Fast Cars and Fast Horses

This year the annual meeting of the Entomological Society of America was held in St. Louis from 17-20 November. This is the time when everyone interested in insects – mostly professionals, but also students and amateurs – have a chance to get together face to face, discuss our latest discoveries, plan for the future, and generally hobnob. The meeting was a great success: we got to see old friends, and make new contacts. My grad students did really well with their research presentations, both of them receiving awards.

Given the opportunity to visit St. Louis, I took a little time to dig into the history of one relative who moved to that city from upstate New York. This is my 1st cousin 3x removed, Joseph Harrington. I thought that this would be very straightforward: find burial sites, take a look at some old houses, and generally get a feel for the place. And that is how it went down during my time in St. Louis, at least until I started to dig a little deeper. The story then became, at the same time, more complicated and infinitely more interesting.

Let me try to put Joe in some context. First cousin three times removed means that his grandparents, William O’Connell and Margaret Murphy, are my 3rd great grandparents (that’s 2 generations away from him and 5 generations from me). I’m related to him on the Harrigan side of the family, and, no, that wasn’t a misspelling in the first paragraph. His surname was Harrington, and he actually has no Harrigans in his ancestry. But as with all things Harrigan, the best starting point is the probate records from 1919 filed for the estate of Nora O’Connell. I described these earlier in my post about Tom Harrigan. In this case, one set of potential heirs or claimants to Nora’s estate were (numbers 3 and 4):

That gives you many of the names of the family relevant to the story. The main ones that are missing are, first, the unnamed child of Joe and Julia: this was a daughter named Julia Josephine. The other important person was Joe’s brother-in-law, a man by the name of Joseph O’Leary. First, though, let me recount the straight-line story of Joe Harrington’s life.

Joseph Francis Harrington was the second son of William Harrington and Margaret O’Connell. I’m not sure if his parents married before or after emigration from Ireland to the United States. My first records are when William Harrington bought property from Lorenzo Carryl in the township of Salisbury in Herkimer County, New York. This land is north of the city of Little Falls, abutting Spruce Creek on its eastern border. Since the original purchase the creek was dammed to produce a reservoir that provides Little Falls with water. The Harringtons had three sons: Martin (born 1868), Joe, and Thomas. There is only a single record for Thomas that I’ve found, the 1875 New York census, and it says that he was 3 years old. Thomas is never heard from again, and so I infer that he died sometime in the period 1875-1880. In that same 1875 census Joe’s age is said to be 5. However, in all the subsequent records Joe’s year of birth is recorded as 1872, and not 1870.

Joe graduated from high school in Little Falls, passing the Regents’ examinations in arithmetic, grammar, rhetoric, and Caesar’s commentaries. He then went on to college, enrolling in the Catholic school Mount St. Mary’s College in Emmitsburg, Maryland, from which he graduated in 1896. From there he enrolled in post-graduate work of some sort at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. He seems to have been a very good student. I haven’t been able to track down any details about what he was doing in Washington. However, in 1897 the Little Falls Evening Times reported that he was going to move to St. Louis to take on the job of a reporter with the Globe-Democrat, specifically in the “church department.” This took a bit of inside influence: “The position was secured by Congressman Richard Kearns, whose sons were classmates with Mr. Harrington at the Washington university.” As best I can tell, though, there was no such congressman at roughly this time. I believe the reference should have been to Richard C. Kerens, a St. Louis millionaire and political aspirant. Although he was a member of the Republican National Committee and tried to gain the Republican nomination for Senator, he was never elected. However, he did serve as Ambassador to Austria-Hungary in the Taft administration. His sons were Richard Jr. and Vincent.

From top to bottom, Mount St. Mary's University (photo from their Facebook site); Ambassador Richard C. Kerens; and The Catholic University of America (photo from their Facebook site).

I rummaged through pages of the Globe-Democrat, but the stories there had no by-line. It doesn’t seem that Joe stayed with the newspaper too long, anyway. In the 1900 census his occupation is “Com’l traveler (books)”; I presume that means a travelling salesman. At some point he worked for the Dodd-Mead Publishing Company. Meanwhile, on 11 May, 1898 he married a young woman from St. Louis, Julia H. O’Leary.

