A Portrait of Old George Town Part 17

Mr. Linthic.u.m was a prominent and prosperous merchant of the highest type, a man of great civic activities, and deeply interested in everything which tended to beautify the community. In his will by a legacy of $50,000 he provided for the endowment of a school for the free education of white boys of Georgetown in useful learning and in the spirit and practice of Christian virtue being, as he expressed it, convinced that knowledge and piety const.i.tute the only a.s.surance of happiness and healthful progress to the human race and devoutly recognizing the solemn duty to society which develops in its members, and entertaining a serious desire to contribute in some manner to the permanent welfare of the community, amongst whom my life has been spent.

As a commentary on the length to which partisan feeling went in the years succeeding the War Between the States, it may be stated that efforts to have the Linthic.u.m Inst.i.tute incorporated by Congress were prevented by Charles Sumner, Senator from Ma.s.sachusetts, for the reason that the benefits were confined to white youths.

[Ill.u.s.tration: EDWARD MAGRUDER LINTHIc.u.m]

The Linthic.u.m Inst.i.tute began its career in the lower floor of one side of the Curtis school building on P Street, opposite Saint John's Church.

The name in large gold letters used to be there. The present building was erected about 1890 on the south side of O Street near 31st, the school occupying the lower floor, and Linthic.u.m Hall, considered by the belles of the nineties to have the "best floor 'par excellence' for dancing anywhere," being the upper portion. I have been told it was the first night school in the District of Columbia.

Mr. Linthic.u.m was a very imposing looking gentleman, was married, but had no children. He and his wife adopted a daughter, Kate, who became Mrs. Dent, and I think it was in honor of her or her son that the little street called Dent Place, just below R and between 30th and 31st Streets was named when that part of Georgetown, then nicknamed "Cooke Park" was developed.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WILLIAM WILSON CORCORAN]

William Wilson Corcoran, the third son of Thomas Corcoran, was born in George Town on December 27, 1798, in his father's home on Bridge (M) Street. He attended Mr. Kirk's school, later Reverend Addison Belt's, in between, having been for a while a day scholar at Georgetown College.

Contrary to his father's wishes for him to complete a cla.s.sical education, at the age of seventeen he went into a dry goods store belonging to his brothers, James and Thomas. Two years later they established him in a small store of his own on the northwest corner of High (Wisconsin Avenue) and First (N) Streets. Again, two years later they all purchased a two-story brick house on the corner of Bridge (M) and Congress (31st) Streets and commenced a wholesale auction and commission business.

In the depression of 1823, when very many firms went to the wall, they too had to give up and settled with all their creditors for fifty cents on the dollar.

I think the aftermath of this story (which is the reason I have given it in detail) is most encouraging to this generation, struggling in the grip of the present depression, for the young man of twenty-five, after giving up four or five years to taking care of the business of his father, who was growing old, finally became connected with the Bank of Columbia, and in 1837 began a brokerage business in Washington in a little store 10 x 16 feet on Pennsylvania Avenue near 15th Street. He was so successful that he eventually took into partnership George W.

Riggs, also of Georgetown, and changed the name to Corcoran and Riggs.

In 1845 this firm purchased the old United States Bank on the corner of 15th Street and New York Avenue. And so the Riggs National Bank, today one of the strongest banks in the United States, was born. A little later George W. Riggs retired and Elisha, his brother, was made a junior partner.

In 1847 Mr. Corcoran sent to all people to whom he had been able to pay only 50% in his failure of 1823, the full amount due them, with interest, amounting to about forty-six thousand dollars, to their great surprise, as evidenced by letters I have read from them to him. Of all his great benefactions, this seems to me to have been the very finest thing he ever did.

He must have been a man of very remarkable personality, witness his going to Europe, the first of the very, very many trips he made in his life, on one day's notice, and against much discouragement, persuading Thomas Baring of the great London banking firm of Baring Brothers, to a.s.sist him in a sale of five millions of government bonds. At that time the firm of Corcoran and Riggs took, on its own account, nearly all the loans made by the United States.

On his return to New York he was greeted by everyone with enthusiasm, as this was the first sale of American securities abroad since 1837--eleven years.

In April, 1854, Mr. Corcoran withdrew from the firm, thinking he had made enough money, and spent the rest of his long life of ninety years--forty-five years more--spending his money in a manner unknown before that time.

