Genealogy

Marrying Out and the Conversion of the Lawrences to the Episcopal Church

January 25, 2015 in Lawrence Family, Quakers No Comments Tags: Genealogy, Lawrence Family, marrying out, Quakers

The early Lawrences were mostly or perhaps entirely Quakers, but gradually became Episcopalian.

One of the causes for the change in denomination was the Quaker prohibition of marrying non-Quakers.

As early as 1694 Philadelphia Meeting advised:

Take heed of giving your sons and daughters who are believers and profess and confess the truth, in marriage with unbelievers; for that was forbidden in all ages…it is unbecoming those who profess the truth to go from one woman to another, and keep company and sit together, especially in the night season, spending their time in idle discourse, and drawing the affections one of another many times when there is no reality in it.

The guilty party had to demonstrate repentance, or was in effect excommunicated:

Marrying out [of the faith] is believed to have caused immense losses in Quaker numbers after 1740. In Quaker records there are notations that someone “married out of unity” or “mou” – this indicated that they married someone not of the Quaker faith. It would be necessary to make amends in writing to the satisfaction of a committee of members of the monthly meeting if they wished to remain Quakers. Sometimes the spouse adopted the Quaker faith and was received by request (rcrq). If the Quakers were unwilling to make amends for their actions they would be dismissed from the monthly meeting.

The prohibition against marrying out helps explain the tendency of the Lawrences to marry their cousins. There were only a few Quaker families in New York, and they quickly became interrelated and entangled.

Of Effingham Watson Lawrence (1795-1872), Friends records indicate that he was dismissed for “marrying out: in January, 1824, His wife was Rebecca Prince, after that must have become an Episcopalian, or at least was agreeably to sending his son Francis Effingham, to an Episcopal school, an experience that led Francis to become a disciple of Muhlenberg, a priest, and rector of the Church of the Holy Communion.

But even marrying a Quaker cousin was not always sufficient because of the Hicksite-Orthodox split. After they Hicksite-Orthodox split in the Quakers, the prohibition was applied to the wrong sort of Quaker. As we have seen, Newbold Lawrence and Anna Hough Trotter were both Quakers, but of different persuasions, and they compromised by marrying in an Episcopal church and their descendents were Episcopalians.

However, Quaker influences remained important in the family, as we shall see.

Leave a Comment

Newbold Trotter Lawrence I and II

January 24, 2015 in Lawrence Family, Uncategorized No Comments Tags: Genealogy, Newbold Trotter Lawrence

Newbold Trotter Lawrence I

Newbold Trotter Lawrence, my wife’s first cousin four times removed, was born on. May 6, 1855. His parents were Newbold Lawrence and his mother Anna Hough Trotter. Both were Quakers, but his father was Orthodox and mother was Hicksite, so they had married in Episcopal church in 1851. Newbold Trotter was the nephew of the ornithologist George Newbold Lawrence.

Newbold Trotter attended a private school, where he befriended Harold Herrick, who later names Lawrence’s’ Warbler after him. Newbold Trotter had an early interest in birds and collected 600 skins, which were left to the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. He became a Fellow of the American Ornithological Union.

Newbold Trotter attended New York University one year, and then became Real estate agent with H. H. Camman and Company. He later became an independent agent and developer. He developed his 125 acre estate in Lawrence into summer homes, and served as the treasurer of St John’s Episcopal Church in Lawrence. He also helped found and served as treasurer for the Rockaway Hunt Club.

In November 1887 he married Isabelle Gillet (1860-1904) of Baltimore in the Church of the Incarnation in New York.

Newbold Trotter hunted in eastern Canada, visited Europe with his wife. Otherwise his life was quiet.

The season of 1895 found the couple at Saratoga.

Newbold Trotter died August 14, 1929 in Antwerp, where he was visiting his son who was serving as an agent for a steamship line.

The rare Lawrence’s Warbler, in the wild here.

*******************************************************************

Newbold Trotter Lawrence II

Newbold Trotter Lawrence II (my wife’s second cousin three times removed) was born on January 9, 1893. He was in the class of 1912 at St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire and entered the Naval Academy. There in 1913 he was a victim of a hazing incident and got into a fight. His tormentor, James. C. Cook was expelled. For “humiliating” Lawrence. In 1916 Lawrence won the second prize in sailing and received a monocular.

Immediately after graduation he married Mary Evelyn Cromwell (1893-1968) at the Baltimore Cathedral at 6 P. M. on June 7, 1916. Cardinal Gibbons presided. The reception was at Ingleside, the Cromwell’s estate.

During World War I Lawrence was in the submarine service out of Bantry, Ireland. He resigned in1920 and became a Merchant Marine officer until 1922. He then went to work for the Pacific Mail Steamship Company and left them in 1924 to work for the United States Lines. He was general manager from 1937, then became assistant vice president and vice president while the S.S. United States was under construction.

His son Richard remembers that

My Dad, Newbold Lawrence was the VP of Operations for the U S Lines, and this afforded me the opportunity to take weekend trips from Baltimore on the Night Boat to Newport News VA to crawl all over the Big U while building. It further gave me the opportunity to visit the ship often when in New York. I remember the special dinners on the ship when Chef Bismark would make me a special plate of petit fours to take home with me. I spent hours in the engine room with the Chief and his Lts.

I made all the trips with my Dad when the ship returned to Newport News for her annual dry docking. My two prize gifts were Commodore Anderson’s sextant as a graduation gift when I graduated from NYSMC, and our honeymoon round trip on the Big U to Liverpool and return.

Newbold Trotter II also served as President of Maritime Association of the Port of New York and headed the American efforts in Lifeboat Races. He retired in 1958 to his home in Lloyd Harbor and died November 18, 1968.

Leave a Comment

George Newbold Lawrence and the Birds

January 23, 2015 in Lawrence Family, Uncategorized No Comments Tags: Genealogy, George Newbold Lawrence

George Newbold Lawrence, born October 20, 1806, was my wife’s third great-grand uncle. Following the tradition of keeping marriage in the family George Newbold Lawrence in 1835 married Mary Ann Newbold. For :marrying out, both George and Mary were dismissed from he Hicksite Quakers in March 1835; then the Orthodox Quakers dismissed her in April 1835.

He was active in the pharmaceutical business, but gave that up to devote his life to his true live: ornithology.

