Early Abolitionists and Feminists
Obadiah Newcomb Bush, born in Vermont, fought in the War of 1812 which began when he was 15 years old. After war's end both Obadiah and his brother Henry Bush migrated to Rochester, New York. There Obadiah met and, in 1821, married Harriet Smith, a daughter of Dr. Sanford and Priscilla Whipple Smith. The Bushes’ son, James Smith Bush, was born there in 1825. Obadiah began teaching at Rochester Seminary, a public school, and was shown in 1832 to be one of its trustees (and Treasurer) before it became Rochester Collegiate Institute in 1841. In 1827 Obadiah was a trustee of the Third Presbyterian Church and Society of Rochester.
With a population exceeding 12,000, when the City of Rochester incorporated in 1834, Obadiah was serving as one of the city’s fire wardens. For its 50th anniversary in 1884, the city commissioned Jenny Marsh Parker to write a history of the city, and Obadiah’s name appeared several times in her book. For example, in 1838 he was named as an officer in Rochester’s Anti-Slavery Society. Obadiah had been attending annual meetings of the American Anti-Slavery Society since at least 1835, and would have been acquainted from those meetings with its president Arthur Tappan, with William Lloyd Garrison, and with former slave Frederick Douglass, who became a member later.
The Liberator reported that O.N. Bush was a manager representing New York, along with Gerrit Smith and Beriah Green of Syracuse's Oneida University, of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1839-40. He was elected in the annual meeting in Boston in May 1839. Other New Yorkers elected included William L. Chaplin, Richard P. G. Wright, Beuben Sleeper, Rev. Elon Galusha.
Henry Bush and Abigail Norton Bush
Obadiah's brother, Henry Bush, before settling permanently in Rochester, had gone to Ohio, where two of Henry and Abigail Bush's children were born. They returned to Rochester to set up a stove dealership soon after 1840. Henry then set up his business and also developed a strong interest in the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society ( WNYASS) formed in 1840 by Chaplin.
Henry Bush's wife Abigail Norton Bush, an intrepid suffragist with Amy Post and Lucretia Mott, presided over the Women’s Rights Convention in Rochester in 1848—the first woman who ever presided over such a meeting in which men were also involved. Once Abigail had taken that shocking step against men’s preordained role of dominance, however, she and her family were soon banned from decent society in Rochester.According to Nancy A. Hewitt in her book Women's Activism and Social Change: Rochester, New York, 1822-1872 (page 106), Abigail was a member of the group led by Frederick Douglass in Rochester called Western New York Anti-Slavery Society. Also in that group were John Kedzie and Samuel D. Porter. Douglass, the freedman abolitionist, would leave his home in Rochester (bought from John Kedzie) in 1852.
John Kedzie, a silversmith and manufacturer of filters, sometimes worked out of an office in New York City (according to the 1889 City Record) with Dr. George E. Morgan, a physician. Morgan was a son-in-law of James Hall Foote, a hardware wholesaler. In 1850 a daughter was born to Dr. Morgan and his wife, whom they named Lemyra (after John Kedzie's wife). When Lemyra was about ten years old, after continuing to insist she was a boy, was allowed to dress in male clothes and to change her name to Rollin Kedzie Morgan, after her uncle Rollin H. Morgan. John Kedzie also had a son named Rollin Morgan Kedzie.
Shortly after presiding over the women’s convention, the Bush family’s future changed forever:
In 1849 or 1850, after years of suffering business losses, Henry Bush headed west to join the California Gold Rush and to make a life there. He left a pregnant Abigail in Rochester. By the early 1850s, the whole family had settled in California, where Bush was to live for the rest of her life…. Abigail Bush died at Vacaville, California on December 10, 1898 at the age of 88. She is buried with her husband in Alhambra Pioneer Cemetery on a hill across the city from the one on which she had lived for nearly 30 years.Henry Bush bought land near Martinez, in Contra Costa County, California. There he started a vineyard, which the family sold to Christian Brothers in 1879. The Catholic brothers also began building St. Mary's College at the site. Henry and Abigail had one daughter and four sons, including
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| Kedzie Morgan in 1954 |
- Norton Bush, who became a famous landscape artist; and
- David S. Bush, who married Ellen Morgan. Their daughter, Dr. Alice Bush, was engaged for a year to Dr. H. S. Pelton, who froze to death while in Alaska, searching for gold in 1901. Three years later Alice contracted a marriage to her first cousin, Rollin Kedzie Morgan a/k/a R. K. Morgan, a lifelong transsexual, who lived with her for five years. Dr. George E. Morgan, a brother of Alice's mother, had attended Hahneman Medical College in Philadelphia, founded upon principles of homeopathy set up by Dr. Samuel Hahnemann of Germany. Alice Bush was connected with Hahnemann Hospital and medical college in San Francisco, where her cousin Rollin Morgan enrolled.
