cogeneration plant fits its vision of natural gas as a leading fuel for the future.

History of Enron, Originally Founded as 
Houston Natural Gas Company

In 1893 John Henry Kirby started construction of the Gulf, Beaumont and Kansas City railroad line, which he sold to the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe in 1900. He decided to invest the money he made on building the railroad into East Texas timber land, but after the big Spindletop oil discovery near Beaumont in East Texas in 1901, he took another turn into oil exploration. With dollar signs in their eyes, however, his creditors thought it more advantageous for themselves to take the corporate assets held as security than to give Kirby the necessary time to develop those assets into oil-producing property.

On July 6, 1901 the Houston Daily Post contained a huge front page headline and photo of Kirby announcing the chartering of Houston Oil Company of Texas with a capitalization of $30 million and of the Kirby Lumber Co. with $10 million in capital. The stock was issued, but Kirby still had to obtain buyers for the stock. That means he had to find stock brokers who had connections to huge pools of capital to invest. For his financing, Kirby had gone to Patrick Calhoun, a New York corporate attorney "with desirable connections in eastern banking circles." Calhoun was the grandson of John C. Calhoun, vice-president under John Quincy Adams.

Patrick Calhoun, a native of South Carolina, owned stock in the Southern Oil Co., which had 100 producing oil wells in the Corsicana Field in East Texas. The investors Calhoun brought into Kirby's companies included Brown Brothers of New York; Simon Borg & Co., originally founded in Tennessee; and Maryland Trust Co. of Baltimore, the latter being proposed as trustee to handle the company's securities and act as its subscription agent. Maryland Trust Co. was headed at that time by ex-Confederate officer, Colonel J. Wilcox Brown.

The Brown Brothers firm was founded in the United States by descendants of Alexander Brown, who also were involved in the English brokerage firm of Brown & Shipley, of Baltimore, Maryland, and, after 1825, in New York. Brown Brothers would operate out of New York City until its eventual merger in 1931 with W.A. Harriman & Co., the latter an investment bank set up five years earlier for E. H. Harriman's young sons by Prescott Bush's father-in-law, George Herbert "Bert" Walker of St. Louis, Missouri, who is the subject of a series of articles at this blog.

Foreclosure and Receivership

The financing scheme for the Kirby companies was an intricate system of cross-collateralization which Kirby alleged was designed to allow the creditors to steal the assets of his companies. Receivers were appointed on February 1, 1904, the same day interest was due on timber certificates that had originally been issued for $11 million, but devalued down to $7 million. Of that, $6 million work of the certificates had been sold by Brown Brothers, while being guaranteed by Houston Oil Co.[2] The semi-annual payment was made by Brown Brothers & Co. in the amount of $700,000, including $210,000 interest, but only the interest was tendered to Maryland Trust, which was rejected.

The receivers appointed for Houston Oil were F.A. Reichardt, cashier of Planter's and Mechanic's National Bank of Houston (of which John H. Kirby was president) and Thomas H. Franklin, a San Antonio attorney, who was president of the Houston Oil Company. N.W. McLeod, a "prominent St. Louis lumber man," and B.F. Bonner, Kirby Lumber Company's vice president, who lived in Houston, were appointed as receivers for Kirby Lumber.[3]

A receiver not mentioned in the New York Times article at that time was Col. J.S. Rice, who, according to his obituary in the Houston Chronicle on March 12, 1931, had been in the sawmill business in Tyler since 1881, after starting as a clerk at the Houston & Texas Central Railroad in 1879 — a railroad extending west and north from Houston to the cotton fields of central Texas. Jo Rice served as receiver of Kirby Lumber from 1904 to 1909 and was elected vice president after it was reorganized. He was also president for a time of Great Southern Life Insurance, vice president of Houston Land Corp., and a director of Missouri Pacific Railroad Co. A nephew of William Marsh Rice, through marriage he was also related to both W.S. Farish and Stephen P. Farish--two brothers who had married Libbie Randon Rice and Lottie Rice, respectively, Jo Rice's sister and cousin.

The New York Times quoted Mr. Kirby as saying that both companies were profitable, and "the only and sole cause of the present trouble lies in the fact that the securities issued the Houston Oil Company have not been marketable." The Times went on to say that

... interests identified with the Atchison and with the St. Louis and San Francisco [Frisco] Railroads have a large interest in the Kirby Lumber Company. Representatives of several banking houses more or less closely associated with the two companies which have just been placed in receivers' hands said yesterday that the assets of the companies were of undoubted value, and that the proceedings were really the outcome of internal discord.[4]

From the Galveston Daily News, February 4, 1904:

Houston, Tex., Feb. 3 --There was nothing new here today in connection with the affairs of the Kirby Lumber Company or the Houston Oil Company, both of which were given receivers by Judge McCormick of New Orleans. Affairs about the Planters and Mechanics National Bank moved along today as they do every day. There was no unusual deposit nor unusual withdrawal of money. In other words, they had their normal appearance all day. In connection with the affairs of the appointment of the receivers the following facts and figures show the status:

The Kirby Lumber Company was incorporated under Texas laws in July, 1901, capitalized at $10,000,000. Its object was to take over fifteen sawmills previously purchased by the Houston Oil Company of Texas. Financial aid was obtained from Eastern associates also interested in the Houston Oil Company of Texas, capitalized at $30,000.000. Stock of the Kirby Lumber Company is divided into $5,000,000 of common, and preferred shares of the same amount. The Kirby Lumber Company contracted with the Houston Oil Company for six and one-half billion feet of yellow pine timber of 12 inches diameter and upward, for the aggregate sum of $30,000,000, to be paid in semi-annual installments in sixteen years....The company owns 180,000 acres of land at Kountze easily worth $5,000,000. Other lands held by the company amount to 127,220 acres, readily marketable for at least $3,000,000.
The temporary receivers of the Kirby Lumber Company and the Houston Oil Company have ordered a continuance of operations in the usual manner, and announcement is made that plans are being considered to terminate the receiverships when the cases are called before Judge Burns of the Southern District of Texas on February 17.