The Businessman

When he was twenty in joined his father in the family business, Lawrence, Keese, and Co. This had been founded in 1781 in Pearl Street by Effingham Lawrence, and was the oldest drug wholesaler and importer in the United States.

John Keese, of a Quaker family, met with his pharmaceutical friends in the Shakespeare Tavern. There they discussed the total lack of quality control in the compounding and prescription of drugs. In 1828 Keese, George Lawrence, and others founded the College of Pharmacy. If a man apprenticed and then studied at the college, he could join the college and advertise that fact, giving some assurance to his customers that he knew what he was doing. The College was in 1904 incorporated into Columbia University.

Most pharmaceuticals were imported from England, as the Seidlitz powders were. The problems of quality control are also in the background: as today, drugs then were faked and sold to the unsuspecting if they do not purchase through reputable dealers.

During the Civil War the firms grossed $1,000,000 a year (abaout $30,000,000 in 2015 dollars). George Newbold worked in the business for thirty-six years.

He and his brothers Alfred and Newbold in 1869 offered the South Side Railroad on Long Island land for a station to be called (what else?) Lawrence. The brothers formed the Cedarhurst Company to develop the land into estates.

The Ornithologist

As a young men he frequented his family’s summer house “Forest Hill” on the heights of northern Manhattan and hunted birds. In 1841 met George Baird, the ornithologist, and began taking a scientific interest in birds. 1845 joined the Lyceum of Natural History and later helped found the American Ornithological Union. He outfitted expeditions to Lesser Antilles to study birds.

By writing of water birds he helped Spencer Baird write Reports of Explorations and Surveys for a Railroad Route from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean. This was the basis for the 1860 encyclopedia, Birds of North America.

Ornithology interested even politicians. Charles Lucien Bonaparte wrote the Conspectus Generum Avium and inscribed a copy to George Newbold.

Like Audubon, who shot birds before he posed and painted them, George Newbold was also a mighty hinter. He gave his collection of 8,000 bird skins to the American Museum of Natural History. His main interest was in the birds of Central and South America, Cuba, and the West Indies.

At the end of his life he became a neighbor of Audubon and his sons Victor and John.

George Newbold described 323 species as new. He published 120 papers on birds, many in The Auk, which gave him a lengthy tribute after his death (January 17, 1895), concluding:

He forms, together with Baird and Cassin, the “great triumvirate, of what has been termed the Bairdian Epoch of American Ornithology.”

The Birds

Lawrence had many birds names after him. One is Lawrence’s Goldfinch: Carduelis lawrencei.

Uncommon and somewhat mysterious is this little finch of the far West. It nests very locally in the foothills of California and Baja, often near streams in fairly dry country. Its winter range varies: in some years, flocks spread well eastward across the southwestern deserts, but the reasons for these “invasions” are not well understood. The twittering song of the male Lawrence’s Goldfinch often includes brief imitations of the voices of other birds.

Here, here, and here are videos of Lawrence’s Goldfinch.

Leave a Comment

Leonie Alexandre and the Barn Dance

January 22, 2015 in Alexandre Family, Genealogy, Uncategorized No Comments Tags: Geneaology

Leonie Alexandre (1890-1992) was Jerome Alexandre’s sister. She is therefore also the first cousin twice removed of my wife.

Leonie led at active life as a debutante.

On March 20, 1909 a Chocolatière et Tableaux was held at the Plaza. The Times reported that

chocolate and other refreshments will be sold by women and girls in chocolatière costumes after the famous painting in the Dresden gallery.

La Belle Chocolatière

by Jean-Étienne Liotard

Pastel on Parchment

There were also dances, and Leonie was an Egyptian dancer, and the evening also promised a “a humorous reading of Salome.”

An Egyptian Dancer, c. 1910

Later in March of that year Leonie was again an Egyptian dancer at at benefit for a benefit of a dancing class of factory and shop girls, hosted at their studio by Mr. and Mrs. Francois Tonetti. Mrs. Tonetti was Mary Trimble Lawrence, another relation of my wife’s, from the artistic side of the family.

Leonie played in The Castle of Liguria during the Italian Carnival at the Waldorf Astoria on March 30, 1910.

Like Jerome, she also stood to inherit $1,500,000 (about $40,000,000 in 2015 dollars) when she reached her majority. Her tendencies differed from Jerome. This is the report on how she celebrated her access to vast wealth on July 3, 1911.

Nirvana was the family estate in Connecticut and the site of the mysterious burglary.

She was engaged to Francis J. Danforth (1878-1950) an industrial engineer. Her fiancé gave his bachelor dinner at Delmonico’s on May 19, 1911. A “colored band” played, according to the Times. They were married on May 11, 1911, at St John’s Episcopal Church in Stamford.

St. John’s Protestant Episcopal Church, Stamford, Connecticut

The reception took place at Nirvana.

Her life seems to have been devoted to charity events. Among those she assisted at were the appearance of Will Rogers in 1928, an exhibition of Edward VII’s coronation robes in 1937, and a production of the pantomime “Popo” in 1939. She acted in a Snark’s production of “The Aunt of England” in 1939.

If the Social Security death index is accurate, she died at the age of 101 on May 18, 1992.

A Note on the tableau vivant

In a tableau vivant actors posed motionless to duplicate a famous painting or scene. Paintings were subjects of tableaux vivants. Here are some recent ones:

Scenes could also be acted. For example, when Dickens came to New York in 1842, an entertainment for him involved both dances and tableaux vivant of :

“A Sketch by Boz”

“Oliver Twist”

“Little Nell”

“Pickwick Papers”

“Curiosity Shop” etc.

Here are some older scenes:

They were popular in the nineteenth century My wife informs me that they are still given at the Roland Park School in Baltimore.

Leave a Comment

Decline and Fall of One Church

January 14, 2015 in Episcopal Church, Lawrence Family, Uncategorized 2 Comments Tags: Church of the Holy Comforter, Genealogy, Limelight, Michael Alig, Party Monster, Upton Sinclair

After the Reverend Francis Lawrence died, the church continued its mission under new leadership. It had an illustrious literary parishioner: Upton Sinclair.

