Charles Augustus Wheaton
Charles August Wheaton | |
---|---|
Minnesota House of Representatives | |
In office 1867 – 1868 (?) | |
Personal details | |
Born | July 1, 1809 Democratic Party of New York
Business Owner |
Charles Augustus Wheaton (1809–1882) was a businessman and major figure in the central New York state
In 1860 he moved to Northfield, Minnesota, where he was one of two men who donated the land to found the Carleton College campus. There he served with the Minnesota legislature. The father of a total of 17 children, he had an active family life. He later became the editor of two local newspapers.
Early life and education
Charles Augustus Wheaton was born on 1 July 1809 in
Charles Wheaton's eldest brother Orlin J. became a farmer and drover like their father. Their brother
Marriage and family
Wheaton married
She was the second of twelve children of Electa (née Beebee) and Victory Birdseye. The father was one of Onondaga County's leading politicians. Birdseye practiced law and served two terms in Congress.[1] He was postmaster of Pompey Hill for 22 years, district attorney of Onondaga County for 14 years, and held numerous other political offices. The original Birdseye House is now part of the Onondaga County Freedom Trail. A descendant founded Birds Eye Frozen Foods.
Charles and Ellen Wheaton had twelve children together, including Cornelia (b. 1835), Lucia, Henry Birdseye, and Charles A. Wheaton (b. 1853).
Ellen was well educated, having attended a girls seminary in Cortland and music school in the state capital of Albany. She is reported to have owned the first piano in Pompey. She is best known for a notable diary she kept from 1850 to 1858, detailing her life as a wife and mother of a large family.[2] The Wheaton family privately published The Diary of Ellen Birdseye Wheaton in 1923. Selections from the diary were reprinted in the Syracuse Post-Standard newspaper in March 2002. Birdseye Wheaton died in 1858 at age 42 from tuberculosis.
After the death of Ellen in 1858 and moving to join friends in Northfield, Minnesota in 1860, Wheaton married the widow Martha Elizabeth (Archibald) Wagener in 1861.[1][3] She had also moved from central New York, migrating with her parents after losing her husband and their three sons to illness. The senior Archibalds owned flour mills in Dundas.
Charles and Mary Wheaton had five children: Frederick (1862–1881), Robert (1863–1898), Allan (1866–1934), Edith (1868–1950) and Annabel (1870–1946). They also reared together some of the younger of Wheaton's 12 children from his first marriage.
Career
As a young man, Charles clerked in the general store owned by his brother-in-law Moses Seymour Marsh. Retail businesses were a growing part of the economy.
In 1835, soon after the birth of their first child, the Wheaton family moved to Syracuse, where Charles went into the hardware business. Wheaton and a variety of partners, including his brother Horace, built a prosperous company. Over the course of 20 years, the Wheatons lived in seven houses, moving to larger homes as family and fortune grew. None of the Wheaton homes in Syracuse are believed to exist.
In 1849, the Wheatons' close friends and fellow abolitionists, John and Anna Loomis North, left Syracuse to move to Minnesota. Ellen noted their departure in her diary, "[John] thinks very highly of the climate and resources in Minnesota, and says it is rapidly filling up with an Eastern population." The Norths were to play an important role in Wheaton's life after Ellen's early death in 1858.
When his hardware store burned in 1851, Wheaton built C.A. Wheaton & Co.—housed in the city's grandest mercantile block, a four-story building overlooking the Erie Canal and Clinton Square. In 1852, the Wheatons were at the peak of their wealth. They moved to Fayette Park, one of the city's most fashionable neighborhoods.
Wheaton sold his share of the hardware business in 1853. He also sold the Wheaton Block for $112,000, the largest sale to that date in Syracuse. He invested heavily in a printing press foundry. He also invested in a project to build a railroad from South Carolina to Tennessee. In 1854, a banking crisis and an economic depression struck New York. By 1855, the family were broke.