Apropos of his money-making faculty, I have often been told by my aunt how her father, Henry Dunlop, when a boy, was walking along the street with young Corcoran, just his own age, when Henry, whose family was rather well-off in those days, seeing a penny lying on the pavement, kicked it ahead of him in his stride, as boys will do, but young Corcoran, stooping down, put it in his pocket saying, "Henry, you will never be a rich man." That prophecy came true, for Henry spent his life in farming, and you know what that means!

Among Mr. Corcoran's very first benefactions were gifts to the town of his birth. First of all a fund of $10,000 to be spent for firewood, etc., for the poor. It was left to the town authorities, but was administered by the Benevolent Society.

In 1849 he gave beautiful Oak Hill Cemetery, lying along the northern limit of the town. To me no other cemetery that I have ever seen in this country or abroad has the same natural beauty of slopes and trees--in the spring bedecked like a bride in flowering white shrubs; in the fall its towering oak trees aflame with shades of crimson.

I suppose what impressed on him the need of a cemetery for Georgetown so deeply was the death of his beloved wife in 1840. It had been a very romantic marriage. She was Louise Morris, the daughter of Commodore Charles Morris. Mr. Corcoran met his wife when she was sixteen and he was thirty-six. On the 23rd of December, 1835, they eloped, accompanied by Mr. Corcoran's sister-in-law, Mrs. James Corcoran, who later became the second wife of John Marbury, senior, and to the day of her death was greatly beloved by Mr. Corcoran. When she was lying in her coffin on 14th Street, he came there and although somewhat lamed by paralysis and nearly ninety years of age, he insisted upon climbing the long flight of stairs to the room where she lay, saying over and over as he toiled up the many steps: "I must see Harriet once more!" I suppose in his mind he was living over the great event in his life when she helped to secure for him the only love of his life. And so pitifully short a time he had her, for only five years afterwards, when she was twenty-one, she died of tuberculosis. In those short years she had had three children, Harriet Louise, Louise Morris, and Charles Morris. Of these the middle child, Louise, was the only one to grow up.

Although Commodore Morris had greatly disapproved of his daughter's marriage, which was very natural as at that time he was one of the most eminent officers of the United States Navy, and Mr. Corcoran had not then entered on the career which eventually made him the most distinguished private citizen of the capital of the nation, he grew to greatly admire and respect his son-in-law. For there are preserved in _A Grandfather's Legacy_, a collection of letters received by Mr. Corcoran, and compiled by him before his death, several letters from Charles Morris, showing the deepest trust and affection.

I suppose there was never a daughter more beloved and petted than Louise Morris Corcoran. Her father seemed to expend on her all the affection of his great big heart, and she seems to have been a very lovely character.

When she was about ten years old she fell overboard from a vessel and was only saved from drowning by the quickness and skill of Gurdon B.

Smith. Among these letters are several in regard to this incident, for Mr. Corcoran, in his grat.i.tude for this merciful deliverance, sent through an agent, $1,000 to Mr. Smith, an artisan, who was very grateful and considered he had received a fortune. But, not satisfied with that, Mr. Corcoran secured an appointment as lighthouse keeper for Mr. Smith at a point not far from his home, a life position with a good salary, but Mr. Smith refused it as he seemed perfectly satisfied with his circ.u.mstances.

Mr. Corcoran's money doubled and trebled and quadrupled, and the following letter shows how his judgment was sought on political as well as financial questions:

My dear Sir:

I wish you would come to my house about 8 this evening and tell me, in five words, what are the best reasons to be given to friends of the administration for not pa.s.sing the sub-treasury bill at present.

Yours, D. WEBSTER.

He had a close friendship with Edward Everett, senator from Ma.s.sachusetts, who was frequently his guest. He and ex-President Fillmore traveled abroad together. The letters he received from many of the great of the earth make very interesting reading. By the middle of the nineteenth century this Georgetown boy of rather modest parentage was living in a very fine house in Washington, in great elegance, entertaining everyone of any importance who came to the capital. There is on record now a letter from a gentleman in England, bringing to his attention the coming of the new Minister and his wife from Great Britain, Lord and Lady Napier. Although, as he had said "he knows he will receive a great deal of attention, yet he wishes Mr. Corcoran, particularly to honor them." He was consulted by presidents for his opinion on financial matters. Baron Humboldt, the great German geographer, kept up a correspondence with him to the day of his death.