On February 12, 1904 the New York Times contained a short item on page 14 stating that a committee of five had been chosen by the holders of the 6% timber certificates issued by Maryland Trust--George W. Young, Dumont Clarke (president of the American Exchange National Bank in New York and a director of U.S. Mortgage & Trust Co.), James Brown (chairman of Brown Brothers), Gerald L. Hoyt (who served as a director of the Wisconsin Central Railroad alongside Brown Brothers partner, John Crosby Brown), and F.S. Smithers. A week later, Kirby was again quoted in the Times, as follows:

"A distinguished Wall Street operator undertook to finance the Houston Oil Company; had and exercised undisputed authority in the conduct of its affairs. He also directed the financial affairs of the Kirby Lumber Company until about a year ago, and during this period of his control caused the latter company to invest heavily in the preferred shares of his oil company....The Board of Directors of the Houston Oil Company, over the protest of the Wall Street promoter, who is still a member of the board, voted to accept the money and to request the Maryland Trust Company not to proceed, but the money was declined and the demand for receivership persisted in."

By the end of March of that year a lawsuit had been filed by members of a stock syndicate managed by two officers of the Baltimore Trust and Guaranty Company alleging misrepresentations made about the condition of the lumber company in the prospectus. The petition further alleged that one month prior to the appointment of receivers, Kirby formed a holding company with Benjamin F. Yoakum, president of the St. Louis and San Francisco Road, to which they transferred the majority of the Kirby Lumber Company stock, and that they formed the Houston, Beaumont and Northern Railroad Company, to which Kirby Lumber's traction lines and other railroad properties were transferred. In addition, the HB&N RR Co. was capitalized at $500,000 with a bond issue of $1 million. Yoakum loaned the company $600,000 and in return received all the bonds, half the stock and $18,000 in commissions. The newly formed company used half the loan proceeds plus an additional $18,000 to repay a prior loan to Yoakum and his commission for this loan.[5]

Surprisingly, we learn that in 1904 Yoakum was a director and on the executive committee of the board of Seaboard Air Line railroad with people very close to the Alex. Brown bank, including Sol Davies Warfield, uncle of Wallis Simpson and others written about in another blog this author writes.

In 1906 Walter Monteith, brother of Edgar Monteith, Sr. (who many years later became attorney for Gibraltar Savings and Brown & Root), was appointed to act as receiver on behalf of the investors.[6] A settlement was reached in 1908. Houston Oil owned several shallow oil wells in Nacogdoches County, all of the stock of Southwestern Oil Co. and properties of Southern Oil Co., as well as stock in Higgins Fuel and Oil Co., but for revenue it primarily relied on the stumpage agreement with Kirby Lumber. Because of more efficient equipment and the demand for timber for the railroad industry, the lumber company was better able in the next few years to meet its contract requirements, and virtually the same investors organized Houston Natural Gas Co. (HNG) in 1926.

Houston Pipe Line Co. was a wholly owned subsidiary of Houston Oil Company of Texas, and its stockholders formed HNG as a separate corporation a year before the pipe line company completed constructing distribution gas lines. Their hope was to compete with Houston Gas and Fuel (HG&F), of which Captain James A. Baker was president. HG&F had signed a contract to buy only from Houston Gulf Gas, and HNG therefore turned to the outlying areas and other cities in Harris County for customers. Shortly before the stock market crash in 1929, Houston Gulf Gas bought out HG&F and then merged with United Gas Corporation, a holding company, 42% of which was bought by Pennzoil (Zapata’s successor) in 1965, then divested by the SEC in 1970, creating a separate investor-owned corporation, United Gas, Inc.--later Entex. The two gas companies merged in 1976 and were later merged into Enron.

[NOTE: The money can be followed directly from the Baker network into Enron.]

John H. Kirby had incorporated Houston Natural Gas in 1925 with eleven subscribers to the initial issue of capital stock issued on January 18, 1926:

• E.H. Buckner, president - 70 shares
• Louis Seymour Zimmerman, Baltimore (president of Maryland Trust Co.) - 70 shares 
• George Mackubin, Baltimore - 70 shares
• David Hannah, Houston - 40 shares
• Judge H.O. Head, Sherman, Texas - 40 shares
• McDonald Meachum, Houston - 40 shares
• C.B. McKinney, Houston - 40 shares
• H.M. Richter, Houston - 40 shares
• George A. Hill, Jr., Houston (father of Raymond M. Hill—discussed in Pete Brewton’s book, The Mafia, the CIA and George Bush) - 35 shares
• T.M. Kennerly, Houston - 35 shares
• A.S. Henley, Houston - 20 shares

The following May, 1926, 1,500 additional shares were issued, with 140 each bought by the largest three investors, with Hannah and McKinney each buying 80 more. New shareholders of note were Samuel C. Davis (80), Thomas S. Maffit (80), John Foster Shepley (80), Samuel W. Fordyce (80), and N.A. McMillan (70), all of St. Louis, Missouri--part of the syndicate for which Prescott Bush's father-in-law, George Herbert "Bert" Walker, was already handling investments through his investment bank, G.H. Walker & Co.[7]

After the 1926 sale of stock, the following geographical breakdown existed:

• Houston -- 1,100
• Baltimore -- 430
• St. Louis -- 390

Filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1976, just prior to the merger with Entex, show that directors of Houston Natural Gas included the following:

1. John H. Duncan (also a member of the audit committee)--chairman of the board of Gulf Consolidated Services, Inc. in Houston and chairman of the executive committee of Gulf + Western Industries, Inc. in New York--since 1968, who owned 40,000 shares of HNG.
2. C. Thomas Clagett, Jr. (also a member of the audit committee), whose occupation was investments in Washington, D.C.--who owned 252,226 shares individually plus over 700,000 additional shares as trustee for family members.
3. J.A. Edwards, a board member since 1968, who was president of Liquid Carbonic Corp., an HNG subsidiary (42,596 shares).
4. W.S. Farish III, who was shown to be president of Fluorex Corp., an "international mineral and exploration company" in Houston (4,000 shares), grandson of Libbie Rice Farish.
5. Robert R. Herring, chairman and CEO of HNG, director since 1964 (60,000 shares), husband of Charlie Wilson's girlfriend, Joanne Herring.
6. M.D. Matthews, vice-chairman of board (32,482 shares).
7. Neil D. Naiden, partner of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, a Washington, D.C. law firm.
8. Charles Rathgeb, chairman and CEO of Comstock International, Ltd. in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Interestingly enough, Robert Herring (at the time of his death married to a Houston "socialite," the former Joanne Johnson King) was also president of Rice University in 1980, shortly before his death, and John Duncan's brother, Charles Duncan, Jr., retired in 1996 as chairman of the Rice board, which had previously been headed by George Rufus Brown, brother of Herman Brown, co-founder of Brown & Root (later Halliburton).

The newspaper misspelled the name of Pakistan's President--Zia ul Haq.

HNG located its offices in 1927 in the Petroleum Building built by Irishman J.S. Cullinan, where it remained until 1967, when it became the core tenant of Kenneth Schnitzer's office building at 1200 Travis. The primary attorney for the company was shareholder George A. Hill--of Kennerly, Williams, Lee, Hill & Sears--the father of Raymond Hill of Mainland Savings fame, to whom Pete Brewton devoted an entire chapter of his book. The foremost Houstonian shareholder was David Hannah who had arrived in Houston from Scotland in 1908 and was head of the Houston Cotton Exchange for a time. David Hannah Jr. would later be named a trustee of the Hermann Hospital Estate and serve alongside Walter Mischer, Jr. He would also attract investment from Toddie Lee Wynne, Jr. into a company called Space Services, Inc., which would launch the first private satellite into space from Matagorda Island, Texas.

In 1956 Houston Oil Co. was sold to Atlantic Refining Co. for a quarter-billion dollars ($250 million). In 1966 Atlantic acquired Richfield Oil Corp., a company which had been placed in bankruptcy in 1928 when it had over $10 million in judgment claims resulting from canceled oil leases at the Elk Hills Naval Reserve, subject of the Teapot Dome scandal, to Pan American Petroleum, received by Richfield from Edward L. Doheny in 1928. The case was settled in 1933 for $5 million after broker Henry L. Doherty & Co. (60 Wall Street) made an exchange offer for 4 shares of Richfield for one share of Cities Service Co. stock. To protect its interest in the stock, Cities later purchased a large block of Richfield and Pan American bonds.

It appears that these various oil companies owed interest on bonds to holders comprised of numerous foreign, mostly British, investors. According to a book written in 1972 by Charles S. Jones,[8] the former chairman of Richfield, as his very first act, once the decision was made to merge with Atlantic, was:

... to go to London to visit my friend Sir Maurice R. Bridgeman, chairman of British Petroleum. While his company was very much interested in entering the United States market, British Petroleum needed government approval to use dollars, and Sir Maurice thought the market value of British Petroleum shares too low for an advantageous exchange of stock. The matter was left in abeyance until either party desired to explore it further.

Jones next offered to merge with K.S. "Boots" Adams--father of former Houston Oilers owner "Bud" Adams--who was chairman of Phillips Petroleum. Later, he set up talks with Standolind at Bunny Harriman's ranch in southeastern Idaho, "Railroad Ranch."[9] After news of this meeting was leaked by unknown sources, Richfield's stock increased, leading to an offer from Robert O. Anderson, chairman of Atlantic of Philadelphia, whom Jones met in August 1965, again at the Harrimans' ranch, leading one to believe that Brown Brothers had a big interest in a buyout of Richfield. After that meeting several other companies expressed an interest, but, according to Jones, "a curious event occurred."

One of our Washington lawyers called to tell me that a Mr. Cladouhos, an Antitrust Division lawyer assigned to the case, had suggested that Richfield settle the suit by merging with Atlantic Refining Company. The division had earlier suggested a merger, but this was the first time it had named a partner. The suggestion seemed most unusual, but I concluded that Bob Anderson's lawyers had probably been exploring the Justice Department's attitude toward a merger with Richfield and had thus given Cladouhos this particular inspiration.

As far back as 1959, when W. Alton Jones was still living, we had made a study of the possibility of merging Richfield, Sinclair, and Cities Service to form a national company strong enough to compete with the international majors. There was always the imponderable of the Justice Department's attitude, but we decided that we would never know the reaction until we tried....Cities Service already owned about 30 percent of Richfield.

When the merger was finally worked out, "Francis Kernan and others of the Boston-based investment bank, White, Weld & Company, represented Richfield."[10] The White, Weld investment bank, which in 1974 merged with G.H. Walker and Co., owned by then by G.H.W. Bush’s Uncle Herbie, his own financial patron. The White Weld-Walker amalgam also merged its London and Swiss operations with Crédit Suisse, the premier drug-money-laundering institution of the day, and the domicile for the Bush-North "Enterprise" offshore bank accounts.

The Zimmerman who was named as a HNG shareholder was president of Maryland Trust from 1910 until 1930, when the company merged with Drovers and Mechanics National Bank and the Continental Trust Company, but continued to operate under the name of Maryland Trust, with Zimmerman as senior vice president until his retirement in 1948. Shareholder Mackubin was a senior partner in the brokerage firm of Mackubin, Goodrich & Co. and became a director of Houston Oil Co. in 1925.

