First Generation

In 2007, I received research materials provided by Mr. John Lawrence Hartshorn to whom I am greatly indebted. It contains new information about the family of Wyatt Hartshorn and his New England family that removed to Ohio. The following is a letter originally written by Clara Pearl Hartshorn which was provided to John's uncle, Fletcher Wakefield Hartshorn. It appears as follows:

THE HARTSHORN FAMILY

There is little to go by in recording the Hartshorn Family history. Except for a bound copy entitled "In Memoriam" printed at the time of my grandfather Hartshorn's death in 1869, I have had to depend on two sources. The first was my mother and your grandmother -Mary Wakefield Hartshorn - whom I questioned in detail toward the close of her life and when she was in her 74th year. It had suddenly occurred to me that I was quite ignorant about my father's family and that she would be virtually my sole source of information. I recorded all of her reminiscences and an now using those notes.

The other source is the result of a happenstance. In the fall of 1959 your mother and I went to Cleveland, O. to attend a Telephone Convention. Since, at its conclusion, we were only a few miles away from the Sandusky Bay area in Ohio where the early Hartshorns had lived, we went on to Port Clinton, a small town in the vicinity where I had spent several golden years of my boyhood. While there, it crossed my mind to try to find other possible members of my father's family. In the course of my Inquiries I discovered an elderly widow who had married what must have been a distant cousin of mine. We visited her and found a charming and clear-headed person who most fortunately also possessed an extensive knowledge of family history. As a result of a pleasant talk with her, she promised to send me a summary from her records and recollections. On Oct. 12,1959 she did so, starting her letter thus:

Dear Member of the Clan: It was nice of you folks to call on the last one of that name on the Peninsula (underlining mine), and she signed herself Clara Pearl Hartshorn, R.R. 2, Point Clinton. Ohio.

What follows, therefore, is a combination from the sources I have outlined.

According to Pearl, the Hartshorns originally emigrated to this country from Leeds, England. Someday I hope someone in our family will have the chance to look at records in that city. It is my intention, through English friends, to find if Shore is someone there similar, to our town clerk to whom I night write. If this is successful, It nay be that an addendum to this chapter can be made. Anyhow, the first individual in the Hartshorn history of whom we have any knowledge is Wyatt Hartshorn who was born Oct. 18, 1793 in "Manchester in New England". in June of this year I circularized the town clerks in Manchester, Conn., Maine, Mass., R.H., and Vt. seeking any record either of Wyatt or his father. N.H. regretted, saying that in the 1790's the town was called Derryfield, Conn. Informed that in the early 1800's the town I was interested in was a part of East Hartford, though they did have a record of the marriage of one Marilla Hartshorn to Joseph House on Aug. 30, 1835. However, in Manchester, Vt., in the period from Nov. 26, 1799 to April 21, 1806, an Edward Hartshorn was shown as both buying and selling property. The town clerk speculated that he might have been Wyatt's father, though she could find no record of Wyatt himself. On this score, she referred me to the birth records kept in the town of Dorset, Vt. where she said the evidence might be found. This is still unfinished business with me. [2.] There have bean no other responses, so I assume the other towns found nothing.

We know that Wyatt left New England and journeyed to the Western Reserve in Ohio in than early 1800’s. The Western Reserve was a tract of land in northeastern Ohio on the south shore of Lake Erie which, strangely enough, was reserved by Connecticut in 1786 when it ceded earlier claims it had had to other western lands. The Reserve consisted of more than one half million acres and much of this land was given, in 1795, to citizens whose original holdings ware burned or destroyed during the Revolution. Either Wyatt had a claim which qualified him, or what I think is more likely, is that he bought land from the Connecticut Land Co. which disposed of what remained after the free grants were taken up.

Wyatt first came to the vicinity of what is now Cleveland by boat. During the voyage he met Jane Kelly (born Sept. 17, 1805). She was an Irish Protestant who had just come to this country. They fell in love and were married on Mar. 18, 1824, in the Congregational church to which they both belonged. Wyatt was 31, Jane was 19.