After a brilliant girlhood, Louise Corcoran had married the Honorable George Eustis of New Orleans, representative in Congress. When the Civil War came and shattered all existing social ties, Mr. Eustis, of course, took the Southern side, as did Mr. Corcoran. Mr. Eustis, who had been appointed Confederate Secretary of Legation at the same time that the Honorable John Slidell was appointed Minister to France, after being held a prisoner in Maine, went over to France, where he was joined by his wife. Neither ever returned to this country. They made their home there, their three children were born there, they died there, were finally brought back and buried in Oak Hill under the beautiful little Doric temple Mr. Corcoran had erected for his first Louise.

Those three grandchildren then became his pride and joy. But more and more he absorbed himself in his benefactions. It is impossible to tell all of them. Beginning with his gift of Oak Hill to Georgetown in 1849, in 1850 a loan to the Roman Catholic Church there which, like all of his loans, he eventually turned into gifts; in 1851 he gave an organ to the Lunatic Asylum in Staunton, Virginia, saying he knew of nothing better than to give music to those whose souls were so troubled. About this time he gave the lot for the Washington City Orphan Asylum, and a little later the one for the Y. M. C. A. For many years he had been collecting painting and sculpture, both on his trips to Europe and from the various persons who wrote to him soliciting his patronage. These were at first kept in his own house, but then he decided to build a gallery and give them to the City of Washington, so he erected the building on Pennsylvania Avenue at the corner of 17th Street, directly opposite the State, War and Navy Building. It was just nearing completion when the Civil War began and was taken over by the United States Government as an annex to the War Department, so that it was not until 1869 that it was opened as the Corcoran Gallery of Art. In 1897 the collection was moved to the beautiful new building lower down on 17th Street and was formally opened on February 22nd by a brilliant reception at which were President and Mrs. Cleveland and all of their Cabinet.

Above the doorway of the old building, in the stone, is still seen a carved medallion with W. W. C. intertwined.

Just about that time, also, Mr. Corcoran began to build another of his beneficent gifts to the city. His beloved daughter had died, and the city and the country was filled with ladies who had been made penniless by the cruel fratricidal war. In 1871 he turned over to the trustees the Louise Home on Ma.s.sachusetts Avenue, between 15th and 16th Streets, as a home for gentlewomen, the only requirements being enough money to furnish their own clothes and their burial expenses, even lots in Oak Hill were reserved for them after the Louise Home failed to suffice. It was very natural that for a long time its clientele was largely made up of Southerners, as there were very, very many more of them impoverished at that time, and also Mr. Corcoran was himself in sympathy with the Confederates. It is said he saved his house from confiscation by renting it to the French Minister.

Many, very many, were the letters he received thanking him for the help he had sent to widows and orphans of soldiers of the South. He founded homes of that kind in Charleston, South Carolina, and in other places, besides rendering a.s.sistance most tactfully in many private cases. Many of these letters are very touching in their grat.i.tude.

His friendship for James Mason, of the Mason and Slidell affair, was close, as was his very real a.s.sociation with General Robert E. Lee, witnessed by letters from General Lee during his life in Lexington, Virginia, after the war, and from Dr. William Pendleton, General Lee's rector there, and from Mrs. Lee in regard to General Lee's death.

He and General Lee spent several summers at the "Old White," as the Greenbriar White Sulphur Springs was then affectionately known. As the years rolled on, Anthony Hyde, a Georgetown man, was kept busy administering the benefactions of his employer. He has told how during a trip through the South after the war, with Mr. Corcoran (he was his secretary), he had difficulty in keeping Mr. Corcoran's gifts within bounds. I was told not long ago by a man in the employ of Oak Hill, how an old street-car conductor had described to him the sight of Mr.

Corcoran going to his office, and on the sidewalk in front of it each morning was a line to which he always dispensed "green money," as the old man called it.

The business of his life then was judiciously giving away his money.