Continental Trust was operated by Solomon Warfield, the uncle of Wallis Simpson —Duchess of Windsor. Solomon Warfield acquired a number of shares of Alleghany preferred stock, "issued in a storm of controversy by the banker J.P. Morgan, who was a chief investor for King George VI and Queen Elizabeth at the time they were Duke and Duchess of York," for his niece, which she inherited upon his death in 1927. This stock had always been her "first investment favorite," according to her biographer Charles Higham.[11] When the Duke and Duchess became friends with Alleghany’s Robert Young, allegedly after being introduced by mutual friend Robert Foskett after the Windsors moved to the Bahamas, Young and his wife Anita became one of their few close friends. Both Foskett and Young were directors of Alleghany and lived in Palm Beach, Florida. When Warfield died, he left her only "the interest from $15,000 worth of shares in his railroad companies and in the related Alleghany Company and in the Texas Company [later Texaco]. She had expected a slice of his $5 million, and she furiously began a lawsuit against the trustees of the estate, in the form of a caveat."[12]

In 1937 Allan Kirby gained virtual control of Alleghany. Not long thereafter Texan, Clint Murchison, would be introduced to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor by mutual friend Allan Kirby, and another Houstonian, George R. Brown, would become an Alleghany director. In such cases, it seems very likely that the person holding title to the stock and acting as a director is a mere nominee for someone who does not wish to have his or her name disclosed.

This leads one to wonder whether George and Herman Brown really owned Brown & Root, or whether they were primarily nominees for someone else, or whether they were simply very dependent upon the other capital invested in their corporations--all of them handled by the investment bank of Dillon Read, specifically by August Belmont IV, thought to be working on behalf of his patron, Rothschild Bank, which handled American investments for royal British capital. George and Herman were nobody before 1942, but almost overnight George Brown became Lyndon Johnson's chief financier and a director of major multi-national corporations, and for many years served as chairman of Rice University. After the death of Herman Brown, Brown & Root would be sold to and become a subsidiary of the Halliburton Company, the company to which Vice-President Dick Cheney is so closely tied. The sale proceeds set up the Brown Foundation, managed by, among others, Edgar Monteith and Fayez Sarofim, the investor/husband of Herman Brown's adopted daughter, Louisa Stude.

Sarofim was born in Egypt, but obtained a bachelor’s degree in food technology from the University of California and an MBA from Harvard Business School. In 1958 he established Fayez Sarofim & Co. in Houston, though his first job in Texas was in the Abilene branch of Anderson Clayton cotton merchants, where he became close to Edward Randall III and his circle of friends. Herman Brown's adopted daughter Louisa Stude was in the same circle. After their marriage, Herman Brown's new son-in-law began managing the corporate retirement fund for Brown & Root and the endowment of William Marsh Rice University, then valued at $63 million. Herman himself died in 1962, and Sarofim thus stepped up in managing a big part of the Brown & Root wealth.

Names of Halliburton directors may give an idea about the corporation's other major shareholders. In 1976, for example, they included Alex E. Barron, president of Canadian General Investments, Robert J. Bradley, a director since 1952, owner of only 700 shares, whose occupation was "personal investments." F.A. Calvert, Jr., a director since 1965, was also an investor. Ford M. Graham was an oil and gas consultant, and the 10th Lord Polwarth (Henry Alexander Hepburne-Scott) was and outside director from the Bank of Scotland from 1974 to 1987. At the time this report was made, Joseph A. Thomas, a partner in Lehman Brothers, was retiring from the board. Thomas, a Texan, had been "lent" to Schenley Distillers as administrative assistant shortly after Lehmans brought out the original issue of Halliburton stock in 1933, just after repeal of the 18th Amendment. [13]

Entex was the successor corporation to Houston Gas & Fuel formed by Captain James A. Baker of Baker, Botts probably for his major client, the Rice family or Rice Institute itself. Baker was president and had signed a contract to buy only from Houston Gulf Gas, preventing any competition in its market from upstart company, Houston Natural Gas, which was forced to market its product outside the city of Houston. Eventually, HG&F merged into Houston Natural Gas in 1976, and later became Enron.

If all the original shareholders retained their shares in the initial companies, Enron would be controlled by the families of the Rices, Farishes and the stockholders of the Maryland Trust Co., which put John Henry Kirby in receivership in the early days of the 20th century. But of course people do sell their stock or die and pass it along to heirs and devisees. Nevertheless, it would be fascinating to see who the major stockholders in Enron were in 2001 when it cratered, and took so much with it, only a matter of days following the destruction of the World Trade Center Buildings in New York on September 11.

Originally published at this blog on May 3, 2011 as 

"Pakistan's old friend, Joanne Herring of Houston."

---

ENDNOTES: 

[1] Tesoro Petroleum Corporation, has an equally fascinating history as Enron, as seen from this excerpt from 1965: "There's some local confusion over the proposed stock interchange of Coronet Petroleum Corp. of Houston and the Texstar Corp. of San Antonio. Coronet is the former Gulf Coast Leaseholders, Inc. Texstar is the holding company organized a decade or so ago by the late Tom Slick of San Antonio, and purchased last year by Amon Carter Jr., of Fort Worth, and others. William T. Rhame of San Antonio is president of Texstar. Burford King, Fort Worth who became president of Gulf Coast Leaseholds before its name was changed to Coronet last year, was one, of those listed as the purchasers of the old Slick firm. Then, reportedly, the [Amon] Carter group sold its Texstar stock to Gulf Coast and this group became the controlling interest of the Texstar Corp. All this was last summer. In the fall, Bob West of San Antonio, who had been head of the Texstar Petroleum Corp., subsidiary of the corporation of the same name, set up his own company and purchased the petroleum subsidiary from the parent corporation. West's new company is Tesoro Petroleum Corp. Now, Coronet Petroleum stockholders will meet April 15 in Houston to vote on an agreement whereby Texstar Corp. would assume control of Coronet Petroleum stock. The ratio would be one share of Texstar stock for each 5.8 shares of Coronet stock. As of Jan. 1 Tex Star Oil & Gas Corp. of Dallas changed its name to Texas Oil & Gas to avoid confusion in the public's mind over it and the Texstar Corp. of San Antonio. Louis Becherl Jr., of Dallas heads this firm which has no connection with Texstar Corp." [Source: San Antonio, TX EXPRESS/NEWS - April 4, 1965] 