Obadiah's Descendants
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| The call of gold |
Obadiah Bush departed for California after the U.S. Census, signed on August 31, 1850, indicated that James Smith Bush, age 24, was indeed practicing law in Rochester while his father, "O.N. Bush," was then a “land agent,” residing at the same residence, along with his mother Harriet and four other siblings. That census records all the children of Obadiah N. and Harriet Smith Bush were then residing with Obadiah and Harriet Bush in Rochester, New York:
- the eldest son, James, 24, was practicing law in Rochester;
- daughter Cornelia, 27, was unmarried;
- daughter Elizabeth, 19, also unmarried;
- son William Mack, 14, was in school; and
- son Sanford, only 6 years of age.
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| Rev. J.S. Bush |
New York in 1851 when he reportedly died aboard ship near Acapulco, Mexico. He was buried at sea.
James Smith Bush, the eldest son, did not have time to grieve for the loss of his father. In October 1851 he married Sarah Hannah Freeman, daughter of a physician, Dr. Samuel Freeman of Saratoga Springs, New York. Sarah moved with James to Rochester, where she died two years later. By 1855 James was recorded by the 1855 New York state census as a student in Saratoga Springs, living with his in-laws while studying for the ministry. The death of his father, wife, and infant child, had apparently taken their toll on his spiritual well-being, turning him to religious studies. All but one of Sarah's siblings had also predeceased her, leaving behind her parents and a sister, Helen Freeman, who in 1861 married Rev. John Woodbridge, a widower with five children.
The year 1860 was a climactic one, which saw the civil war beginning to split apart the country. But before following up on the second marriage of Rev. Bush and his descendants at that turbulent time, we will next explore his siblings, the other children of Obadiah and Harriet Smith Bush.
Cornelia Bush Marsh
James Smith Bush's eldest sister, Cornelia, had married Robert Marsh and moved to Virginia, where three children were born. From there they moved west to Ohio before the civil war.
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| William Raymond, coffin maker |
A second sister, Elizabeth (they called her Lizzie), married William Mead Raymond in 1852, and they lived out most of the remainder of their years in the northernmost part of Brooklyn, New York--called Williamsburg--west of Newtown Creek southern bend. They moved farther north for a time to Newburgh, Orange County, New York (shown there in census of 1870).
In 1876, a city directory showed the Raymond family back in north Brooklyn at 130 Rodney Street, while the office address for Mead's coffin-making business was at 348 Pearl Street in Manhattan, near the Brooklyn bridge. The family had by then suffered two catastrophic events:
- The eldest son, William Bush Raymond, died at the tender age of 13 in 1867;
- a daughter Evangeline died in 1875 at the age of 11.
William Mack Bush
The fourth of the Bush children born (1836) to Obadiah and Harriet was William Mack Bush. Only 15 when his father died in 1851, William attended Harvard and then studied at MIT, obtaining a degree as a civil engineer by 1858. During those years, it seems likely that his mother had moved with him to Massachusetts, since neither of them show up in the New York census of 1855.
In June of 1859 William married Euphemia "Effie" Faulkner, of Newtown, Long Island (area now absorbed by Brooklyn), who had grown up very close to the Williamburgh neighborhood where Lizzie Bush Raymond lived with her family. It is possible that young William Mack Bush had met his future wife while accompanying their mother to visit his sister in Brooklyn. In the 1860 census, Obadiah's widow (Harriet S. Bush) and the youngest son Sanford were making their home with William Mack and his new bride in Orange Ward 1 in Essex County, New Jersey, some distance away from the manse provided to the newly ordained Episcopal minister, Rev. James S. Bush, Harriet's eldest son.
Mrs. William Mack Bush's Meiggs/Keith Relations
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| Henry Meiggs |
- Mary Augusta Faulkner in January 1858 married John Gilbert Meiggs, youngest brother of the once-infamous Henry Meiggs, who heard the call of wealth in California a
year or so before Obadiah appeared there. The Meiggs family had been
in the lumber business in New York, and Henry saw an opportunity to
provide lumber for the booming construction business in that new territory, to which wannabe gold miners were moving.