Sinclair was from a shabby genteel Baltimore family; his father was not very successful. His mother was a devout Episcopalian, so when they moved to New York in 1888 when Upton was ten years old, he became an active parishioner of the Church of the Holy Communion, where the Rev. William Wilmerding Muir continued Lawrence’s work with the poor.

When I was thirteen, I attended service, of my own volition and out of my own enthusiasm, every single day during the forty days of Lent; at the age of fifteen I was teaching Sunday-school. It was the Church of the Holy Communion, at Sixth Avenue and Twentieth Street, New York; and those who know the city will understand that this is a peculiar location—precisely half way between the homes of some of the oldest and most august of the city’s aristocracy, and some of the vilest and most filthy of the city’s slums. The aristocracy were paying for the church, and occupied the best pews; they came, perfectly clad, aus dem Ei gegossen, as the Germans say, with the manner they so carefully cultivate, gracious, yet infinitely aloof. The service was made for them—as all the rest of the world is made for them; the populace was permitted to occupy a fringe of vacant seats.

The assistant clergyman was an Englishman, and a gentleman; orthodox, yet the warmest man’s heart I have ever known. He could not bear to have the church remain entirely the church of the rich; he would go persistently into the homes of the poor, visiting the old slum women in their pitifully neat little kitchens, and luring their children with entertainments and Christmas candy. They were corralled into the Sunday-school, where it was my duty to give them what they needed for the health of their souls.

…….

I had a mind, you see, and I was using it. I was reading the papers, and watching politics and business. I followed the fates of my little slum-boys—and what I saw was that Tammany Hall was getting them. The liquor-dealers and the brothel-keepers, the panders and the pimps, the crap-shooters and the petty thieves—all these were paying the policeman and the politician for a chance to prey upon my boys; and when the boys got into trouble, as they were continually doing, it was the clergyman who consoled them in prison—but it was the Tammany leader who saw the judge and got them out. So these boys got their lesson, even earlier in life than I got mine—that the church was a kind of amiable fake, a pious horn-blowing; while the real thing was Tammany.

I talked about this with the vestrymen and the ladies of Good Society; they were deeply pained, but I noticed that they did nothing practical about it; and gradually, as I went on to investigate, I discovered the reason—that their incomes came from real estate, traction, gas and other interests, which were contributing the main part of the campaign expenses of the corrupt Tammany machine, and of its equally corrupt rival. So it appeared that these immaculate ladies and gentlemen, aus dem Ei gegossen, were themselves engaged, unconsciously, perhaps, but none the less effectively, in spreading the pestilence against which they were blowing their religious horns!

So little by little I saw my beautiful church for what it was and is: a great capitalist interest, an integral and essential part of a gigantic predatory system. I saw that its ethical and cultural and artistic features, however sincerely they might be meant by individual clergymen, were nothing but a bait, a device to lure the poor into the trap of submission to their exploiters.

Sinclair seems to have been an old fashioned Progressive Reformer. He disliked political corruption because it contributed to VICE. As the corrupt political parties received money from businesses from which well-to-do people also contributed, Sinclair held them responsible, although it is not clear what he wanted them to do.

Good Society moved uptown, and the leaders of the Church of the Holy Communion were aware that they were losing the parishioners who supported the church and its work with the poor, so they tried to set up an endowment that would allow the church to function with reduced contributions.

By the 1890s the area was the Ladies’ Mile, with department stores and dry goods stores; but by 1920 they had moved uptown.

The church survived but underwent the vicissitudes which the Episcopal Church also underwent.

“On 14 June 1970 Al Gross’s seventy-fifth birthday was celebrated at an honorary service in Lower Manhattan’s Episcopal Church of the holy Communion. The church, on Sixth Avenue and Twentieth Street, was next door to the offices of the George W. Henry Foundation, which were housed in the church’s parish house. Gross was the executive director of the foundation, an agency founded in 1948 to help young men charged with homosexual offenses. Gross’s career as a homophile activist began in 1937 when he first became associated with Henry. A biographical sketch appeared in the church’s program for the honorary service that charted Gross’s career as a researcher and activist. No mention was made of how and why Gross embarked on his life’s work. Indeed, this was not possible because Gross ws a closeted gay man who began his endeavors after he had been removed as an Episcopal priest. (Henry Minton, Departing from Deviance, p. 95)

The last rector saw the handwriting on the wall and in 1966 had the church designated an historical landmark, which at least protected the exterior.

The church was closed in 1976 and deconsecrated ; it was sold to the Lindisfarne Association, which held poetry readings, lectures, and concerts. The restoration of the building was too expensive for the Association, so the Lindisfarne Association returned the building to the parish and moved to Colorado.

The parish then sold the building to Odyssey House, a drug treatment center. Odyssey House in turn sold to Peter Gatien who open the Limelight night club there in 1983.

Then the trouble started.

Gatien stripped the beautiful old structure of its sacred context – distorting the Gothic finery with a funhouse mirror, placing bars lined with expensive imported spirits (alcoholic as opposed to celestial) next to the marble crypts, and turning the hushed reverence of the chapel into the riotous frivolity of the VIP lounge.

There were go go cages suspended above the dance floor in the nave.

Andy Warhol hosted opening night. Prince came, and Mick Jagger, and Madonna, and the gay nights became every more popular, filling the building to its capacity of 2500.

The NYC Police were unhappy:

The Limelight, located in a former Episcopal church on the Avenue of the Americas at West 20th Street in Chelsea, was temporarily padlocked by the police after a drug raid last year. New York City police arrested three people, including an employee, on charges of selling marijuana. The police said that drugs were rampant at the Limelight and sold in an “open and notorious manner,” sometimes by the employees.

The DEA was not amused:

The owner of three of Manhattan’s largest nightclubs was accused yesterday of turning two of them — the Limelight and the Tunnel — into virtual drug supermarkets, peddling the drug known as Ecstasy to a clientele made up largely of college students and teen-agers.

Zachary W. Carter, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a written statement that Peter Gatien, one of the reigning nightclub promoters in New York, had “installed a management structure” at the Limelight and the Tunnel that was “designed to ensure successful distribution” of Ecstasy to nightclub patrons, and that the sale of Ecstasy “was the centerpiece of the operation of these clubs, not just a lucrative illegal sideline.”