[2] New York Times, February 2, 1904, p. 11. 
[3] New York Times, February 3, 1904, p. 11. 
[4] New York Times, February 3, 1904, p. 11. 
[5] New York Times, March 30, 1904, p. 12. 
[6] It should be noted that both George and Herman Brown and the Monteiths previously hailed from Bell County, where several surveys of land were patented to a Monteith.  It might be interesting to learn whether the Browns may have been related to the family of brokers. 
[7] Samuel Davis, born in 1871, was a son of John Tilden Davis, and his brother was none other than Dwight Filley Davis for whom the Davis Cup was named. When he obtained a passport in 1918, Samuel Craft Davis called himself president of the John T. Davis Estate and stated he was traveling to France and England to work on behalf of the YMCA's War Work Council. More will be said about his family and about John Foster Shepley in future posts at this blog. 
[8] Charles S. Jones, From the Rio Grande to the Arctic:  The Story of the Richfield Oil Corporation (Norman, Okla: Univ. of Okla. Press, 1972), p. 308. 
[9] Remarkably it was in Sun Valley, the Harrimans' ski resort, where Warren Buffet and Disney's chairman bumped into each other accidentally and decided to merge. 
[10] Keep in mind that at that time, the Hannah family appeared to be major shareholders of Houston Natural Gas.  David Hannah was also chairman of a private company competing with NASA, with a land development company with a Scottish name, and with an amusement company started near the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport in 1955 by Robert Bernerd Anderson, trustee of the Waggoner estate, lawyers Toddie Lee and Angus Wynne, who wanted Bill Zeckendorf to help develop as an industrial and distribution center.  Zeckendorf brought in the Rockefeller Brothers' investment company.  Angus Wynne was the father of Bedford Wynne, who was not only an employee of the Murchison family, but a minor partner with Clint W. Murchison, Jr. in the Dallas Cowboys football team.

  If this director was actually oilman, Robert O. Anderson (as distinguished from Eisenhower Treasury Secretary Robert B. Anderson), it is interesting to explore this link between him, David Hannah and the Wynnes, since he would also add into the mix a connection with John Dick and Walter Mischer. 

Mischer's connection to Robert O. Anderson involves a 250,000-acre ranch near Big Bend National Park that Mischer owned with Anderson. According to Pete Brewton, John Dick "had Anderson over to his house for dinner, while Anderson invited Dick to his annual Christmas dinner for the 'world's most powerful men' at the Claridge Hotel in London. The only woman in attendance . . . was then-British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher." Brewton, p. 274. Both Mischer and John Dick also both borrowed money from Hill Financial Savings of Pennsylvania, one of the companies involved in the St. Joe Paper transaction. Anderson's father was Hugo A. Anderson, a leading oil and gas banker at First National Bank of Chicago. When Robert O. retired from AtlanticRichfield, he went into an oil and gas partnership with Tiny Rowland, considered by some to be a front for the British monarchy. In 1975 HNG directors included John H. Duncan and W.S. Farish III. In 1976 the company merged with Entex and later with Enron.

     [11] Charles Higham, The Duchess of Windsor:  The Secret Life (New York:  Charter Books, 1989), p. 387. 
     [12] Higham, p. 67. 
     [13] Wechsburg, p. 248.

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 II)

Walker Skeletons

In Part I of the Bush family's Walker ancestry, we opened up a closet containing skeletons--the bones of the Dorothy Wear Walker's family dating back five generations preceding the birth of her son, George H. W. Bush. Dorothy's father, George Herbert Walker, had been born in St. Louis in 1875 to David Davis Walker, who had then only recently located to Missouri.

Dorothy's paternal grandfather, David Davis Walker, born in 1840 in Bloomington, Illinois, was the youngest son of George E. Walker, whose family history was set out in Part I.

George E. was the first Walker in his line born on American soil--Burlington, N.J., 1797. Both his parents and two elder siblings were born near Bristol, England before the family's relocation to America in 1792. George's father, called "Beau" Walker, was a sea captain and had been lost at sea while shipping slaves from Sierra Leone, Africa, to the West Indies the same year George was born in America. His mother died when he was nine, and his sister, Rosetta, quickly married in 1807 and moved to Cecil County, Maryland. She took George with her, while their brother (called Uncle Tommy by the Scanlan children) appears to have remained in Philadelphia until some time after 1839. All those facts were documented in the previous segment linked above.

Mount Saint Mary's College, 1826

Rosetta (Mrs. James) Scanlan, then a young bride moved the young boy to Sassafras Neck, Cecil County, Maryland, a community located on the most northerly cove of Chesapeake Bay. Rosetta's husband, Dr. James Scanlan, provided George with the semblance of a Jesuit education, sending him 120 miles away to a new school in Emmitsburg, founded by a French priest, Fr. John DuBois, in 1808.[1] John Carroll, America's first Catholic bishop, later Archbishop of Maryland, who purchased the land for Mount St. Mary's in 1793. George's studies at Mount Saint Mary's were for only one term (1811-12) along with some thirty boarders at Emmitsburg, twelve miles southwest of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, approximately 120 miles from Sassafras Neck. Other alumni from the school's early history, including names of men who would become quite famous,included:

• Jerome Bonaparte, born in 1805 as the son of Napoleon's younger brother by a repudiated marriage (rites performed by Bishop Carroll) to Betsy Patterson; and 
• Charles Carroll, son of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, and his wife Harriet Chew, daughter of  Pennsylvania's Chief Justice and Attorney General Benjamin Chew of Philadelphia, as well as the father of a later alumnus, Maryland Governor John Lee Carroll; and 
• Roger Taney, a future Supreme Court Justice, was not an alumnus but was a parishioner and early legal adviser to the school.

The Carroll family in Maryland were not only large shareholders in the old Bank of the United States in Philadelphia, but also clients of Alexander Brown's investment bank in Baltimore. The Brown family's history is being written up in Linda Minor's series at the Minor Musings website.