After building Meiggs Wharf at San Francisco, Henry Meiggs reportedly absconded in 1854 with proceeds of forged warrants and stock from his lumber company, bound with his family for Tahiti. With him was his younger brother, John Gilbert Meiggs, and other family members. He eventually turned up in Chile (which had no extradition treaty with the United States), where he obtained a concession from its president to construct a railroad from Valparaiso to Santiago, which was completed ahead of schedule in 1860. History then revised his notoriety, once he paid back the money which he had stolen.
- Elizabeth (Lillie) Faulkner in 1838 married Henry Meiggs Keith, a nephew of her brother-in-law. One of the sons of Emily Meiggs Keith and Minor Hubbell Keith, and brother of the much more famous Minor Cooper Keith.
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| Minor Cooper Keith in Costa Rica |
Upon Uncle Henry Meiggs's death in 1877, his will, published in the New York Daily Herald, did not mention his brother, John G. Meiggs, who had sailed from Callao, Peru, and arrived in Liverpool in February, 1876, intent on borrowing money on behalf of the Peruvian government, presumably for his brother's projects. His wife, Effie's sister, traveled with him, and she gave birth on January 6, 1877 to Norah Church Meiggs in London. (Note: When Norah married Herbert Allfrey 20 years later, Ambassador John Hay and the Cunard family attended her wedding.)
A portion of the will, relating to unfinished South American projects, appeared in the news in October 1877:
He named William Mack Bush first among a group of men from whom successors would be chosen in the event any of his named executors failed to serve in that capacity. William's wife, the former Effie Faulkner, had given birth in Peru to several children between 1871 and 1876.
John G. Means established a banking and contracting business of his own--John G. Meiggs, Son & Co.--based in London, where the family lived from then on, becoming naturalized British citizens.
Mary Faulkner Meiggs's youngest child, Hilda Rathbone Meiggs, would be born in 1882, while the family lived in South Kensington, shown by the 1881 census at Bailey's Hotel (140 Gloucester Road, London SW7 4QH). In 1901 Hilda (18) was living with her 75-year-old widowed father in Chelsea, cared for by her older unmarried sister, Mary Effie Meiggs.Later years would show Mary Effie and her brother Frank, neither of whom married, living at Birch Trees in Haslemere, in West Sussex. A Sister, Helen Cornell "Nina" Meiggs, had in 1890 married Sir James Roderick Duff McGrigor.
At some point after this change, there was no need for William Bush to remain in London. When he returned to America, he settled with his family in Concord, Massachusetts, where they lived in 1893 at Nashawtuc Hill near Elm Street until closing their house in November 1894 to move to Brooklyn.
There are several extant homes in that area built around 1884 and are quite impressive.
The later years of the Keith family are shown below.
The Fay Family in Concord
Harriet's father, Samuel H. Fay, as a young man had moved to Savannah, Georgia to work as a cotton broker. It is possible he met Harriet's mother, Susan Shellman, through her father, whose family in 1807 had built a boarding house in Savannah, which they advertised in New York papers. Between 1828 and 1834, John Shellman received a presidential appointment to be inspector and surveyor at the Port of Savannah, and return revenues collected to the U.S. Government. However, an inquiry was made in 1855, questioning whether his debt owed to the government in 1831 had ever been resolved. Shellman died in 1838.
Susan Shellman had been seventeen in 1825, when she married 21-year-old Sam Fay, recently arrived from Massachusetts. We are given very little about Sam's biography, other than what we have to glean by reference from that of his younger brother, Joseph Story Fay:
As a young man, he [Joseph] worked as a shipping agent in New York in partnership with L. H. Brigham. In 1838, he moved to Savannah, Ga. and joined his brother Samuel H. Fay in the cotton trade as part of the firm Padelford, Fay & Co. He worked in that business until 1861, when the company dissolved and he moved back to Massachusetts.The partnership was with Edward Nathaniel Packard Padelford, who died in Savannah in 1870. Padelford appointed Joseph Story Fay to act with his son-in-law, Francis C. Foster, to manage property bequeathed to his daughter.
The census of 1850 records that Joseph Fay was living in Chatham County, Georgia, and for a time served as president of Chatham Academy, as well as the Union Society. Both Joseph Story Fay and his brother Samuel Fay had seemingly moved to Savannah as early as 1825, the year he married Susan Shellman.
We know that in 1894 William M. Bush was residing in Concord since his son Robert married Marguerite Putnam of Dorchester in a wedding ceremony performed by the rector of Trinity Episcopal Church in Concord. Trinity, only a decade old at the time, had a late start due to Concord's retaining its patriotic fervor long after the British soldiers, and their state religion, had been eradicated during the revolution.