Julia was the only daughter of Cornelius O’Leary (1835-1891) and Mary Mulroy (1850-1876?). She had two brothers, Joseph (1873-1941) and Leo (1874-1889). Cornelius was a lithographer or printer. I’ve not been able to find much at all about Mary Mulroy. In the 1880 census Cornelius already is recorded to be a widower. There is a Mary Mulroy buried in Calvary Cemetery in St. Louis who died in 1876. The timing is right, and I suspect, but can’t document, that this was Julia’s mother. Julia was living with her brother Joe when she married Joe Harrington, and the three of them continued to live together for a few years. Joe O’Leary was an artist: he drew cartoons for most of the newspapers in St. Louis as well as drawing advertising, theatrical, and circus posters. The Harringtons had three children: Marguerite (born 1899), Joseph Jr. (born 1902), and Julia Josephine (born 1903).

The thing that makes this story interesting to me are a couple of dramatic changes from the expected timeline. The first of these occurred in 1905, when Harrington left the book business and turned to making cars. In 1907, with $2500 in cash, he and Julia, together with another couple, Robert and Grace Horne, filed articles for the incorporation of the Victor Automobile Manufacturing Company. The Harringtons and the Hornes each held 125 shares, the husbands each had 124 shares, while the wives had a single share apiece. In 1908 Horne was cited as the president of the company, with Harrington the vice-president. When Horne died the next year, Joe became president (I’m not sure what happened to those 125 Horne shares). His salary was $30/week along with about $100/month in commissions. A far cry from modern CEO salaries even when inflation is taken into account!

When I first learned this, I was puzzled: wasn’t Detroit the national center of automobile manufacturing? Well, yes, but in those early days there was a lot of competition, and St. Louis was a hub of such activity. The Victor Motor Car Company (another name for the business) produced both commercial and pleasure vehicles. In later years the commercial vehicles were a profitable enterprise, but the personal cars lost money for the company. For reasons that I’ll explain shortly, the company made cars only until 1911. There were a surprising number of companies around the country that sold cars under the name “Victor,” so a bit of care is needed when searching for information on Harrington’s products. Apparently, though, there is still one of their 1907 high-wheelers out there that still runs (although obviously with lots of rebuilt parts). I was also able to find some of their advertising.

The factory site moved around a bit, judging from the ads and listings in the St. Louis city directories. A new building to house the factory was constructed at 900 Boyle Avenue in 1909. The address is still valid, and from the looks of it, the one-story building could well be the same. Most of the floor space is now unoccupied. I was also able to find their home, located at 241 Selma Avenue in the suburb of Webster Groves. The house is just down the tree-lined street from Webster Groves High School, and Webster University is just a few more blocks away.

Above, the Harrington family home at 241 Selma Avenue in the suburb of Webster Groves. Below, the final factory site of the Victor Automobile Manufacturing Company at 900 Boyle Street.

The Victor Automobile Manufacturing Company ceased operations in 1911 due to the premature death of its president, Joseph Harrington. His wife, Julia, later testified that he had been quite sick during the period from 1896 to 1905 or 1906. Nevertheless, his death came unexpectedly and quickly; according to his death certificate he died on May 6 due to bowel obstruction, and had been attended by Dr. C.L. Armstrong for three days. The death certificate also states that Joe was to be buried in Calvary Cemetery. Online searches for the site were unsuccessful, though. I was able to find where Julia was buried (she died in 1930), but nothing for Joe. This is what prompted me to visit Calvary Cemetery.