A former patron remembers fondly:

The amount of sex that went on in the Limelight was unbelievable. Orgies in one room,sex in the bathrooms and on the dance floor, in the video booths. Music and lights were incredible. Nothing exists today to match the Limelight. Late 70’s and 80’s were truly great times. Kids today have no idea what they missed.

Michael Alig (1966- ) was its most famous employee:

Andre “Angel” Melendez was regular on the New York City club scene and worked at The Limelight. He also sold drugs on the premises. After the bar was closed by federal agents due to an investigation that Peter Gatien was allowing drugs to be sold there, Melendez was fired. Shortly thereafter, he moved into Alig’s apartment. On the night March 17, 1996, Alig and his friend Robert “Freeze” Riggs murdered Melendez after an argument in Alig’s apartment over many things including a long-standing drug debt. Alig has claimed many times that he was so high on drugs that the events are quite cloudy.

After Melendez’s death, Alig and Riggs did not know what to do with the body. They initially left it in the bath tub that they filled with ice. After a few days, the body began to decompose and became odorous. After discussing what to do with Melendez’s body and who should do it, Riggs went to Macy’s to buy knives and a box. In exchange for ten bags of heroin, Alig agreed to dismember Melendez’s body. He cut the legs off, put them in a garbage bag and stuffed the rest into a box. Afterwards, he and Riggs threw the box into the Hudson River.

In the weeks following Melendez’s disappearance, Alig told “anyone who would listen” that he and Riggs had killed him. Most people did not believe Alig and thought his “confession” was a ploy to get attention. Alig was eventually tried and convicted.

The 2003 film Party Monster featured these events.

The nightclub was the subject of a 2011 movie.

The Limelight was finally shut down. After a brief stint as the Avalon night club (2003-2007), the building became an high-end boutique center, Limelight Marketplace.

This 25,000-square-foot former eighties nightclub (and, before that, a church) was converted into a shopping emporium in May 2010. The 20th Street landmark’s lancet windows, labyrinthine layout, and soaring chapel are the same as they ever were, but the sex-and-drugs-fueled bacchanal is long gone. Where makeout booths and cocaine corners once stood, now you’ll find limited-edition sneakers, handmade belts, MarieBelle chocolates, Hunter boots, tubes of Sue Devitt lip gloss, scented soaps from Caswell-Massey, and Grimaldi’s pizza.

The Marketplace failed, and was replaced by a gym.

Changing demographics often produce superfluous church buildings, and the mission fo the church is not to preserve buildings which are no longer of use to it, even if the buildings are architecturally significant. Creative re-use is a solution, but what the parish failed to do was to put some kind of restrictive covenant one the building that would forbid the premises from being used for inappropriate, immoral, or infamous purposes. Such a restriction would lower the market value but preserve the dignity of a building which, although deconsecrated, had once served as a house of prayer.

Leave a Comment

The Church of the Holy Communion

January 14, 2015 in Episcopal Church, Lawrence Family, Uncategorized No Comments Tags: Evangelical Catholicis, Francis Effingham Lawrence, Genealogy, The Church of the Holy Communion

To return to the life and times of the Reverend Francis Effingham Lawrence.

The Church of the Holy Communion

As our never-failing source Wikipedia says:

The Gothic Revival church building was constructed in 1844-1845 according to a design by Richard Upjohn, and was consecrated in 1846. In 1853 Upjohn completed the Parish House and Rectory on West 20th Street, and in 1854 he built the Sister’s House.^[The design of the church, which features brownstone blocks chosen for placement at random, made the church “one of the most influential buildings of the 19th century”. It was:

[the] first asymmetrical Gothic Revival church edifice in the United States … Upjohn designed the building to resemble a small medieval English parish church … The church’s founder, the Reverend William Muhlenberg, a leader of the evangelical Catholic within the Episcopal Church, was closely involved with the design …

Muhlenberg believed that the Gothic style was “the true architectural expression of Christianity.”

Another source elaborates:

Land was procured on the northeast corner of Sixth Avenue and West 20th Street, at that time a second-rate residential district surrounded by fields. On July 25, 1844, the cornerstone was laid for a church designed by Richard Upjohn and built from 1844-1846. Upjohn’s small building resembled a small medieval English parish church and was noted for being the first asymmetrical rustic Gothic Revival edifice in the United States, a design that would be copied by many churches throughout the country. Dr. Muhlenberg, a leader in the evangelical Catholic movement of the Episcopal Church, was closely involved with the design, suggesting the use of transepts and other features that were more typical of Roman Catholic churches.

Richard Upjohn (1802-1878) designed Trinity Church on Wall Street. It is formal and symmetrical.

Trinity before the canyons were built.

But he made the Church of the Holy Communion asymmetrical and less elaborate, presumably in keeping with Muhlenberg’s desire to welcome both rich and poor, like the village churches of England. The asymmetrical tower inspired numerous Episcopal churches in the United States.

This view romantically portrays the location of the church as it should have been.

This is the church as it in fact was in the 1860s.

Here is an older view, probably in the heyday of the church.

Here you can see how Upjohn used brownstone to give an informal, rustic effect.

And how it looks today.

Here is the interior in 1946.

Muhlenberg, like the Ritualists of England, used Catholic paraphernalia to appeal to the poor, who found bare churches and hour-long Calvinist sermons a touch on the cold side. He thought that the poor should be served with grace and beauty.

The Church of the Holy Communion was the first church to use flowers on the altar, and after the Easter service the congregation in procession brought the flowers to the sick in the hospital the church had founded. This seems to have been the origin of the New York custom of the Easter Parade. Other churches took up the custom of Easter flowers; as Francis Lawrence said in thus funeral sermon of 1877, it was –“a practice now indeed carried to such a silly and wasteful extreme, many churches seeming rather flower-shops at Easter than Sanctuaries of the Almighty, that he almost regretted that he had introduced the custom.”

And the Easter Parade no longer was in service to the poor:

In your Easter bonnet, with all the frills upon it,
You’ll be the grandest lady in the Easter parade.
I’ll be all in clover and when they look you over,
I’ll be the proudest fellow in the Easter parade.
On the avenue, Fifth Avenue, the photographers will snap us,
And you’ll find that you’re in the rotogravure.