James Smith Bush resigned from his pastorate at Staten Island in late 1884 and immediately thereafter relocated to his wife's hometown of Concord, Massachusetts for several years, working as superintendent of schools in Concord before 1887 and resigning in April 1877. His brother, William M. Bush, was also living in Concord at that time. James and Harriet Bush's youngest son, Harold, prepped for college in Concord before he began his engineering studies at Cornell (Class of 1893). His parents also moved to Ithaca, NY, shortly before Rev. Bush's death in 1889.
Rev. Bush's widow, Harriet Fay Bush, was found in 1900 census records to be living in Concord, Massachusetts with her daughter, Eleanor Howard Bush (born 1873), an 1896 graduate of Smith College. She then trained to be a settlement worker at Boston Associated Charities, whose president was Robert Treat Paine, a descendant of the signer of the Declaration of Independence with the same name. Eleanor, in 1902, married Robert Archey Woods, founder of Boston's first settlement house, South End. When R. T. Paine died in 1910, Woods wrote a lengthy notice of his death, published in the Boston Transcript.
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| Harold M. Bush, Cornell Class of 1893 |
The Fay brothers in the South
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| Harriet's father - suicide? |
He went to Savannah, Georgia, early in his career as a cotton broker, and there he met and married Susan Shellman. The births of several children followed. Samuel Fay executed his will in Savannah in 1839 before he relocated to Brooklyn, after the birth of Susan Elliott Fay in 1843. The child's name may signify a closeness between Fay and Georgia's first Episcopal Bishop Stephen Elliott, who was at that time organizing a school in the diocese, to which S. H. Fay was named as principal. The school's largest donor was Gazaway Bugg Lamar.
Not long after becoming the school principal, the Bishop and financial angel of the female school paid Fay a visit in early May 1845, only a few months after the Bishop had been involved in the trial of a fellow bishop, Onderdonk of Pennsylvania. Elliott had no tolerance for men of authority allegedly engaged in improprieties with female members.
Two months after the allegations of improprieties appeared against Fay, on July 10, 1845, Susan Fay gave birth to Clara Montford Fay in Cambridge, Massachusetts, presumably under the guidance of her in-laws. Shortly thereafter Samuel was dispatched with his family to Brooklyn, New York.
Probate proceedings filed in May 1847 declared that Samuel had died on April 17, evidence of which was cited as a letter written in his own hand. However, no body had been located at that time. Notices of his disappearance were posted and a reward offered for information. Fay was said to have been involved in "adventurous transactions," which he did not expect to turn out well. A search of records in the Ancestry.com database indicates Letters Testamentary were issued in June of 1847 (recorded 2/168). The summer had passed before a decomposed body turned up in the dried-up bed of a pond in Flatbush--a signet ring belonging to Fay and identifying papers found in the jacket pocket. An empty vial of poison was also found nearby.
By the 1850 census Susan Fay had moved with all five children (Harriet was then 20, her elder sister 22) to New Haven, Connecticut, but their address was some distance from the Yale campus, east of the river. In the meantime, Samuel's brother (Joseph Story Fay) had taken up the cotton business in Savannah, as indicated in the 1850 census and tax records in Georgia.
The 1855 New York census showed Susan living in Manhattan with three servants to care for the family (Anna and Harriet were 27 and 25, respectively). Anna, who never married, died in 1921 at the age of 92 while living with her unmarried niece, Rosamond Hill-Smith, only daughter of Clara Fay Hill Smith.
Susan's own will, written in 1884, would leave her daughter, Harriet E. Bush, a fourth of her estate, with a like amount to Harriet's brother, Joseph Story Fay.
Minor Cooper Keith and United Fruit
The contracts continued with Minor Cooper Keith in charge in Costa Rica. He married the Costa Rican president's daughter and eventually brought her to Brooklyn and built her a mansion at West Islip on the south shore of Long Island. The Associated Press wrote about him at the time of his death the following:
He had received an invitation from his brother, Henry Meiggs Keith, to join him in the construction of a railroad in Costa Rica, so he joined his brother in that country, at that time a fever-ridden jungle, and the two men began to build a line from Puerto Limon, on the Atlantic side, to San Jose, the capital, on the Pacific. Henry Meiggs, an uncle and a builder of the first railroad across the Andes, had turned over to Mr. Keith's brother the contract for this road.His obituary in the New York Times in 1929 stated:
At the start the enterprise was beset with grave peril and in the first twenty-five miles Mr. Keith's three brothers and 4,000 other men lost their lives. Despite this, Mr. Keith, on his own credit, continued for several years to build the line, contracting in 1882 with the government to arrange the external debt and to complete the road to San Jose. He went to live in London for three years, where he arranged the external debt and also the financing of £1,200,000 in bonds to finish the railway. While building the road on his own credit he suffered losses of more than $1,000,000 which the Costa Rican government paid to him voluntarily.