My plan for the cemetery visit was the height of cunning: find Julia’s grave and then nose around reading the names on nearby stones and hope to get lucky. I knew that she was buried in Section 20, but when I arrived at the cemetery I discovered that it is huge. So I stopped in the office to ask directions. I thought that the mere fact that there was an office to visit was a very positive sign. Also, it was both manned and open for visitors! I went in and asked directions to Section 20. The clerk asked me who I was looking for, and I told him “Julia Harrington.” From his computer he printed out a map of the cemetery showing the sections, a map of Section 20, he identified a name on one of the markers close to the road and nearby Julia’s grave, and then he printed off a sheet of details on Lot No. 1450. On this sheet not only were all the burials in the lot specified, but there was even a sketch to show who was buried where. There was Julia H. Harrington (buried 30 Aug 1930); Francis Hoffmeier, the 1-year old grandson and son of daughter Julia (buried 09 Jan 1933); Joseph J. O’Leary, Julia’s brother (buried 11 Jun 1941); Marguerite H. Anderson, the other daughter of Joe and Julia (buried 31 Mar 1970); Oscar B. Anderson, Marguerite’s husband (buried 07 Jul 1988); and, last but not least, Jos. H. Harrington himself (buried 19 May 1911). Of course they got Joe’s middle initial wrong – it should be F. for Francis – and Francis’s name was also misspelled. It’s a good thing that the cemetery was so well organized, because the headstone was not very helpful. All it has on it are the four surnames Harrington, O’Leary, Hoffmeier, and Anderson.

Top: Headstone of the Harrington family cemetery plot. Here are buried Joseph and Julia Harrington, grandson Francis Hoffmeier, Julia's brother Joseph O'Leary, daughter Marguerite Anderson, and son-in-law Oscar B. Anderson. Middle: Calvary Cemetery. Bottom: Cemetery record for Section 20, Lot 1450.

Before our trip to St. Louis I knew at least the outlines of most of the story I’ve told so far. Since our return, the past couple of weeks I wanted to flesh out details and fill in the many gaps in the history. In doing so I stumbled across the record of an appeal to the Supreme Court of Missouri, dated 03 Dec 1917: Manchester Bank of St. Louis v. Harrington et al. (No. 18507).

It seems that when Joe Harrington died in 1911 and the Victor Automobile Manufacturing Company closed shop, the company was unable to cover all of its outstanding debt. The bank was left some $2000 short, and so, being bankers after all, they sued the family to take possession of the house on Selma Avenue. The bank initially won, and the Supreme Court case is the appeal by Julia and her brother Joe to have that decision reversed. In the testimony it comes out just how the Harringtons were able to purchase the Selma Ave. property and, probably, cover costs associated with the car company. This is the reason that I mentioned the name of Julia’s brother, Joe O’Leary, early in this post.

The crux of the matter, to my untrained legal eye, was that Julia Harrington asserted that the bank could not take possession of the house because her brother held the deed. And he held it because over the years he had loaned his sister and brother-in-law thousands of dollars, and he was a secured creditor. As such, he took priority over the bank when it came time for repayments for the car company’s losses. (Please, those of you who do understand the intricacies of the law, let me know how to better state the case.) That begs the question, where did Joe O’Leary get some $14,000 that he could have “loaned” to the Harringtons? By his own testimony, Joe was making only somewhere between $35-$45 per week, of which he sent his sister about $15 a week. From 1898 to the time of Joe Harrington’s death that would have only amounted to a maximum of $10,920.

First few paragraphs of the Missouri Supreme Court ruling in the appeal of Manchester Bank v. Harrington et al. You can read the entire decision at this link beginning on page 242, or I can send you a copy (it's 9 pages long).

It turns out that Joe O’Leary had another source of income: betting on the ponies. But he wasn’t your typical punter. No, Joe had the inside track. Remember that the father of Joe and Julia was Cornelius O’Leary. Cornelius had a brother named John J. O’Leary, and John had a daughter named Anna. She, in turn, was the wife of a certain John J. Ryan, a man who later in life came to be known as “Bald Jack” Ryan. With a nickname like that, you can probably sense that we’re heading toward the wrong side of the law.