Leave a Comment

William van Duzer Lawrence

January 13, 2015 in Anti-Semitism, Lawrence Family, Uncategorized 1 Comment Tags: Anti-Semitism, Bronxville, Genealogy, PainKiller, Sarah Lawrence College, William Van Duzer Lawrence

William Van Duzer Lawrence (1842-1927) was my wife’s 4^th cousin 4 times removed (distant, but traceable). “Removed,” by the way, means a different generation. For example, my uncle’s children are my first cousins. My great uncle’s children are my first cousins, once removed, and so on.

William van D. Lawrence

Van D., as we shall call him, according to Wikipedia

was a millionaire real-estate and pharmaceutical mogul who is best known for having founded Sarah Lawrence College in 1926. He played a critical role in the development of the community of Bronxville, New York, an affluent suburb of New York City defined by magnificent homes in a countrylike setting. His name can be found on the affluent Lawrence Park neighborhood, the Houlihan Lawrence Real Estate Corporation, and on Lawrence Hospital.

The pharmaceutical company was Perry Davis, later Davis & Lawrence, which published a book Nursing the Sick, which achieved mention in Culinary Landmarks: A Bibliography of Canadian cookbooks 1825-1949.

Biblio of Candian Cookbooks

Davis and Lawrence also manufactured “Pain-Killer”

Painkiller Bottle

“”PAIN KILLER” was patented by Perry Davis in 1845. It is believed to be the first nationally advertised remedy specifically for pain – as distinct from a particular disorder. “Pain Killer” was distributed by Christian missionaries around the world Its ingredients, mainly opiates and ethyl alcohol, were entirely natural. No need of doctors (who had a deservedly poor reputation).

Joy

Nothing like organic opium to relieve pain. Narcotics provided a solid foundation to the Lawrence fortune; once you started taking Pain Killer, you never wanted to stop.

As a youth Mark Twain encountered it. In his Autobiography he reminisces:

It was not right to give the cat the “Pain-Killer”; I realize it now. I would not repeat it in these days. But in those “Tom Sawyer” days it was a great and sincere satisfaction to me to see Peter perform under its influence–and if actions do speak as loud as words, he took as much interest in it as I did. It was a most detestable medicine, Perry Davis Pain-Killer. Mr. Pavey’s negro man, who was a person of good judgment and considerable curiosity, wanted to sample it and I let him. It was his opinion that it was made of hell-fire.

Next Van D went into real estate. He founded Bronxville, which was designed for upper-middle class types who wanted a pristine community:

Lawrence Park proudly advertised in House and Garden in 1925: “Restrictions? Yes! Bronxville has been carefully guarded in its development…. The index of desirability has always been character, culture, and the ability to fit easily and naturally into the social scheme.”

As a Protestant minister remarked “Jesus Christ, – himself a Jew – would not be a welcome citizen of communities such as…Bronxville.

bronxville_ny

In 1958 Harry Gersh, using the name of Harry Greenberg, tried to buy a house in the Holy Square Mile, as Bronxville was known.

One real estate agent told him bluntly: “I have to tell you that you wouldn’t be comfortable here in Bronxville. There are no Jewish people in the village.” She only had his best interests at heart:

Some of my best friends are Jews,” she said. “And I wouldn’t want you to be hurt. It’s not even you and your wife so much. You’re probably used to it. But your children. You know how cruel children can be. Think of your son and daughter exposed to the cruelty of the other children.”

Van D. built the Hotel Gramatan in Bronxville

Gramatan

A massive fixture straddled atop Sunset Hill from 1905 until 1972, the Gramatan enjoyed its spectacular heyday in the 1920’s. Developed by real estate mogul William Van Duzer Lawrence, The hotel enjoyed an international reputation of exclusivity, attracting stars such as Greta Garbo, John and Ethel Barrymore, Gloria Swanson, Peaches and Daddy Browning and Theodore Dreiser. Society from all over the world flocked to the Gramatan to rub elbows; its balls and social events serving as mixers for the rich and famous.

Jews were allowed in the hotel.

Sarah Lawrence College was his next major work in 1926. He named it after his wife,

and built it on his estate. Westlands:

From its inception, the college was intended to provide instruction in the arts and humanities for women. Its pedagogy, modeled on the tutorial system of Oxford University, combined independent research projects, individually supervised by the teaching faculty, and seminars with low student-to-faculty ratio.

One of my nieces went there, I shall have to ask her if the tradition of all natural opium continues at the college.

Its architecture leans to Stockbroker Tudor, as we see in the Titsworth and Dudley Lawrence dorms:

Lawrence Dorms

Van D. also founded Lawrence Hospital after his son nearly died when he fell sick and had to be taken to New York.

Such are the accomplishments of this Lawrence: a fortune built on opium and real estate, a college, and a hospital.

At present those who try to build fortunes on opium and its equivalents end up in jail or dead, rather than successful philanthropists.

Leave a Comment

Effinghams All

January 6, 2015 in Genealogy, Lawrence Family No Comments Tags: Genealogy

Francis Howard, Fifth Baron Howard of Effingham

(Not a relation)

Rhode Island Effingham

Tasmanian Effingham

Actor Effingham

HMS Effingham

The Last of the Effinghams

Leave a Comment

At the Name of Effingham

January 6, 2015 in Lawrence Family No Comments Tags: Effingham, Genealogy, Lawrence Family, Townley estate

Bishop Potter alludes to Francis Effingham Lawrence’s middle name, which Francis usually concealed under an humble E.

It is characteristic of the intrinsic modesty of his nature that, though his middle name, Effingham, descended to him through a long line of honorable, and, in its trans-Atlantic connections, noble ancestry, he himself never used it, and during his whole life wrote in connection with his signature only its initial letter.

The Lawrence family believed that they were related to the Earls of Effingham. Supposedly Joseph Lawrence married a Mary Townley, whose sister Dorothy married an Earl of Effingham. These Townley sisters were supposedly members of the wealthy Townley family of Townley Hall.

This never happened.

What in fact happened is that Thomas Lawrence (1580-1625) married Joan Antrobus (1592-1659) and had three sons, William, Thomas, and Joseph. The father died; his widow Joann married John Tuttle (1596-1656) and all of them came to Massachusetts on the Planter in 1635.

William Lawrence (1622-1680) married Elizabeth Smith. He died; she married Philip Carteret, governor of New Jersey (1639-1682). He died, and she married Richard Nicholas Townley (1629-1711), and by him had a son Effingham Townley. Richard Townley had come to Virginia in 1683 in the suite of the Earl of Effingham, and presumably named his son after his patron. Richard Townley was not a member of the Townley family of Townley Hall.