Here are some of the ways he did it: colleges had always appealed to him, and he was for many years Rector of Columbian University in Washington, now renamed George Washington, and gave freely to it. His name is now borne by one of their largest and best buildings, Corcoran Hall. He gave to the Maryland Agricultural College, to the College of William and Mary in Virginia, loaned money to the Virginia Military Inst.i.tute and when the bonds came due, tore them up--a little way he had. To Washington and Lee University, also in Lexington, he gave $20,000 besides the library purchased from the widow of Nathaniel Howard, thus, it helped in the getting as well as in the giving.

His portrait hangs in the little chapel in Lexington where lies the body of his friend, Robert Edward Lee. To the University of Virginia he gave $100,000 which endowed two chairs, also giving $5,000 to resuscitate the library which had suffered during the war and the period following, from being unable to procure any new books.

He was one of the first people to subscribe to the fund being raised by certain ladies to purchase Mount Vernon, after the Washington family found themselves unable to keep it up and offered it to the United States Government, which refused to buy and preserve it.

The Episcopal Church of the Ascension on the corner of 12th Street and Ma.s.sachusetts Avenue was built almost entirely with his money. William Pinckney, its rector when it was begun, was very devoted to Mr.

Corcoran. He afterwards became Bishop of Maryland. It worried him exceedingly that Mr. Corcoran had never become a confirmed member and communicant of the church. Many are the long and eloquent letters he wrote to him on the subject. Finally, in his old age, the old gentleman did come forward and be confirmed. The friendship between these two seems to have been very sweet. The Bishop was a simple soul, a great lover of flowers and birds. He was always sending gifts of grapes to his wealthy friend, from Bladensburg. He now rests not far from his friend in Oak Hill. The inscription on his stone, which is surmounted by his statue reads thus:

WILLIAM PINCKNEY, D. D., L L. D.

APRIL 17, 1820 JULY 4, 1883

Guileless and fearless.

All through his life Mr. Corcoran was a very sociable person. He always loved to play whist and in the last years of his life his nephews and nieces and great-nephews and great-nieces used to go often to play with him and pa.s.s the long evenings. A friend of mine remembers being taken as a little girl, with her grandmother, to call on him. She was fascinated by the room where he sat, which had medallions of children's heads, set at intervals into the paneling of the walls. She said he told her they were his grandchildren. She loved looking at them and was distressed when told to go out in the garden to play.

That garden to the house where he lived for many years and where he died, stood on H Street at the corner of Connecticut Avenue. Daniel Webster had lived there before him. The flowering trees in the spring hung over the high brick wall on the Connecticut Avenue side and gladdened the hearts of all who saw them. It was a sad day for Washington, historically, when that whole square was reconstructed. If only one could endow old houses!

At last, on the 24th of February, 1888, W. W. Corcoran, as he was always known, was laid to rest in his own beautiful Oak Hill. I remember as a little girl standing at the window of my home facing 31st Street and hearing the bell of near-by Christ Church toll ninety strokes as carriage after carriage pa.s.sed slowly up the hill. My brother and I counted them, and there were ninety-nine.

George Peabody, the third of my trio of philanthropists who got their start in Georgetown, was born in Danvers, Ma.s.sachusetts, on February 18, 1795. He was descended from an old yeoman family of Hertfordshire, England, named Pabody or Pebody. At eleven years he was an apprentice in a grocery store, and at fifteen, by his father's death, he was left an orphan and was cheerfully helping to support his mother and sisters. He soon after left Danvers and became an a.s.sistant to his uncle in his business in Georgetown. When he was seventeen he served as a volunteer in the War of 1812 in the artillery company of Major George Peter against the British, which is interesting, as in later life he was offered a baronetcy by Queen Victoria, which he refused.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GEORGE PEABODY]

After the war, when he was about nineteen, he became a partner with Elisha Riggs in a dry goods store in Georgetown and through his energy and skill the business increased tremendously. They moved to Baltimore, and when his partner retired, about 1830, he found himself, according to _The Encyclopaedia Britannica_, at the head of one of the largest mercantile concerns in the world. About seven years afterwards he established himself in London as a merchant and money-broker at Wonford Court in the city, and in 1843 he withdrew from the American business.

He was never married. He was a very intimate friend of Mr. Corcoran's, and in several letters to him speaks jokingly of himself as a confirmed old bachelor, and in one flouts the idea that he is attentive to a certain lady, saying that he never but once seriously thought of marriage.