Ryan began his notorious career as a bookmaker, and from there moved on to become a “horseman” or “turfman.” He owned race horses, built race tracks, and ran pool halls to accommodate betting. He operated across several states, from Missouri to New York, and north into Canada. Eventually he became well known enough to the authorities, jockey clubs, and such that he was forced to leave the horse racing business. From there he moved on in 1909 to, what else, playing the stock market. Later he became a speed boat racer and was a partner in a boat-building business that eventually became Chris-Craft Boats. He had a colorful life, and you can read much more about him in a 7-part story entitled The Horseman, written by Joe Ryan.

John J. (Baldy) Ryan as caricatured in the pages of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 03 Oct 1903.

Joe O’Leary testified that he made thousands of dollars betting on horse races while he was working as an artist in Cincinnati and Chicago. His cousin, Anna Ryan (Bald Jack’s wife) would telephone him and pass on in code the names of horses to bet on. O’Leary never deposited the money in a bank, but left it for safekeeping at Dermody’s “bar” in Cincinnati. This was the source of the money that was supposedly lent to Joe Harrington. In the end, the appeal by Julia and Joe O’Leary was successful, and Julia was able to live out the rest of her life in the house on Selma Ave.

In the years after her husband’s death, the activities of Julia Harrington and her daughters often appeared in the society pages of St. Louis newspapers. The youngest child, Julia Josephine, was sent to spend her final year in high school in Los Angeles, California. There are notices of the girls and their mother traveling to visit friends around the country. One question, though: if, at the time of Joe’s death, the family risked losing their home because of a debt of $2000, on what income did they maintain that lifestyle for the next 19 years? Maybe Joe O’Leary had other cash assets stashed away somewhere?

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported on 09 Oct 1921 that the youngest daughter, Julia, left for Los Angeles to attend high school at Ramona Convent, a private school. She spent the holidays in California. As graduation day approached on 18 June 1922, the Globe-Democrat reported that “...she was suddenly stricken with appendicitis last Sunday and an immediate operation was necessary.” Upon return, I found her picture in the newspaper when she was voted Queen of the Armistice Ball in 1923.

Finally, to wrap up a few loose ends: I’ve mentioned that Julia, the mother, passed in 1930. Julia the daughter married John Joseph Hoffmeier (1903-1979) in Cleveland on 3 Jan 1926. At about that time her uncle Joe O’Leary was also working in Cleveland. What a tightly knit family! Julia Hoffmeier had 3 children, and she died in Santa Barbara in 1998 at the age of 94. Joseph Harrington Jr. appears in the 1920 census, but in his mother’s obituary in 1930 he is said to be deceased. I haven’t been able to find any record about what happened to him. Finally, the oldest daughter, Marguerite, married Oscar B. Anderson on 18 Dec 1945 in Phoenix at the age of 46. They had no children of their own, and Marguerite died in 1970, aged 71, in San Francisco.

So ends my tale of the life of Joseph Harrington. I’d expected my trip to St. Louis to be relatively uneventful, but his history turned out to have a few more surprises than I expected. There are still a lot of gaps to fill: what did he study at Mount St. Mary’s and at the Catholic University? What happened to Julia O’Leary’s mother? How about Joseph Jr.? Is any of Joe O’Leary’s artwork still around? I’ll be sure to include an update if and when new information shows up.

References

• Anonymous. 1908. The horseless buggy. The Spokesman of the Carriage and Associate Trade 24(6): 167-182. (The section entitled “The 1908 Hand Forged Victor” appears on page 182.)
• Manchester Bank of St. Louis v. Harrington et al. 1917. The Southwestern Reporter 199: 242–250.

The Butcher of Kansas City

This headline was too good to pass up for a Halloween post! My subject today is a follow on from the last post on the Barthelsons in New York City. As I noted then, I've been somewhat surprised at the number of people in the family that emigrated to the U.S. Not all of them stayed permanently, but since I started out knowing only about one or two, it's been quite a revelation. This line of inquiry was really instigated by a cousin's query. I'd been burrowing back through the records on Barthelsons, and as I did so I was recording what I found on ancestry.com (if you're interested, I think you can see what I've gathered: it's all under the Johnson Family tree, under the user name baeus2). Anyway, I then received an inquiry about one of the persons I'd recorded, Carl Victor Barthelson (b. 1849) that was mentioned in the last post. That query came from a direct descendant of Carl, Anne Meyer Nordström – so thanks to you, Anne!