Harriet Mercer's Family

Indications are that George attended the school only that one term, until he was fifteen. The War of 1812 began that year, and his whereabouts from that time until he he married a Protestant, Harriet Mercer, in 1821, has not been discovered. About his bride's family, however, much is known. She was the youngest of six children born to John and Rebecca (Davis) Mercer, in St. Stephen's Parish  in Earleville, Cecil County, Maryland.

The Mercer family reputedly descend from William Mercer of Aberdeen, Scotland, who served as a soldier in Ireland, where he remained until his death in 1675. Thomas Mercer, William's son or, perhaps, his nephew, came to eastern Maryland in 1671, from which date the family genealogy is documented at St. Stephens Parish, the same church where Thomas Mercer's descendant, Harriet Mercer, married George Walker 150 years later. The Davis and Mercer families had inhabited Sassafras Neck, Maryland, for generations, dating as far back as 1671 for the Davis family and 1703 for the Mercers.[2] The four generations of Mercers leading up to Harriet had seen a large accumulation of land and slaves purchased to work their plantations.

Harriet and Ann's mother, Rebecca Davis, granddaughter of Thomas Davis, Sr. and Rebecca Gregory through their son William Davis (1742-1791), was also a niece of John Davis (1744-1788), who had married Frances Mercer in 1793. Before settling in Maryland (previously part of Chester County, Pennsylvania), the Davis clan had settled in Kennebunk, Maine, from which they relocated to the warmer climate.

Harriet had been only ten years old when her neighbor George, living at the home of his brothe-in-law, Dr. Scanlan, left school at "the Mount," in Emmitsburg and presumably returned home to Sassafras Neck. Since her mother (formerly Rebecca Davis) had died in 1802, Harriet, then only a five-month-old infant, was reared by her father, John Mercer, likely with assistance from his sister, Frances Mercer Davis and her husband, John Davis (1744-1788), who was also Harriet's maternal uncle.

Harriet's fifteen-year-old sister, Ann, had married 24-year-old physician David Davis, brother of Rev. Henry Lyon Davis, rector of the St. Stephen's Parish Episcopal Church in Cecil County, but became a pregnant widow in 1814, due to the untimely death of her husband. Ann gave birth to David Davis (junior) shortly thereafter. Harriet no doubt helped Ann look after the baby, who grew up to become an attorney in Illinois, appointed to the Supreme Court by Abraham Lincoln. Rev. Davis was later named principal of Maryland's first university, St. John's College: (chapter III sets out his tenure at this historic institution). Ann Mercer Davis was remarried in 1820 to a Baltimore publisher, Franklin Betts.

John Mercer's death in 1820 left Harriet an heiress, but her newly acquired estate was in trust overseen by her elder brother, William Davis Mercer, her legal guardian, appointed in a codicil to John Mercer's Will, which provided that all the real and personal estate that he had

"willed and devised to his daughter Harriet, shall go to his son William D. Mercer, and held by him until Harriet shall arrive to the age of twenty-one years." 

William Davis Mercer operated one or more of the plantations he himself had inherited from their father and, from time to time, he hired a broker to sell some of his slaves in Louisiana. In 1832 a lawsuit had been filed against his slave broker (Warfield), who had purchased the slave in issue from Mercer before selling her on the auction block, along with other slaves actually owned by Mercer.

Harriet's inheritance consisted of a 321-acre farm, which her new husband, George E. Walker attempted to cultivate. This farm was part of what was called the "Chew's Resurvey," mentioned in the papers of Benjamin Chew, Jr., in particular letters to and from his brother-in-law, Edward Tilghman, regarding loans owed by Mercer against the property. Chew, Sr. had moved to Philadelphia in 1754, set up a highly lucrative legal practice, and "owned an elegant town house on South 3rd Street. Here, he attended St. Peter’s [Episcopal] Church and associated with many influential people in the city. He became involved in other business interests, including iron works and land speculation." The Walker family, as mentioned in Part I, attended St. Augustine's Catholic Church, which was burned in May 1844, followed by more riots which occurred in July. Thomas Walker decided to move west also after that.

It should be noted that the First Bank of the United States was established at 116 S. 3rd St, Philadelphia in 1791. Benjamin Chew III was involved with discussions between 1843-52 with both Charles and Joseph Reed Ingersoll (sons of Jared Ingersoll), whose third brother, Edward Ingersoll would come into contact with William A. Stokes, who married George E. Walker's niece, Mary Scanlan, in 1839 in Philadelphia. The Chew family, who acted as bankers and attorneys representing contractors dealing with the government, appear to have called the notes they held on Harriet Mercer Walker's lands just prior to that wedding, forcing Walker to relocate his family to Illinois. His brother, called Uncle Tommy by his siblings' children, had for some years worked as a clerk at the Philadelphia Bank (Chestnut at 4th Street), while living at 181 S. 9th Street.

The Slave Plantations in Sassafras Neck

Archives in Maryland indicate that only a year after Harriet married George Walker, a mortgage on the Frisby Farm was the subject of a foreclosure lawsuit filed by Philadelphia banker, Benjamin Chew:

CHANCERY COURT (Chancery Papers) 1822/02/01
7162: Benjamin Chew vs. William Davis, George Walker, Harriett Walker, and William D. Mercer. CE. Mortgage foreclosure on Frisby Farm [see p. 340 at link], Frisbys Prime Choice. Recorded (Chancery Record) 123, p. 756. Accession No: 17,898-7162-1/2. MSA S512-7195   1/37/4/

The same Frisby Farm or Prime Choice had been the subject of a lease in 1752 from a Bristol, England, man (Loyalist, associated with Benjamin Franklin) named Daniel Cheston to Harriet Mercer's uncle, John Veazey, husband of her father's older sister Rebecca:

Deed Book VII, P. 468. Lease. Daniel Cheston of Bristol but late of Kent Co., Maryland, merchant, and Francina Augustina his wife and daughter of the late Arriana Jennings, wife of the Honorable Edmond Jennings, esq., of Annapolis, for 5 shillings, to John Veazey of Cecil Co., 373 acres, part of 2 tracts of land lying between Sassafras and Bohemia Rivers in Cecil Co. called Frisby's Farm or Frisby's Prime Choice, by Scotchman's Creek, by Thomas Davis' land called the Level and by a tract called King's Aim. Made 31 Aug 1752. Wit: Thos, Luntley, Jno. Hope. Rec: 20 Jan 1752. M's. Bordley, Clerk.