The Townley family of Townley Hall had only one daughter at this time. There were not three Townely daughters of Richard Townley (1629-1707), but only one: Mary Anne Dorothy Townley. Because the family had previously been in the custom of giving only one name to their children, the daughter with three names was inadvertently later identified as three daughters, two of whom were non-existent, but were nonetheless useful in providing the Lawrence family with an aristocratic connection.

In any case, there is no evidence that any Earl of Effingham ever married a Townley of any Townley family; and the peerage, as it was important for matters of inheritance, was extremely accurate.

I presume the conceit that they were related to the Earls of Effingham by marriage must have started early among the Lawrences to produce such a fine crop of Effinghams through the centuries, who extended their flight from the name as far as Tasmania.

As Bertie Wooster once said “There’s some dirty work done at the font sometimes, Jeeves!”

Effingham Lawrence (many, many of these)
Effingham Bulkey Lawrence
Edward Effingham lawrence
Watson Effingham Lawrence
Francis Effingham Lawrence
William Effingham Lawrence (one of these went to Tasmania)
Owen Effingham Lawrence (of the First Tasmanian Imperial Bushmen)
Effingham Calvert Lawrence
Effingham Nicoll Lawrence
Joseph Effingham Lawrence
Albert Effingham Lawrence etc. etc. etc.

The contagion extended to families related by marriage:

Effingham Embree
Effingham Townley (several of these)
Effingham Townsend
William Effingham Townsend
Lawrence Effingham Embree
Effingham Lawrence Townsend
Effingham Maynard
Effingham H. Nichols
Effingham Warner
Charles Effingham Townley
Effingham Lawrence Capron
William Effingham Lawrence Hunter etc. etc. etc.

And there are many suspicious E.’s in the Lawrence family.

And women:

Frances Effingham Lawrence
Bertha Effingham Lawrence Newton Davison

Not to mention the Effies:

Effie Lawrence
Francis Effie Lawrence
Effie Humphrey

All this would be harmless enough, only afflicting boys with a name they would rather not have (although it’s better than Sue), but vanity combined with greed involved the Lawrence family in one of the classic cons of the nineteenth century, which I will cover in another blog.

Leave a Comment

Evangelic Catholicism

January 4, 2015 in Episcopal Church, Lawrence Family 1 Comment Tags: Flushing Institute, Francis Effingham Lawrence, Genealogy, Memorial Movement, Willaim Augustus Muhlenberg

Although I referred to the Rev. Francis E. Lawrence as an Anglo-Catholic, that is perhaps not entirely accurate. He was a pupil of William Augustus Muhlenberg (1796-1877), who was a great-grandson of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg (1711–1787), the father of Lutheranism in America.

William Muhlenberg became an Episcopal priest. His first significant work was in education.

The Young Muhlenberg

Muhlenberg resigned as rector of St. James’ Church, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1826, and moved to Flushing, Long Island. He became supply priest at St. George’s Church in Flushing, and later became the rector. Several men in Flushing wanted to establish an academy for boys and asked Muhlenberg to be the head instructor. He accepted, and the school opened in the spring of 1828. Muhlenberg served in this position for eighteen years. He made the school the model for other church schools in the United States. Flushing Institute stressed the ideals of a Christian atmosphere, the role of the Bible in the curriculum, physical education, and a sense of family life. One of the most famous schools influenced by Flushing is St. Paul’s School, Concord, New Hampshire.

St Paul’s (the Flushing Institute) existed from 1836-1848. There Francis Lawrence was educated. (The Lawrences had lived in Flushing for centuries). Lawrence said

I think–when I claim that the influence for good of St. Paul’s College can hardly be overestimated, not merely in the religious training of its students, although in that respect its success was most remarkable–at least one hundred of the clergy, numbering among them some of our most eminent Bishops, Professors, and Pastors, tracing, it is said their choice of the sacred ministry to the impressions received at College Point–but it made honorable the hitherto slighted office of the teacher and woke the dormant conscience of the Church generally to the vast importance of a Christian training of the young.

St. Paul’s College / The Flushing Institute

The Flushing Institute provided a model for the Episcopal prep schools of the US.

Muhlenberg’s religion has been described as Evangelical Catholicism.

He began to call his religion “evangelical and catholic.” To Muhlenberg “evangelical” meant devotion to Jesus Christ, dedication to the Scriptures and the responsibility to live and share the Gospel. “Catholic” denoted roots in a universal faith and order, with guidelines and discipline.

Muhlenberg explained his stance:

In a word, Catholicism, as such, is more objective than subjective, while Evangelicism, is more the latter than the former, though, of course, in respect to the great facts of revelation, it is equally objective with Catholicism. Accordingly, Evangelicism deals more with the inward and spiritual. It considers the Church as the society of all true believers, the “blessed company of all faithful people;” ministers of the Gospel, as having a call within from the Lord, rather than as ordained by man; the various forms of worship, as comparatively indifferent, so there be the “worship in spirit and in truth.”

Agreeable to these distinctions, our Church is both Catholic and Evangelic — Catholic in adhering to the ancient documents of the faith; Evangelic in requiring the faith of the heart and immediately in Christ.

Muhlenberg hoped for a Pan-Protestant union. He wanted the Episcopal Church to offer ordination to clergymen of other churches and offer a very general supervision if they would use certain elements of the Book of Common Prayer. This was the Memorial Movement.

Lawrence said of Muhlenberg:

The prayer of that Redeemer, “that they may be one as We are one,” seemed to him to be a call to unity, which could not but be heard by the devout believer. Hence, with great ability, in the columns of the “Evangelical Catholic,” which he edited for several years, as well as in the pamphlets published by him, a broader Catholicity was advocated than was familiar at that time to the thought of the Church. The freer use of our inherited forms of prayer, the adaptation of the service more fully to the Christian year, and especially the extension of the Orders of the Church to those who stumbled at a full reception of our whole ecclesiastical system–our Episcopate thus becoming a golden bond of union between the divided followers of Christ–these were among the subjects upon which he wrote with power..

It was supported by Bishop Potter but High Church bishops objected and it got nowhere.