Eight children came from this union - Catherine in 1825 (m. Geo. Mallory 1845), Isaac B. in 1826 (m. Matilda Bryson 1853), Byron in 1829 (m Mary Knapp 1853), Fletcher, my grandfather and your great grandfather, who was born Mar. 17, 1831 at Danbury, Ohio, of whom more presently, Sarah in 1833, Alfred in 1835 - neither of these apparently marrying - Harriet in l837 (m. Chas. Johnson 1859) and finally my great aunt Jane. I recall her clearly from my boyhood as an utterly charming old lady. It comes as something of a shock to me now to realize that when I knew Aunt Jane she was actually younger than I am now. In 1864 June married Marshall Duroy, an equally charming Frenchman with a great white handlebar moustache. As I look back on the Duroys now, I realize also that they really met the definition of "gentlefolk.”.

Wyatt and Jane acquired land in the Sandusky Bay area near what is now Port Clinton, and in the Township of Danbury. This must have been somewhere around 1824 or perhaps a bit earlier. To me it is remarkable that when I was a boy, and nearly a hundred years later, the Duroys still lived on and farmed a part of this land.

Wyatt must have been , for his time, an educated man. He taught the local school for a number of years. According to my mother, quoting her mother-in-law, your great grandmother, Anna Elwell Hartshorn, Wyatt was lazy. He is reported to have retired at an early age and thereafter let his sons support him, visiting them in rotation. Assuming that he also included married daughters on his visiting list, the earliest he could have started his life of leisure was with the marriage of Catherine in 1845,at which time Wyatt would have been 52.

Not much is known of Jane Kelly Hartshorn beyond the obvious fact that she had an extensive period of fertility. My mother understood she was a well informed woman who contributed greatly to local historians. [3.] There seems to be no record of how long Wyatt and Jane lived, though it may be that records are available in town records at the places I have mentioned, if further research Is indicated.

So much for the meager early, information. Beginning with my grandfather Fletcher first my father was Fletcher second and I am Fletcher third - and last) there is a good deal of material. Much comes from the previously mentioned funeral oration "In Memoriam" and this is supplemented by what my mother knew.

Omitting the numerous religious exhortations and sticking to the biographical detail, the Memoriam asserts that Fletcher 1st was born on Mar. 17, 1831 at Danbury. Ohio. He completed the local schools and went on to study at Delaware which I suspect may have been the than equivalent of a preparatory school. From there he went on to Oberlin College, though no reference is made to his graduating. I now quote directly from the Memoriam; "At an early age he left school to take charge of his father's business and was soon brought to notice as a business manager by the success which attended his every effort" Ed. note. I have no idea what the business may have been. As far as I know, his father farmed. To continue - "Soon his financial abilities became well-known in the commercial circles in which he moved. His energy was untiring and his integrity beyond question. His sagacity and insight led to many offers of business connections, some of which he made available (sic!) He had the Midas touch. All ventures seemed to prosper under his hands. He became interested at different tines in faming, grazing, fruit-growing, the handling and shipping of livestock, speculating in real estate and latterly in the manufacture and shipment of lime.”

“In furtherance of the last named enterprise, contiguous to his extensive quarries and kilns, he built the work which is known as Hartshorn's Dock.”

“He was a man of strong, self-reliant, resolute character, always remarkably reticent in matters concerning himself. In such an active career he must have often met with disappointments and discouragements, but he made no mention of them. He was an enthusiast in out door sports, his dogs and gun furnishing the pastime in which he most delighted. He was a royal entertainer and in his younger days took great delight in playing host to his bachelor friends; and later, his home, until darkened by the affliction under which he suffered, was a model of hospitality. “

I will come later to this matter of the affliction, but first would like to add to the above certainly not understated panegyric some of the things my mother said. Mother, of course, never knew Fletcher 1st personally because he had died long before she and my father met. However she had heard a great deal about him in the course of her married life and this is a sort of brief of her view.

Fletcher 1st stayed at his ancestral home and in fact ran the farm until he was 38 years of age. Then, on Dec. 9. 1869 he married my grandmother Anna Jennetta Elwell - from whence comes Prudence's middle name - and started his own operation. Mother remembered that while in the livestock business, he apparently [4.] drove a flock of sheep 200 miles, whether singlehandly she did not know. His career really began to move, however, when ha discovered large, usable limestone deposits, mainly on a nearby island an the Bay known as Kelley's Island. I assume he got control of this island and soon began quarrying operations My father used to tell me that he thought Fletcher 1st was the first man in this country to discover and exploit the use of ground limestone in agriculture. Incidentally the lime business was begun by "borrowing quite a lot of money” – mother's phrase - and it grew into a highly profitable undertaking. In passing, the wooden telescope which we have is the one Anna Jennetta used to watch out for her hard working husband as he sailed into Hartshorn's Dock at the close of day. My grandfather did all his own selling and travailed extensively through the country by carriage, sometimes covering over 100 miles a day. So profitable was this business that, as we shall see, it provided a comfortable living for his wife and child for many years. After Fletcher 1st's death. Which brings me to the affliction.

