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Alice Ripley Haskell Maxwell (1858–1948)
Alice was the only child of Sam and Abbie Haskell.
In 1875 she graduated from
Monticello Seminary
in Godfrey, IL near St. Louis, MO where the
principal was Helen Newell Haskell, her first
cousin once removed▼2
(At death Alice was the oldest graduate of the
school.)
At age thirty in 1888
Alice married a prosperous cotton broker who was
twenty years her senior. She moved often
in her life. Born in Massachusetts, she
spent her
childhood in Chicago, was a bride and mother
in New Orleans, lived in
Ontario from 1880 to 1899, came briefly back to New
Orleans just before her husband's death, then
back again to Ontario for a time, before settling for many
years in a Park
Mansions apartment in Pittsburgh. Her last years were
spent in a Fifth Avenue apartment in New York
City and she was buried in Ontario.
Alice's husband and sons
Robert Maxwell (1838–1900)
emigrated from his birth home in Ontario just
before the start of the Civil War. When the
conflict started, he joined the Washington
Artillery. He was promoted to sergeant in
1861, wounded at Rappahannock and left the
service in 1863. As a civilian he worked for
Everett, Lane & Co. and Wallace & Co., before
going into partnership Hugh Allison & Co., head
of a long-established New Orleans cotton
factorer. When Allison retired, Robert and
W. A. Peale went together to purchase control of
the firm and named their new enterprise Maxwell
and Peal. Both men served as a committee
head on the Cotton Exchange and Robert became a
director of the National Bank and president of
Mechanics and Traders Insurance. Toward
the end of his life Robert left cotton factoring
and became a partner in the dry goods wholesale
firm, Williams-Richardson, Ltd. He was one
of the governors of the original Howard Library,
built in 1889 on Harmony Circle. At death
his estate was valued at $31k ($1.1 mil), mostly
in stock in the National Bank,
Williams-Richardson Company Ltd., and
fertilizer-maker Standard Guano and Chemical
Manufacturing. Half went to his two young
sons and half to Alice.
Robert
Elliot Maxwell jr (1889–1946) Robert
served as a colonel in the Canadian Army during
World War I. After the war he went to work for
Carnegie-Illinois Steel for two decades where he
was in charge of exports. He left Carnegie to
form his own import-export firm, R. Elliott
Maxwell Associates. In 1941 he married a widow,
Mrs. Jean Spalding. He left no offspring.
Allison Ripley "Allie" Maxwell (1891–1929)
Shortly before an early death Allison became vice-president of Pittsburgh Steel.
He was a top-ranked amateur golfer. He married
Eleanor McCook and they had four children,
including Allison R. Maxwell Jr. who became
president of Pittsburgh Steel.
Alice's parents
Simeon "Sam" Dickenson Haskell (1830–1916)
came from Vermont and Maine and his wife, Abigail
James Hubbard Haskell (1831–1911),
from Boston;they married in 1855.▼3
Simeon Dickenson Haskell was a dry goods
commission merchant, his offices located at
23-25 Randolph St. — one of
five thousand
wholesale companies destroyed during the Great Chicago fire in 1871.
(The structure was rebuilt after the fire then replaced in 1902
with a six-story six-thousand-sq.-ft brick warehouse.)
The Iroquois Theater went up in 1903 across the
street. Sam and Abbie lived in the rebuilt Palmer
House hotel in 1877, the year that Sam
voluntarily petitioned the bankruptcy court
for protection. As a result of accounting and reporting
problems, the case lingered for
two years, with frequent newspaper updates.▼4
An ardent republican, in 1879 he decorated the windows of his State
St. offices in support of President General
Ulysses S. Grant's Chicago visit.
Down but not out, in 1899 he served as a spokesman
for the South Park Auto-Coach Company in
petitioning
the South Park Board for exclusive rights to operate
twenty or so thirty-passenger motor carriages on
Michigan Avenue in Chicago. Their plan was
to sell one-hour 25-cent bus trips through and
near the parks, with a 10% commission going to
the South Park Board. (Carl Benz had
invented the first bus in 1899 and Daimler
brought the first commercial passenger version
to London streets in 1899.)