Ellen died suddenly at age 42 on December 17, 1858, the day after the wedding of their eldest daughter Cornelia. Her funeral was a
Abolitionist and political activities
The Wheatons were part of a large network of abolitionists in Syracuse and knew
Between 1839 and 1847, the Wheatons operated their house as a station on Underground Railroad, helping escaped slaves travel to Canada. His public reputation as an abolitionist was such that the family seamstress, a Mrs. MacManus, was said to have reported to a census taker that Wheaton was "president of the Underground Railroad."[citation needed]
In a notable case in 1839, Syracuse abolitionists helped the slave Harriet Powell to escape from her masters, a family from Mississippi who were staying at a local hotel. Officials suspected Charles Wheaton of being involved. Local law enforcement officers searched the Wheaton's home for Powell without success. She made it to Canada.
Wheaton was one of 600 people in Syracuse who signed a call for a meeting at the Syracuse City Hall on May 16, 1850, to discuss the proposed
The Law required all citizens to support capturing escaped slaves and returning them to their masters, even if found in northern states that prohibited slavery. US Marshals were to enforce the law. Its passage aroused the anti-slavery movement in Syracuse. On October 4, 1850, a biracial group chaired by A.H. Hovey, mayor of Syracuse, appointed a
On October 15, Wheaton spoke to a meeting at the Congregational Church to make "common cause, in view of various arrests rumored to have been made, or to be made under the Fugitive Slave act, and on charges of Treason."[
On October 1, 1851, Wheaton was part of a biracial group who rescued
When the federal government investigated the case, it traced the file used to cut Henry's
Newspapers across the state denounced the overtaking of the jail and freeing the prisoner. Some 677 Syracuse-area residents signed a petition of protest against the action. After four days of hiding Henry, abolitionists disguised him in women's clothing and took him to Oswego on Lake Ontario. There he boarded a ship to Kingston, Ontario and freedom.
A federal grand jury indicted Wheaton and twelve other men—nine European Americans and four African Americans— for the action at the jail and Henry's escape, but Wheaton was never arrested or tried. The event became known as the Jerry Rescue.
Wheaton ran for
Minnesota (1860-1882)
Wheaton suffered after the death of his wife Ellen in 1858. His friends the Norths wrote from Minnesota in 1859, urging him to join them in Northfield, which they had founded. The following year, Wheaton moved there with many of his 12 children, joining other Syracuse families who had migrated to join the North family. When John North had earlier suffered financial failure in the Panic of 1857, Wheaton purchased his interests in the local flour mill and other properties—an act that may have economically saved the town. For some time, Wheaton's Northfield Mills produced "choice family flour."
After his second marriage in 1861, Wheaton and his large family first took over the second floor of the American House Hotel, built by John North in 1857. (The hotel became the first building of Northfield College, later renamed
In 1864 Wheaton sold the flour mill to Captain Jesse Ames and his sons, John and
In 1866, Wheaton was elected to the House of the
Wheaton later became editor of the Northfield Standard newspaper and later the Rice County Journal,
When Wheaton died in 1882 at the age of 72, the bank and businesses of Northfield closed for the funeral as a sign of respect. A tribute of the time read, "In Northfield his editorial pen was ever at the disposal of any good cause, and he was a leader in all progressive causes."[1]
References
- ^ a b c d e f g h "Charles Augustus Wheaton Biography", in History of Rice County, 1882, reprinted in Dalby Database, Owatonna Library, accessed 11 Jun 2010
- ^ "Ellen Douglas Birdseye Wheaton" Archived 2007-09-27 at the Wayback Machine, In the First Person, Alexander Street Press, accessed 10 Jun 2010
- ^ Marriage record, death record at FamilySearch Archived March 23, 2010, at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Petition to the House of Representatives, HR31A-G23.1, National Archives
- ^ Syracuse Standard, October 16, 1850
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- ^ "The Ames Mill | NorthfieldHistorical". Archived from the original on 2016-07-31. Retrieved 2016-08-08.
- ^ "Charles Augustus Wheaton", Minnesota Legislators Past & Present, Minnesota Legislature, accessed 10 Jun 2010