My father, Fletcher 2nd and christened by a romantic mother ''Fletcher Pierre - she wanted a second name which was nickname proof with the result that my father's pal always called him Pete - and was born June 4, 1876. This was seven years after his parents had married, there having been a previous child who died soon after birth. Fletcher 1st's paralysis came just before his son was born and when he was about 45. In those days medical knowledge was limited and they neither recognized nor knew how to treat what later became known as strokes or cerebral accidents. At any rata, my grandfather recovered from the first episode and want on apparently well for some four to five years. Then occurred a second and far more severe episode which ended by confining him to a wheel chair for the remaining ten years of life he had left. All of this time he carried on his business and I have the impression it continued to grow despite the terrible handicap under which he performed.

At my father's birth and for six years afterward, the Hartshorns lived on the family farm. Then, because of his growing infirmity, Anna overcame Fletcher's great reluctance to leave and they moved to a "city" house in Sandusky. There they lived until, at the age of 58, he died.

According to my mother who did not like her mother-in-law. Gramme as I called my grandmother Hartshorn "spent money like water." I remember her as a rather small, plump women with snapping black eyes, a short temper and a strong tendency to talk almost continuously. By the time my father was 22, which would be eight years after Fletcher 1st's death, Gramme had sold the Kelley Lime Co. as it was called, and was living high, wide and handsome off of the proceeds.

My father was the only child of a terribly indulgent mother. There is a much evidence that her cosseting of him, her efforts to shield him from life's realities, her giving him everything he wanted, so long as she could, all combined to virtually unfit the man for a stable and productive life. As will shortly be evident. [5.] From the many reminiscences I listened to over the years, I judge my father's youth was a gay and feckless one with the exception that his father, bowed down with illness, had a hard time tolerating his exuberance when he was a small boy. My father went through the usual schooling of the tine and then went on to Oberlin. There, when he was 21 and she 19, he met my mother. Mother remembered that three months after they met father was expelled from Oberlin because he would not study the Bible, the first of many indulgences and lacks of discipline he was to exhibit. So he returned to the old farm where his mother had built an expensive house and they stayed there for a while summers. They wintered in nearby Clyde where Gramme had relatives.

When my father was 22, Gramme sold the old farm - part of it to the Duroys as I have previously indicated - and they went to Chicago where he studied bookkeeping in a school called Lewis Institute for a year. During the three years which had passed since he had met my mother, my father had kept in touch with her and I believe had visited her in Johnstown. Pa, her home. By this time, mother had graduated from Oberlin Conservatory where she had studied voice and the piano. She had a magnificent, warm, deep contralto voice and had done some semi-professional singing, though hers was not the temperament to make a career of music, being a modest and somewhat shy person. At any rate, in 1899 or 1900 (I lack this date) they were married. Through the good offices of the husband of one of grandmother Wakefield's nieces, a John Brothers, Dad was interested in a job with the Canton Hardware Co. in Canton, O. He went to the Eastman Institute in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. for a further brush-up on what we would now call Accounting and then joined that firm, buying stock in it, no doubt from money advanced by Gramme. There in Canton I was born on Sept. 15, 1903. Naturally I was christened Fletcher plus Wakefield, a dual cognomen that was to make my boyhood active with fist fights justifying the names to the plainer Tons, Dicks and Harrys. After five years, during which Dad had become Office Manager, he left Canton Hardware in a huff because of an argument over accounting methods. It seems the owners wouldn't do things his way. This was the beginning of a pattern that was to become sadly familiar as the years slipped by.