Sam worked then as secretary for patent medicine
company, Klinck Medicine.
Though nothing official was reported about
Haskell's worth, it was rumored to be in the
$10-16 million range when he was at the top.
Abbie passed in 1911 and Sam left Chicago,
relocating to West Manchester, MA.
Alice's education at
Monticello was likely spurred by her mother.
Abbie Hubbard Haskell had attended Townsend
Female Seminary of West Townsend, MA 1844-1848.
She studied art and music but
Principal Hannah P. Dodge saw to it that her
students also received an advanced collegiate education,
including math, geography, literature,
chemistry, and philosophy, taught from the same
texts as male students at Ivy League schools.▼5
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Helen Marie Hutchison Lancaster (1855–1927)
Helen was
one of five children.
In 1875 she had married Wisconsin native Eugene Abiel
Lancaster and by 1903 had given birth to two children,
the first lost at five months of age.
She is an enigma. Following
her mother's lead, she
performed the social duties expected of her
status, hosting teas, balls
and receptions, but was not interviewed.
 Helen's husband and daughter
A native of Beloit, Wisconsin, Eugene Abiel Lancaster (1848–1932)
was a carpet merchant. He usually went
by E.A. Lancaster. Ben Hutchinson had
purchased the former Allen & Mackey Carpet
company for his son-in-law in 1876, a year after
his marriage to Helen, and the store was renamed
Chicago Carpet Company. In addition to carpet,
the store offered furniture, draperies and
oriental rugs. Located for over two
decades at 156-162 Wabash, at the corner of
Monroe St., the store contents were destroyed by
a fire in 1897. The following year John.C.
Carroll bought controlling interest and the name
was changed to Caroll & Lancaster. The
structure was rebuilt but by then Carroll &
Lancaster had moved across the street to the
opposite corner of Wabash and Monroe. When
Carroll died in 1905, his wife became involved
in the company and they relocated to 172 Wabash.
The firm could not survive the
1907 Panic and filed bankruptcy in 1908.
It's inventory was purchased by a Boston
company. In addition to its residential trade,
the store furnished theaters and public
buildings.
Kate Lancaster Brewster (1879–1947)
married Walter Brewster in January 1903.
She was named after her aunt, Kate Hutchinson
Noble.
Helen's parents and siblings
Benjamin P. Hutchinson
(1829–1899) and Sarah Ingalls
Hutchinson (1833–1900) came from
Massachusetts. They had six
children, of which four were still living in
1903. Known as "Old Hutch,"
Ben began his entrepreneurial life as a manufacturer
of shoes.. He came
west in 1856 and after learning the
meat- packing trade in Milwaukee settled
in Chicago where he became co-founder of a meat
packing plant in the Bridgeport neighborhood. Burt, Hutchinson, and Snow
was said to be the first meat packing plant in
Chicago and in the Union Stock Yards when it
relocated there. He became an early
stockholder in the First National Bank of Chicago
and founded the Corn Exchange Bank in
1872. For a time his next
enterprise, the Chicago Packing & Provision Company,
founded in 1872 by he and Sidney A. Kent, was the largest meat processor
in the country, employing sixteen hundred
people. Around 1880 Hutchinson turned his
businesses over to his son, Charles L.
Hutchinson (1854–1924), and focused on
grain trading, becoming a dominant force in the
pit from 1880 to 1885. His historical cornering
of the September wheat market took place in 1888.
Over the next three years his estimated $10
million fortune dwindled to $1 million with his
last big trade losing over $2.5 million. ($67 millions adjusted for inflation). In the
last eight years of his life he wandered to
Evansville, Boston and New York City. He slept in his
office while trading on the New York exchange
before giving it up. Reclusive, alcoholic and bitter,
he took a job clerking at
a second-hand store under the Brooklyn Bridge. His family brought
him back to Chicago and admitted him in the
Lakeside Sanitarium at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin,▼6
possibly hoping to cure the alcoholism, but he died there at age
seventy of heart disease.