Meanwhile Mr. Keith saw the possibilities of banana raising in Costa Rica and in 1872 he started a plantation-the first in Central America--shipping to New Orleans and New York. He gradually extended his plantations until he became, in 1898, the largest banana grower in Central America. He also in the meantime had acquired a fleet of steamships to transport his fruit.
In 1899 he organized the United Fruit Company with the late Andrew W. Preston, receiving three-fifths of the company's capital for his interests. He was the first vice president of the corporation's steamship line which office he resigned many years ago to attend to his widening interests.
In 1912 he organized the Guatemalan Railways, which became the International Railways of Central America, a system of some 880 miles, touching both the Pacific Coast and the Caribbean. He also became president of the Guatemala & Salvador Railway, the St. Andrew's Bay Lumber Company, the Abangarez Gold Fields of Costa Rica and the Polochic Banana Company. He was vice-president of the Premier Gold Mining Company of this city, International Products Corporation and the General Lead Batteries Company.
In 1883 Mr. Keith married Cristina Castro, daughter of Jose M. Castro, former President of the Republic of Costa Rica, by whom he is survived.
Henry Meiggs' youngest brother, John Gilbert Meiggs and his wife, formerly Mary Augusta Faulkner, moved to London in 1877 to raise funds for the construction projects that were continued by the the Keith brothers. Mary Faulkner Meiggs was the sister of Effie Bush, wife of William Mack Bush--James Smith Bush's younger brother. The Meiggses remained in South Kensington for many years, even after the births in 1877 and 1882 of their youngest daughters, Norah Church (Mrs Herbert C. Allfrey) and Hilda R. Meiggs (Mrs. Edward Arthur Smalley Potter). Both girls grew up in London and married wealthy Englishmen.
O. H. Bush's widow, Harriet Smith Bush, the mother of James Smith and William Mack Bush, also moved to Orange, New Jersey, with her youngest son — fifteen-year-old Sanford — where they lived in the residence of 24-year-old William Mack Bush, according to the 1860 census. William's occupation at that time was bookkeeper. William's brother-in-law, Henry Meiggs Keith, enticed him, as well as Henry's own brother, Minor Cooper Keith, to work in South America, building railroads for his uncle. At some point after 1867, when William's third son was born, he moved his family to Lima, Peru. The1900 census shows their children as follows:
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| Wm. F. Bush |
- William Faulkner Bush, born at Newtown, Long Island, New York in 1861; married in Flushing, N.Y., 1887 to Marion Smedberg; a 1921 passport application showed his legal domicile at Roselle Park, N.J., residence at Paysandu, Uruguay, and working for Midland Uruguay Railway Co., Ltd., based in Maiden Head, England.
- James Sanford Bush, born in New York in 1864; married Helen Stetson and worked initially for M. Farris & Co. as a custom house merchant.
- Robert Marsh Bush, born in New York in 1867, married Marguerite Putnam in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1894; her father, Silas S. Putnam, had made curtain rods and hooks, expanding into horseshoe nails, at two large facilities, located on Ericsson Street and on Neponset Avenue. He invented all the products he made and retired from the New Era Coffee company (patented in 1877 as a substitute for coffee) just before his daughter's marriage. The "coffee" was made from wheat and was manufactured on the Neponset River until at least 1938. Robert and Marguerite Bush lived at 722 Walnut Street, Roselle Park, New Jersey--just west of Staten Island. He worked at C. B. Richard & Co. at 61 Broadway in New York City, steamship agents, as an insurance broker.
- Their only daughter, Alice E. Bush, was born in 1871 in Peru and never married;
- Walter Meiggs Bush, born in Peru in 1873; in 1920 worked for Baltimore Tube Co., originally organized by Minor Cooper Keith, who also founded the Baltimore Bridge Company of which Harry Dean Bush was manager.
- Noel Mack Bush, was also born in Peru in 1876. He eventually married Anne Rainsford French in Concord, Massachusetts
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