Fletcher 2nd was a handsome man and particularly in his younger years, an individual of considerable charm with a special talent through an almost boundless enthusiasm to persuade people. I will shorten my account simply to summarize the fact that during his lifetime he held jobs as a real estate promoter in Yakima. Wash., a Cashier in a Tacoma, Wash, bank, a lumber mill operator in the northwest, and then, in 1909, when my brother Alfred Newlon was born, Dad developed a chronic and disabling Appendicitis. My mother's parents persuaded my parents to return to Johnstown where for two years Dad did nothing, existing as a sort of semi-invalid. It was my grandfather, Dr. Wakefield, who finally persuaded him to go to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn, where the offending organ as well as some gall stones were removed. Followed then a long convalescence - my father was anything but a Spartan - and off he went to look at apple farms in Virginia. Nothing cane of that. [6.] Because his health seemed precarious, Grandpa Wakefield suggested to my father that he work outdoors for a while. This led him back to his ancestral heath and we went to Port Clinton, O. Passing up a job offered to him in the local bank, for a year Fletcher 2nd just looked around. Then, finally, on Elwell Rd. named after his mother's father Hollister Elwell, in the town of Danbury, he bought a 60 acre peach farm. By now Fletcher 1st's money was running out. Gramme was living in reduced circumstances in Clyde and my father had to assume a large mortgage on the farm. After one good crop year there came four years of crop failures and with these the foreclosure of the mortgage, the forced sale of most of our possessions at auction. By now, I was beginning to see our lives clearly and had begun to realize that the man I had looked up to, as I suppose most sons do to fathers, was, in effect a weak vessel. It was then, at the time of the first World War that I first thought of how I could strike out on my own.

Leaving the farm, where I had spent some of the happiest and bitterest days or my boyhood, we went [to] Cleveland. There Dad managed to get a job with Firestone as a tire salesman and was sent to the Rochester, N.Y. office. Here we were to stay for the longest time in our checkered family career - some nine years. During that time, he left Firestone and got another job, this time with S.W. Strauss selling Mortgage Bonds. He did so well at this that a rival concern, the G.L. Miller Co. hired him to run their local office with a force of salesmen reporting to him. This was the period of our greatest affluence. But the misfortune which seemed to dog my male parent came along again. As I recall it, somewhere around 1926-7 both the Strauss Co. and G.L. Miller failed as a result of lending mortgage money unwisely to highly over-valued Florida building combines which then defaulted on their interest and principal payments. My father spent a horrible year on his own, looking up every person and institution to which he or his men had sold Bonds, trying to help them recover at least something. He was an ethical person and this searing experience really marked the beginning of a decline in him in terms of confidence and hope. By this time I had completed college and had gone to work for the New York Telephone. As he had done on other occasions, my father decided to go far away.

In 1927 my father, mother and brother drove to the West Coast, settling in Santa Monica, Calif. They stayed there I believe for something like three years while Dad was variously and unsatisfactorily employed. Then back they came to Rochester where he was to work at this and that - all small assignments which is all an aging man could get - until his first stroke. This happened sometime around 1939 or 1940. He recovered from the first episode. Grandma Wakefield, who had been widowed for many years and whose house had been badly damaged in the second Johnstown flood came to live then with my parents. They all moved to Medina, N.Y., a small town near Buffalo, where they could rent a comfortable small apartment inexpensively. And there they stayed, living partly from income from the much depleted Wakefield estate, partly from what little Dad had. [7.] There in Medina Grandma Wakefield died, well into her eighties. And there too, after several strokes, none of which permanently paralyzed him, my father died in April 1944.

Mother returned to Rochester where she found a small apartment which suited her and spent the regaining years of her life in that city. Her younger son, Fred, who had married and also lived in Rochester, and who was very close to her kept an almost daily eye on her. My visits, engrossed as I was in a developing Telephone career, were infrequent but when I did see her I got the distinct impression that the concluding years of her life were among the best she had had. She could stay put, there was enough income, what with the dregs of the Wakefield and Hartshorn estates supplemented by an allowance I sent her monthly, to permit her to live modestly but comfortably. She had a few friends, she read a great deal and was happy. She died in the Spring of 1956 at the age of 77.

As the Sole surviving Fletcher, inevitably some of my story has appeared in the foregoing account. I have tried to keep such personal references to a minimum, not out of a sense of modesty, a virtue which has never bothered me, but rather because, as a finale to this rambling attempt of mine to enlighten future generations, I fully intend to put together what is known in literary circles as a Memoir. In fact, I have in mind two Memoirs - your mother's and Mine, which will start out as separate histories but will merge into one from the time we so felicitously met. With this in mind, I accordingly here conclude the chapter on the Hartshorns.