The Carl Victor Barthelson in question was born in Västerås, Västmandland, in 1849, son of Per Barthelson and Kjerstin Persdotter. On 5 May 1872 he married Anna Christina Eriksson in Karlstad, a city in the province of Värmland (to the west of Västmanland). Together they had six children: ill-fated twins Anna Christina and Elin Maria (1872-1872), Victor Emanuel (1873?), Carl Johan (1875-?), Anna Viktoria (1877-1877) and Herman Mathias (1879-?). The question marks aren't meant to signify any great mystery, only that I haven't yet had the chance to follow up on those persons in the records. Carl Victor's profession is recorded as “slaktare,” Swedish for butcher or meat-cutter. I understand that this was the family business, and quite a number of Barthelsons have this as their profession in public documents. You may remember that when my great grandmother, Lottie, had her mother committed to the Brooklyn Home for the Aged, the document said that the mother's father was a butcher. Also that our poor lamented August Barthelson had been a well-to-do butcher in Sweden.

For reasons that are as yet unknown, in 1884 Carl Victor Barthelson left his wife and three children in Karlstad and emigrated to the U.S. As far as I know, he never returned. His wife, Anna, lived until 1922. Therein lies a tale, I'm sure. My focus in this posting, though, is was happened to Carl Victor in the States?

If you get on ancestry.com and search for that name, one of the early hits you'll find is a man named Carl Victor Barthelson, living in Kansas City, Missouri. Actually, the name varies a bit, but is still recognizable: Carl Victor, Karl Viktor, Charles V., Charles W. I won't bore you with all the permutations by which supposedly literate American recorders murdered the name Barthelson. Aside from the name itself, this gentleman is particularly attractive as a match for our Swedish emigre because he, too, was a butcher/meat cutter. I'll bet that there was a lot of work for that profession derived from the stockyards of Kansas City.

We're generally in good shape as far as the availability of records goes as well, because the state of Missouri has placed not only the data from their birth, death and marriage records online, but you can also download copies of the documents themselves! We can find, for example, a copy of the marriage license of Charles Barthelson, age 25, resident of Jackson Co., Missouri (= Kansas City) to Miss Emma Erickson, age 26, on 29 June, 1887. Charles/Karl/Carl appears in the KC city directories, beginning in 1886 and continuing uninterrupted until 1911. Barthelson is not such a common name, neither in the U.S. nor in Sweden. Combine that with the fact that Carl Victor in KC is also a butcher, the we have a match, right? Not so fast, my friend.

The glaring inconsistency – undoubtedly noted by the math fiends – is that the Carl Victor in Kansas City was claiming to be substantially younger than the Carl Victor that left Sweden. The latter was born in 1849; the former – both on the basis of his marriage license as well as the censuses of 1900 and 1910 – was born around 1862, a difference of 13 years plus or minus. Now I can understand hedging your age (Jack Benny comes to mind!), but could you really pull off saying that you're 13 years younger than you actually are? Although I might say no, it's impossible to definitively say one way or the other.

As a result of this impasse, I just didn't know what to make of the Kansas City records. But I think I may have broken through the logjam. The break came when I was trying to write an earlier blog post about my 2nd great grandmother, Catharina Charlotta Barthelson. Her father had died and mother remarried, and I was having a bit of trouble trying to track her whereabouts after her father's death. I found her, eventually, in 1861 living in Västerås along with the focal point of this post, her brother Carl Victor. But then I noticed a couple of things in that record. First, above Carl Victor's name was the annotation “Fosterbarnet herren” (I think I've got that right), indicating that the names below were the foster children of those listed above. And above that, as head of the previous family, was a name I didn't recognize: Lars Persson Bartelsson. That surname was too close to be just a coincidence, don't you think?