You can read an entertaining/informative/sad
story of the trading adventures of Old Hutch
online.
Charles L. Hutchinson (1854–1924)
was Helen's older brother.
As a partner in his
father's commission brokerage, and Ben's primary
heir, Charles used his wealth and considerable
energy to help found the
University of Chicago and Chicago Art Institute.
(Helen joined him in philanthropy for the Art
Institute.)
At death, Charles' estate of $1.5 million
(inflation adj. $26 million) included a artworks
from his personal art collection that were
donated to the Art Institute (along with a $170k
donation — $3 million — from Charles and Helen). I failed to
learn exactly what works were included. A
newspaper obituary cited a list of artists
in the Hutchinson estate donation but many of
those named had actually been in the possession
of the Institute for over three decades.
In June 1890 Charles had spearheaded the purchase of a collection of
thirteen Dutch and Flemish portraits from the Demidoff
collection in Florence, Italy, sold by a Paris
dealer representing Princess Helena Troubetskoi
Pratolino Demidoff. (Check out the
Institute's picture of one of
the receipts from that buy, listing a Rembrandt,
Van Dyck. Cuyp, teniers, and Van der Meer.) Monies
for the purchase came from Charles and other wealthy benefactors he
persuaded to contribute. In 1907 the 1890
acquisitions went on exhibit in the
"Room 32 Hutchinson Gallery of Old Masters," so
named as a tribute to Hutchinson's 25th year as
president of the Institution.
The Quentin Massys shown here was paid for by John Glessner
and
comes with an interesting history found on
the Glessner House blog.
Kate
Hutchinson Nobel ( ) was Helen's
younger sister. She had married attorney
Judah Noble and they had two children.
Prairie Street and Hyde Park
In 1880 siblings Charles, Willie, Helen and Kate Hutchinson lived with their
spouses,
children, and parents
Benjamin & Sarah Hutchinson, ten people all told, at 178 Park St. in Hyde Park,
with five servants. By 1900 they'd all
moved to three mansions on Prairie Avenue in the
Douglas neighborhood. There eleven
servants cared for the needs of ten people.
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Helen Hutchinson Lancaster, her husband Eugene
Lancaster and daughter Kate Lancaster lived
at 2703 Prairie
with Sarah Hutchinson, Helen's recently
widowed mother, her brother, Williie
Hutchison, and three servants.
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Helen's sister Kate Hutchinson Noble,
her husband, son and daughter (named after
Helen) and
lived at 2701 S. Prairie with five servants
to care for four people.
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Helen and Kate's oldest brother
Charles L. Hutchinson lived at 2709 S. Prairie
where four servants took care of he and
his wife.
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Discrepancies and addendum
1. In 1877 the Chicago Tribune cited
Hutchinson as one of the city's eleven wealthiest
men, in company with the likes of Marshall Field,
Levi Leiter, George Armor and George Pullman.
2. In thirty-nine years as head of Monticello Seminary,
1867–1907, puritanism seems to have been
Harriet N. Haskell's most remembered
characteristic. She twice sought to isolate
the school from sinful influences by purchasing acres of land adjacent to the campus
to prevent its purchase by entities she deemed
inappropriate as neighbors. She saw the word female as
uncouth and embarked on a long and ultimately
successful campaign to change the school's name from
Monticello Female Seminary to Monticello Seminary.
The short 1908 Harriet Newell Haskell biography by
Emily G. Alden can be read online. It does
not mention Alice Haskell.
3. Alice seems to have favored her association with her
mother's side of the family, with it's Boston
origins and connection to Mayflower ancestry.