It appears, however, that the land described above was part of Harriet's inheritance, devised in 1764 to her grandfather William Davis by his father Thomas Davis, who had purchased it from Daniel Cheston:

Source: S986 Abbreviation: Will Title: Will for Thomas Davis (1698-1763) ... To my wife, Rebecca Davis, her choice of all my horses, & for life, 1/2 the lands bequeathed to my son Thomas Davis excl. her 1/3 the lands I bequeath to my sons William, Joseph, & John Davis. CONT To my son Thomas Davis, the part of The Levell on the N side a br. of Back Crk. below my dw. house, 6 3/4a of Frisbys Prime Choice, & 25 2/4a of Frisbys Farm I bought of Mr. Daniel Cheston. CONT To my sons William & Joseph Davis, equ. div., the part of The Levell on the S side a br. of Back Crk., Tullys Lot 12a, Rattle Snake Neck 100a, Kings Delight 69a, Marys Jointure 57a, & Cockatrice, 20a on Rattle Snake Point. CONT To my son John Davis, 55a of Frisbys Farm, & if he d. s. p., equ. div., to my sons William & Joseph Davis. CONT To my son William Davis, Pew #9 in St. Stephens Ch., to my son Joseph Davis, Pew #25 in sd. ch. CONT Extrs: my sd. wife & my son William Davis. CONT Witn: Jno. Ward, Matthias Hendrickson, Benjamin Cox. CONT 23 July 1763, sworn to by all 3 witn.

In the fall of 1838 George and Harriet Walker traveled by wagon to Blooming Grove, McLean County, Illinois. David Davis, Harriet's nephew, was there practicing law with Abraham Lincoln. The Walkers' youngest son would be born in Illinois in 1840 and named David Davis Walker in honor of that same nephew, whose own history is related below.

David Davis' Maryland Roots

In 1815, a few months after his father had died, David Davis, Jr. was born to Ann Mercer Davis; five years later she married Franklin Betts. Young David would then be bounced back and forth between his mother, now Mrs. Betts, and his uncle, Rev. Henry Lyon Davis, who had moved to Annapolis to become president of St. John's College. Marcy Brant's excellent article reveals information about an early court case involving disputes between Davis and Betts over which man would be the better guardian for the boy. Years after the legal battles, Rev. Davis' son, Henry Winter Davis, only two years younger than David Jr., boarded with his cousin at Kenyon College in Ohio, and both subsequently were educated as lawyers.

David entered Kenyon in 1826, graduated in 1832, then entered the legal office of Henry W. Bishop in Lenox, Massachusetts to study law.[3] David was admitted to the Illinois Bar in 1836, practicing law in McLean County while showing an interest in Whig politics. The Walker family moved to that county two years later and resumed their farming.

Henry Winter Davis

Henry Winter Davis would remain in Maryland, locating in Baltimore and running for Congress as a Know-Nothing. He would later join the Radical Republicans. According to the Lehrman Institute website, Henry Davis was

a combative, volatile and brash chameleon who changed religion with the philosophical winds and parties with the political seasons [and] ... became a thorn in President Lincoln's side.

In fact President Lincoln was once quoted by Noah Brooks as saying: "I've been told that insanity is hereditary in his family, and I think we will admit the plea in his case." The year after losing his Congressional seat in the election of 1864, Henry W. Davis died in Baltimore.

Walker family

It was in Lenox (in the western part of Massachusetts) that David Davis met his future wife, Sarah Woodruff Walker, daughter of William Perrin Walker, a noted judge from a family dating back to Revolutionary War days, with no obvious relationship to George E. Walker. The judge would not allow his daughter to marry until 1838—after the proposed bridegroom had completed law school in New Haven and set up a law practice in Bloomington, Illinois. The couple’s first son was named George Perrin Davis after Sarah’s brother.[4]  

David Davis’s maternal aunt, Harriet Mercer Walker, wife of George E. Walker, had four surviving children in Cecil County, Maryland before their move "out west" to southern Illinois in 1838. The background on these sons was given by Roger Hughes, "Degrees of Separation," Illinois Times, April 4, 2007:

• John Mercer Walker (1822-1888)--John Mercer Walker, the firstborn, served in the Mexican War at Santa Fe. Soon after, he caught “gold fever” and went overland to California in 1849. His first cousin, Circuit Judge David Davis of Bloomington, helped stake his adventure. John stayed in the Sacramento Valley and farmed 160 acres in Yolo County for more than two decades before returning to Illinois to manage a Davis farm near Maroa. He retired sometime around 1883 and lived with the Davis family in their Clover Lawn mansion at Bloomington until he died in 1888, at age 65.
• Thomas S. Walker (1825-45)--Thomas S. Walker died in 1845, at age 19. Nothing else is known about him, except that he is buried in the pioneer Woodlawn (Rhodes) Cemetery in rural Bloomington Township.
• George W. Walker (1832-96)--George W. Walker married Mary Lilly and farmed for the rest of his life near other Lilly family members in Tazewell County’s Mackinaw Township. They had five children and also reared a son of a Walker brother who died tragically in an 1876 farm accident. Mary’s parents built and operated the Lilly Inn, where lawyers such as Abraham Lincoln sometimes stopped in when Davis was holding court in Tazewell County. Letters in the David Davis Papers — archived at various locations, including Springfield — affirm that George lived and worked for extended periods at the David and Sarah Davis home in Bloomington while growing up. Family members relate that George often took care of the Davis horses. He was being paid about $12 a month by Davis in 1852. George occasionally drove the judge’s carriage when Davis was riding his judicial circuit. According to family lore, Lincoln is believed to have ridden along with them at least once — and maybe more often. George died in 1896, at age 63.
• Edward Scanlan (1835-1876)--Edward S. “Ned” Walker also was regularly found at the Davis home in Bloomington during the 1840s and 1850s, the same years in which Lincoln would drop by to visit the judge. Ned returned from Civil War service in the spring of 1865, several months after the death of his father, and took charge of the family farm at Blooming Grove. He married Sarah Bay of Bloomington. His mother Harriet lived with them until her death, in 1869. Ned died in 1876, at age 40, when he accidentally fell to his death in a farm well. Sarah and her three young children soon left the farm that had been in the Walker family for about four decades.