A couple days of digging revealed that Lars was born the illegitimate son of Catharina's father Per, hence the Persson. I'm not sure how or if he was ever legitimized – yet another trail to follow – but it is clear that he was Catharina's uncle. Not only that, but as you can see in the record, one of the sons of Lars Persson Bartelsson was named Carl Victor Bartelsson. More than that, this Carl Victor was born on 4 September, 1862, and therefore was exactly the same age as the butcher in Kansas City. As with so many others in the family, Carl's father, Lars, was a butcher. Lars died young, a victim of alcoholism and delerium tremors. I haven't seen any record of this Carl being classified as a butcher in the Swedish records, though. He emigrated at the age of 19, unmarried, and destination unspecified other than North America.

What happened to the Carl Victor of Kansas City? Carl and Emma had two children (that I know of), a daughter Hildur born in 1888, and a son Harold born in 1897. Emma was committed to a state hospital in 1906, and she remained a ward of the state until her death of a stroke in 1920. As I noted earlier, Carl Victor is in the KC directories until 1911. A helpful contributor to ancestry from that area posted a transcription of the short notice from the Kansas City when he died at the age of 50 in 1912. Daughter Hildur never married. She was a music teacher in Kansas City until her death in 1942.

Harold served in the U.S. Army in World War I, in 1919 achieving the rank of Corporal, Company H, 63rd Infantry. He eventually settled down in the Bay Area of California, where he married Helen Joyce Holloway in 1921. Joyce was a prominent pianist, and the two met during a visit she made to an army camp where Harold was stationed. The couple divorced sometime between 1928 and 1936, but she retained the use of the name Barthelson for the rest of her career, even after remarrying. Joyce's career was a great success. She studied at the Oakland Technical High School in California, graduating in 1918. She attended the University of California, Berkeley; studied piano with Elizabeth Quaile, Helene Barere and Harold Bauer, composition with Julius Gold, Otto Cesana and Roy Harris, orchestration with Nicolas Flagello, and conducting with Antonia Brico. From 1922-1935 she toured with the Arion Trio, playing with Josephine Holub (violin) and Margaret Avery (cello). In the photo, Joyce is in the center, with Josephine on the left and Margaret on the right (I think!) She was staff pianist NBC radio San Francisco and KGO Oakland, and in 1936-1938 conductor of the Women's Symphony in New York. In 1944, she and Virginia Hoff Greenburg founded the Hoff-Barthelson Music School in Scarsdale, NY. In 1942 she married Benjamin Morris Steigman, but continued to use the name Barthelson through the rest of her life. She died in Scarsdale in 1986.

To briefly go back to Harold, in 1941 or 1942 he married Ardis Sara Olive Jones, a dental hygienist. He was a builder. They continued to live in the Bay Area for many years, and later moved to Magalia, California. Harold died in 1983, and Ardis in 1993. As far as I know, neither had any children.

I've probably digressed too far. To summarize, I've pretty much concluded that the butcher of Kansas City probably isn't the Carl Victor Barthelson we'd been searching for. He's likely a relative, but not the target. I would really love to see his death certificate in the hope that his parents' names are listed. He died in a hospital in Kansas City, Kansas, but the state has no documentation for him. They suggested that I check in Kansas City, Missouri where he lived. But the death certificate isn't in their on-line records. I suppose there's a chance that they have the document but, for some reason, it wasn't digitized and placed online. So I'm pretty much back at square one. There is still the unidentified brother of Johan August who was living on West Twenty-sixth Street in Manhattan to find, and that seems like the best bet for progress.

One thing that I've learned from this exercise is that coincidences occur more commonly that I'd thought. We started out looking for a butcher from Sweden named Carl Victor Barthelson. Well, we found one, but it turns out that he wasn't the right one. And I learned that he's not the only one: there was another Carl Victor Barthelson, butcher, who moved from Sweden to Chicago (and later to New York). I'm pretty sure that this isn't the one I'm after, either, since he had a child born in 1882, the same year that the Swedish records say that my Carl left Karlstad for the U.S. The lesson is to get as much corroborative evidence as possible, but still always leave open the possibility that your conclusions will turn out to be wrong!