It may not have been coincidental that the few times her
name appeared in newspapers Alice never mentioned her father
and only referenced her maiden name when dropping the name of her
prominent cousin Harriet Haskell at the Monticello
Seminary. She described her ancestry as Boston
based, omitting her father's Vermont heritage
altogether. No evidence of them sharing
a household once she reached adulthood. marry. I didn't find enough evidence to describe
her as a snob but noted that the few newspaper stories
about her, even her obituary, included mention of her prestige digs,
i.e., Park Mansions in Pittsburgh and 5th Avenue in
New York.
4. Haskell's creditors did not force him into
bankruptcy. He voluntarily
petitioned for relief.
Haskell had worked
as a commission broker for a decade prior to
the bankruptcy. By 1876 the operation consisted of his taking yarn on
consignment that he then sold for a commission,
sometimes reselling it outright and other times
contracting with knitting mills to have it turned
into garments he wholesaled. He also served as a
sales agent and wholesaler for producers of such
garments as shirts, socks, and underwear. A
knitting mill might sell Sam yarn or socks, or pay
him to sell their yarn to other knitters, or their
socks to merchants.
One example was
in process at the time of the bankruptcy filing.
It involved his $700 ($20k inflation adjusted) knitting order
with William B. Nourse's knitting company in
Michigan City, Indiana (that used state prison
inmates for labor). He'd provided yarn for the
contract to Nourse, from yarn consigned to him by
Crane & Water (C&W), who was also a producer of garments
that Sam wholesaled. The yarn belonged to C&W until a specified date on
which Haskell was expected to pay for it or return
it. His total liability with C&W when filing
bankruptcy was $1382 ($40.5k) . At the
same time, he had $7,300 ($214k) in receivables, and
about $300 ($8k) in cash. So it was complicated,
and Haskell made it worse. After filing bankruptcy he
collected about $4,000 ($40k) of his receivables and used
the money to pay back the companies who had
commissioned goods with him. A no no. To meet the terms
required for bankruptcy protection, his assets (that
he'd cited as $2,650, an amount that maybe did or
maybe didn't include the $7,300 in receivables), had
to be liquidated, the monies then first used to pay off
the $5,500 ($161k) owed to his secured creditors. Whatever
was left would then be applied to $21,652 in unsecured debt.
Sam continued to record transactions in the same set
of books after filing for bankruptcy. It would
have been easier for him to keep track of the
various interrelationships, and upon investigation
the bankruptcy court registrar, scholarly attorney
Homer N. Hibbard (coincidentally, a fellow Vermont
native), found no hocus pocus in the numbers, but it
made unraveling a bigger task.
IIn the
Last-Straw category: the day after Sam's
bankruptcy filing, a case against him appeared in
the criminal court of justice Peter J. Foote.
One of Haskell's commissioners was a company named
Schaffner & Stringfellow (S&S), a Philadelphia
wholesaler of knitting cotton. One of the garment
makers to which Sam sold S&S's cotton was Sweet, Dempster & Co. (SD&Co) — a Chicago hat maker
who was involved in way too many lawsuits and secretly persuaded
one of Haskell's employees to reveal confidential information. They brought a $1,360 ($40k) criminal suit
against Sam for selling them 2-lb. balls of cotton
knit but delivering 1.75-lb balls. Sam had tried to
compensate S&S for the under-weight parcels,
offering $200 for material already used and a reduced price
on material on their floor, and brought in the attorney he'd consulted who
advised him he'd done all he could.
Nevertheless, the court found against Sam on the
basis that he'd knowingly sold underweight units,
fined him $1,500 ($44k) and charged him with a misdemeanor.
Thereafter Sam's name appeared in the news mostly
relative to political activities.
Simeon Haskell was a business associate of Leroy Payne, father and
grandfather of
Flossie, Barbarabell
and Florence Mueller who were also Iroquois
Theater fire survivors.
5. Sue Siebert,
"Women’s minds were not ‘strong enough’ for
learning," Nashoba Valley Voice, July 11, 2019.
6. William erris,"Old Hutch: The Wheat King," Journal of the
Illinois State Historical Society, Vol. 41, No. 3
(Sep., 1908).
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