After the move to Illinois, three more children would be born to them:

• David Davis Walker (1840-1918)--David Davis Walker was born in 1840. Letters in the David Davis Papers show that with the assistance — and at the insistence — of the judge, D.D. Walker attended the Beloit College preparatory school in Wisconsin for two years. Young Walker then journeyed to St. Louis in 1857, soon after his schooling, for employment as a clerk in the wholesale dry-goods firm of Crow, McCreery & Co. Wayman Crow founded the business in 1835. He was a longtime friend of Davis and partnered with the judge in various land transactions across the Midwest. D.D. Walker quickly learned the dry-goods business. He had his own company by the 1880s and was living exceptionally well — though sometimes in poor health — in St. Louis. Around the turn of the century, his six children were marrying into some of the most influential St. Louis families, such as Lambert, Filley, Papin and Wear. He and wife Martha had a summer home at Kennebunkport, Maine, and a winter home at Santa Barbara, California.... D.D. Walker died at Kennebunkport in 1918, at age 78.
• Rosetta Walker (1842-1919)--Rosetta Walker had 10 children with husband Thomas LeRoy Ijams. They farmed in the LeRoy area in DeWitt County. She died in 1919, at age 77. Like her siblings, Rose sometimes lived away from the family farm during her younger years, helping out at the always-busy Davis family home at Bloomington.
• Sarah Davis Walker (1845-1915)--Sarah Davis Walker began occasionally living with the Davis family as early as 1853, when she was about 8 years old. Sarah married Samuel Raley in the mid-1860s. They farmed and had four children. The Raleys first lived in Illinois, near LeRoy, then in Kansas, Missouri, and Texas. Sarah died in 1915, probably in Wharton County, Texas, at age 70.

David Davis Walker

Justice David Davis

David Davis soon became a circuit judge, traveling with Abraham Lincoln, and he has been credited with being the brains behind achieving Lincoln’s election to the Presidency. He accompanied Lincoln to Washington for the inauguration and remained there for a time, possibly helping in the transition, before returning to Illinois to resume his position as Circuit Judge. Shortly after his return, he was appointed chairman of a Western Commission in St. Louis, to investigate claims against the War Department and Union General John C. Fremont with regard to military preparedness. In October 1862, President Lincoln appointed his friend to be a Justice on the Supreme Court.

David Davis residence in Bloomington

David D. Walker arrived in St. Louis in 1857 after studying at Beloit College Academy in Wisconsin for several years. Judge Davis sent his only son, George Perrin Davis, who was two years younger than his cousin, D.D. Walker, to Beloit at about the same time Walker was there. George P. Davis received further education at Illinois Wesleyan, of which his father was an incorporator and trustee. With a partner, Wells Colton, Davis in 1836 bought the law practice of Jesse W. Fell, and in 1843 he also acquired Fell's mansion on the south side of Bloomington, called "Clover Lawn," which has come to be known as the David Davis Mansion.

A decade later Fell and Davis witnessed the groundbreaking of the Illinois Central Railroad in the northern part of the city. This is the railroad which would decades later be reorganized by E. H. Harriman--thus serving to rescue the investments of Bloomington's wealthy citizens who had retained their stock.

According to the Roger Hughes article cited above:

Even after his death, on June 26, 1886, Judge David Davis continued to assist the less successful of his Walker cousins — just as he had regularly helped them and their parents across earlier decades of the 19th century. Decatur’s Daily Review newspaper reported on Aug. 4, 1886, that the will of the late circuit judge, Supreme Court justice and U.S. senator had been “offered for probate” and that it included “comfortable support for his poor relations. . . . ” Among the “poor relations” were all but two — D.D. and George W. — of his Walker cousins. He provided lifetime annual legacies for some of them and one-time bequests for others. Also, he gave “my horse ‘Whoodlebug’ and my Washington buggy” to John Mercer Walker. Shortly before the judge died, D.D. Walker visited Clover Lawn to pay respects to a first cousin who had, about three decades earlier, helped put Lincoln in the White House even as he was also giving the young Walker a life-changing jump-start to future personal and family success.

 
ENDNOTES:

[1] The revolution in France following America's revolutionary war caused the Catholic priest to flee to the United States in the 1790's. Eventually he settled in Maryland, where he was assisted by Fr. Simon Gabriel Bruté, in setting up Mount Saint Mary's school at Emmitsburg. Bruté taught there 1812-34, later became the first bishop of Vincennes, Indiana. 

[2] The Mercer family's roots in Cecil County were deep, and they can be traced as far back as the birth of Robert Mercer, Sr. there in 1703 to the Scottish-born Thomas Mercer, who married a widow, Elizabeth Barnes MacGregor (born in Cecil County in 1666). Thomas left four sons: Robert, William, Thomas, Jr., and John.

[3] Bishop was a close friend of Berkshire County Clerk Charles Sedgwick, of a prominent family living in Massachusetts and Connecticut whose first American ancestor, Robert Sedwick, arrived in 1635 and was appointed governor of Jamaica by Oliver Cromwell in 1655. The intermarried Sedgwick, Dwight and Ellery families were notable in the Skull and Bones fraternity at Yale. 

[4] Marcy J. Brant, “David Davis,” Illinois History, Volume 46, Number 2 (February 1993); Davis entry in American Biographical Library.]