Muhlenberg’s attitude is very appealing:

I confess, as I advance in life, I grow increasingly tolerant of the various organizations of genuine Christianity, and proportionably impatient of the exclusive claims of any one of them to be that of Christ or His apostles. I come to look more and more at the Church simply as the Congregation of the Brethren in Christ. This is the Ecclesia of the Gospel, having equally the universal Christian consent. Brotherhood in Christ is eminently Evangelic Catholicism. What idea of the Church is more Catholic than that of the Society of men, in all ages and everywhere, united by faith to Jesus Christ, the Eternal Son of God, taking their nature upon Him, and so becoming their God- Brother, the one and only Mediator between God and man ? What virtue more Evangelic than the love of the brethren as brethren in Him? What more Evangelic and Catholic, pre-eminently both, than Charity, the informing spirit of the Church on earth, and so to be of the Church forever in heaven? May such be the Evangelic Catholicism of our Union, making it a true brotherhood in Christ, for a new bond of love to one another in Him, and a new encouragement to all such works of love as “He hath ordained for us to walk in.”

\\\

The Elderly Muhlenberg

The differences between Anglo-Catholicism and Evangelic Catholicism are not doubt very significant theologically, but I doubt they were noticed by anyone in the pews. The worship of the Episcopal Church in the US must have been rather stark and Calvinist before Muhlenberg’s work at the Church of the Holy Communion, where (according to Lawrence)

were introduced, for the first time it is believed in this country, the Daily Service, the Weekly Communion, Choirs of boys, the Chanting of the Psalter, the Christmas Tree–inherited from Dr. Muhlenberg’s German ancestry–the use of flowers at Easter as symbols of the Resurrection….

As we shall see in his work at the Church of the Holy Communion, Muhlenberg is a most engaging and most Christian man.

Leave a Comment

The Rev. Francis Effingham Lawrence and Masculinity

January 1, 2015 in Genealogy, Lawrence Family, Masculinity, Meek or Macho 1 Comment Tags: Anglo-Catholicism, Francis Effingham Lawrence, Genealogy, Masculinity

+The Rev. Francis. Effingham Lawrence is my wife’s second cousin four times removed. He was a High Church Episcopal clergyman who lived from 1827-1879. He died unmarried at the age of 53. From 1839 to his death he was assistant and then rector of the Church of the Holy Communion in Manhattan.

The Rev. Henry C Potter, the rector of Grace Church, preached at Lawrence’s funeral service on November 2, 1889. In it he made some remarks which are immediately relevant to the thesis of my book Meek or Macho?

[Dr. Lawrence] was essentially a manly man. “I am a man,” said a clergyman in my hearing not long ago upon a public platform, “even though I do wear a cassock.” Unfortunately, not all those who wear a cassock can say so as truly as could Dr. Lawrence. He never forgot that he was a Priest in the Church of God, but that consciousness did not make him effeminate.

Lawrence, as we shall see, was a proponent of Anglo-Catholicism and of a Catholic liturgy. The masculinity of Anglo-Catholics was frequently questioned because some were celibate and fussy about ritual. “Effeminate fanatics” and “womanish men” were some of the milder criticisms of these “not conspicuously virile men.” Punch observed in “Parsons in Petticoats” that “reverend gentlemen ‘of extreme High Church proclivities’ are very fond of dressing like ladies.”

The “cassock’ that Potter mentions was regarded by many as a sign of questionable masculinity. In France bishops required priests to wear the soutane (the cassock); men called it the jupon (skirt), and the clerics who wore it, les enjuponées (the skirted ones). In 1870 the newspaper Patriote wrote of seminarians: “let them have the courage to take off their robe, that it can be seen underneath if they are men or if they are hermaphrodites.”

An unmarried, Catholicizing Episcopal priest like Frances Effingham Lawrence could easily have his masculinity questioned, and that is why Potter emphasized that Lawrence was masculine.

Leave a Comment

The Bishop and The Heiress

March 4, 2014 in Celibacy, clergy sex abuse scandal, Genealogy 10 Comments Tags: Baroness von Zedtwitz, Catholic University, Genealogy, Grafin von Zedtwitz, John Lancaster Spalding, Marquise des Monstiers Merinville, Mary Elizabeth Caldwell, Mary Gwendolin Caldwell

As a harmless amusement, to distract my thoughts from the perennially depressing revelations about sexual abuse and corruption in the Church, I took up working out the genealogy of my family. Some pleasant surprises on my side: a staunch Confederate, and a soldier who was on the muster rolls at Valley Forge. Also indirect relationship, but real and traceable, to Lady Beatrice Weasel, King Alfred, and best of all, Lady Godiva.

My wife’s family had some very successful industrialists, such as the great-grandfather who invented the open hearth process for making steel and built blast furnaces all over the world, naming many of them (to the puzzlement of historians) after his daughter Lucy, a woman of forceful personality. Others were classic American stories: from ticket agent to president of the New York Central Railroad, from cabin boy to owner of a steamship line. Another ancestor was James Caldwell, an English actor who came to the United States in the early nineteenth century. He played Romeo in the theater in Fredericksburg, Virginia; during the death scene the widow Wormeley sighed and fainted. One thing led to another, and over the opposition of all her relatives, she married him, producing a son, William Shakespeare Caldwell. Having dipped his toe into the gene pool of the First Families of Virginia, James Caldwell returned to the theater in New Orleans where awaited his mistress, a Jewish actress by the name of Margaret Abrams. My wife (to the consternation of her mother) is descended from that activity on the wrong side of the sheets. So far, so good. Hot stuff. Caldwell made a fortune lighting first his theater and then the cities of New Orleans, Mobile, Memphis, and Cincinnati with gas.

Shake Caldwell (as William Shakespeare was known), went to the University of Virginia, and married another FFV maiden, producing two daughters, Mary Gwendolin and Mary Eliza (these are my wife’s first cousins, three times removed). The Caldwells, I gather, may have been from a Catholic (if somewhat sexually irregular) background, because he and his wife prayed to Mary for children, which is why they were both named Mary. The mother died; the father, although he had already established the Little Sisters of the Poor in Richmond, postponed becoming a Catholic until just before his death, when he was baptized. He left the daughters in the care of Irish Catholics he had met in New York. They turned over the care of the daughters to the thirty-two-year-old Father John Spalding, nephew of Archbishop Martin Spalding of Baltimore. Mary Gwendolin was eleven and Mary Eliza nine. John Spalding was chaplain at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Manhattanville, and took over their education, travelling with Mary Gwendolin to such an extent that it caused gossip. He became trustee of their estate.

John Lancaster Spalding (1840-1916)

Mary Gwendolin Caldwell, Marquise des Monstiers-Mérinville

At the age of twenty-one, Mary Gwendolin, under the guidance of now-Bishop Spalding of Peoria, purchased the land in Washington D. C. for the Catholic University of America and gave money for the erection of Caldwell Hall. She was honored by Pope Leo XIII for her generosity and received the Laetare Medal from Notre Dame in 1899. Mary Gwendolin’s wealth attracted the attention of Joachim Napoleon Murat, the heavily-indebted grandson of the King of Naples; he wanted half her wealth as her dowry, so he could pay off his gambling debts. She said no dice. Instead she married a French marquis, Bishop Spalding presiding. It did not work out; they separated, and she pensioned the Marquise off so he wouldn’t divorce her, which would cause her to lose her title, Marchioness des Monstiers-Mérinville.

Caldwell Hall, Catholic University

Her sister Mary Eliza gave the money for Caldwell chapel. In it, with Bishop Spalding presiding, she married a German baron who was killed when Kaiser William’s yacht ran into his yacht during a regatta, leaving her the Baroness von Zedtwitz, with a four-month-old boy who became the bridge champion of the world. Spalding became the boy’s guardian.

Mary Gwendolin then became ill, and in 1901 revealed a dark secret to her sister: that she had been sexually involved with Spalding for twenty years, that is, it started she was nineteen. There were scenes. He was up to be made Archbishop of Chicago, but the Vatican investigated and instead made him retire at age sixty-eight. In 1904 both sisters publicly renounced Catholicism, although not directly accusing Spalding. Privately Mary Elizabeth called Spalding “a whited sepulcher,” “a liar,” a “sensual hypocrite,” of “a private life of iniquity and license” and “a very atheist and infidel.” She offered to come to Rome with witnesses to testify against Spalding, whom she had known “intimately” (her emphasis). Both sisters were denounced by Catholics as sick, crazy, spoiled rich girls who threw tantrums and made wild accusations when life didn’t turn out the way they wanted.

In her own defense, Mary Elizabeth, under her title of Baroness von Zedtwitz, wrote a short book, The Double Doctrine of the Church of Rome. She condemned the Jesuits, the doctrine of probabilism, equivocation, and the sexual failings of a supposedly celibate clergy.

In the 1950s, while he was writing a dissertation under the guidance of the John Tracy Ellis, the Franciscan priest David Sweeney discovered these allegations about John Spalding. Ellis did not believe the allegations, so they were simply suppressed, and the dissertation became the standard biography, The Life of John Lancaster Spalding. Andrew Greeley later claimed Sweeney and Ellis suppressed incriminating evidence. C. Walker Gollar, the great great nephew of Bishop John Spalding, in 1995 published an article in the Catholic Historical Review, “The Double Doctrine of the Caldwell Sisters,” defending Spalding, implying that illness and disappointment had driven the sisters mad. Poor Spaulding had his career ruined, absolutely ruined by these crazy, hysterical women – mere women. Gollar in a later article examined Ellis’s decision to suppress what Gollar thinks are false charges against Spalding.

But:

· Neither the interviews the sisters gave nor the book (available online) sound irrational.

· It is hard to explain their bitterness unless something terrible had happened to them or they had discovered something terrible. The sisters were not naïve; they were women of the world, and would not have been scandalized by rumors that a priest in a Roman suburb might have a mistress. Mary Gwendolin could not have publicly accused Spalding, without also ruining herself.

· When Mary Elizabeth threatened to make the abuse public if Spalding were appointed archbishop of Chicago, Archbishop Riordan of San Francisco wrote to Denis O’Connell, the Rector of the Catholic University: “You must advise the B[aroness] for the sake of her family and especially for the sake of her child to say no more about it to anyone. He [Spalding] has no chance for the promotion.”

· Archbishop Riordan looked into the charges and wrote to Rome “I had hoped he was innocent but I am now satisfied he is guilty.” Riordan later changed his mind for unspecified reasons.

· Bishop Frederick C. Rooker of the Philippines in 1904 wrote a letter in which he called Spalding “a brazen villain.”

· Enough officials in the Vatican believed the charges to block Spalding’s promotion. This at least shows that Spalding’s behavior was not considered either common or acceptable. But the hierarchy’s sole concern was to prevent scandal, which they interpreted to mean damage to the reputation of the clergy. They showed no concern for the tragedies and possible betrayal the Caldwell sisters had experienced.

· The tendency of historians and journalists and church officials to protect powerful men at the expense of the women they have injured also fits a general pattern.

· Spalding’s defenders (mostly the Spalding family) claim that Mary Gwendolin was mad at him because she wanted an annulment and he wouldn’t arrange it; but she had pensioned off the Marquis so he wouldn’t divorce her.

· Spalding lied about never being a trustee but documents show he was appointed by the court.

· Even if the sexual relationship began when Mary Gwendolin was an adult, it was abusive, adulterous, and quasi-incestuous, as Spalding functioned as her guardian and father. It was not an “affair,” as some historians have called it. Moreover, abuse victims usually cannot admit the worst, so the abuse may well have started when she was a child.

· The relationship of Mary Gwendolin and Spalding fits the classic pattern of Stockholm syndrome. The perpetrator keeps the victim psychologically off-balance by sudden changes from kindness to abuse. The victim feels that the only hope for safety is pleasing the perpetrator. If the victim is fortunate, she or he may suddenly snap out of the trance and realize that she or he has been induced to live in fantasy-nightmare world that the perpetrator has created.

If the allegations of the sisters are true, and the great preponderance of the evidence points in that direction, the Catholic University of America was founded by Spalding, who was, according to the sisters, a sexual abuser and an atheist, with the money of the woman he had abused.

Mary Gwendolin died at forty-five and Mary Elizabeth at forty-four. The Caldwell sisters were buried in a secular cemetery, not in their father’s grave in the Catholic cemetery in Louisville. On their monument stands the inscription: You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.

Leave a Comment

1 2 3 4 5