USA > New York > New York state's prominent and progressive men : an encyclopaedia of contemporaneous biography, Volume III > Part 7
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After that time Mr. Dahlgren practised law and attended to other business duties. In March, 1898, he was appointed and confirmed as commissioner of the State Board of Charities. He was also president of the New York and Pennsylvania Brick, Tile and Terra-Cotta Company. He was for years active in polities in this city, as a Republican. He belonged to the Roman Catholic Church and was devoted to its interests. His home in this city was both a social and intellectual center. He was a member of the Union League Club, the University Club. the Catholic Club, the Bar Association, the Republican Club, and the New York Athletic and other clubs. He was a trustee of the Catholic Summer School of America, and a vice-president of the Alumni Association of Georgetown University. He was also a life member of the Ohio Archaeological and Historical Society, and a member of the New York Genealogical and Bio- graphical Society.
Mr. Dahlgren traveled abroad extensively, and in 1890 had a private interview with Pope Leo XIII. On June 29, 1889, he was married by Archbishop Corrigan to Miss Elizabeth Drexel, third daughter of Joseph Drexel, the distinguished banker and philanthropist. They had two children, Joseph Drexel Dahl- gren, born March 30, 1890, and died July 26, 1891, and John Vinton Dahlgren, Jr., born June 30, 1892. Mr. Dahlgren died at Colorado Springs, Colorado, on August 11, 1899.
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JAMES P. DAVENPORT
TAMES P. DAVENPORT is of New England ancestry on his father's side, and New York ancestry for many generations on his mother's side. Born in Brooklyn on July 27, 1856, he was carefully educated in local schools and at Williston Semi- nary, Easthampton, Massachusetts, and then went to Yale Uni- versity, where he was graduated in the class of 1877. A few years later he was admitted to the practice of the law at the bar of New York, and has, since that time, devoted himself to that profession. For a number of years he was also a member of the local staff of the New York "Tribune," paying especial atten- tion to legal matters, and he has been for years, and still is, the American correspondent of the London "Law Times."
Mr. Davenport was for several years attached to the Court of General Sessions in this city, and there acquired a knowledge and an experience which have since been of great service to him. Afterward his attention was called to the condition of the civil distriet courts in the northern part of the city. These were the "people's courts," in which were tried a vast number of petty cases in which lawyers were not employed, as well as many of greater importance. He found that in that part of the city, containing nearly a fourth of the population of Manhattan Island, there was only one such court. The result was that the court was always overcrowded with work, litigants were put to great and unnecessary trouble and expense in time, and the proper admin- istration of justice was seriously hampered. He thereupon pre- pared a bill for the creation of another judicial district, with another court, and spent much time at Albany working for its passage, as well as performing similar work in the district him- self. The bill was, through his efforts, enacted into law.
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An unusually strong movement was thereupon started for the appointment of Mr. Davenport as justice of the new court. All the judges of the federal courts, and of the Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court in this city, several other justices of the Supreme Court, and ex-justices, and a host of members of the bar, united in certifying to Mr. Davenport's fitness for the place. State Senators and Assemblymen, and numerous other men of influence, also addressed the Governor in his behalf. The result was that Governor Morton, on May 27, 1896, appointed him to the place. The appointment was well received by the bar of this city. His work on the bench was no disappointment to his friends. There was no criticism of his conduct save the most favorable. Lawyers and clients were unanimous in praising him. And whenever an appeal was made from his decisions to the Supreme Court, his decision was almost invariably confirmed and approved.
Justice Davenport was not a candidate for reelection to the bench in 1897, when the reorganization of courts and districts took place under the New York City Consolidation Act.
Ex-Justice Davenport has been appointed as referee in many important cases, his opinions in some of which have been widely published. He is counsel for several corporations and many business firms, and has devoted much attention to probate and real-estate law. He was one of the early members of the Harlem Board of Commerce, and is active politically and socially in the affairs of the Harlem and Washington Heights district, in which he resides. His latest service, which has attracted wide attention, is as counsel for the property-owners of St. Nicholas Avenue, for whom he has conducted a vigorous warfare against corpora- tions which have sought to obtain a franchise to occupy, for surface-railway purposes, that avenue, one of the finest driving- roads and most beautiful residence avenues in the city.
Jec. W. Davis.
GEORGE WARREN DAVIS
W ALL STREET draws from all sources. You may find there representatives of all parts of the country, and of all the strains of blood which have gone to make up this cosmopolitan and conglomerate people. There are the restless, pushing men of the West, who have come back from that land of great opportuni- ties to find still greater opportunities in the metropolis, and there are the conservative, steady-going but not less successful sons of the East, who have grown up in New York or New England, and haveretained a full measure of the old-time spirit of this region, while adding to it the quickened spirit and effective enterprise of the time.
Among such latter, a conspicuous and typical place has been won by George Warren Davis, who for many years has been a familiar and commanding figure " on 'Change." Mr. Davis is, as his name might indicate, of New England origin. His father was Joseph French Davis of Cambridge, Massachusetts, the de- scendant of a line of ancestors who had done much for the development of the colony of Massachusetts Bay into one of the foremost States of this Union. Joseph French Davis was en- gaged in the trade of a dealer in provisions, and was a typical New-Englander in his intelligence, enterprise, energy, business acumen, thrift, and success. He was for many years one of the representative men of the community in which he lived, respected by all who knew him.
Joseph French Davis married Miss Rebecca Godfrey Atwood of Boston, the daughter of a family long identified with the best social and business interests of that city, and to them the sub- ject of the present sketch was born.
George Warren Davis was born at Cambridge, Massachusetts,
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on June 5, 1848. His early years were, of course, spent in his father's home, under the beneficent influence of his parents' moral and intellectual training. His parents took pains to have him thoroughly educated. Accordingly, they sent him first to the unsurpassed local schools of Cambridge, where the founda- tions of a broad and liberal culture were laid. Then he was sent to the famous Chauncey Hall School of Boston, one of the fore- most institutions of its class in the United States.
His training was well designed on both the theoretical and practical sides. He was well versed in the classics and other branches of a purely academic education, and equally well in the practical studies which should be of direct service to him in the pursuit of a business career. With this accomplished, he de- cided to forego the completion of a full collegiate course, and to turn his attention, at an early age, to following his father's foot- steps in a mercantile life.
His first occupation was as an employee in a dry-goods estab- lishment. That work was not altogether to his liking, but it served the valuable purpose of acquainting him practically with business methods, and of confirming him in the knowledge he had theoretically gained at school. He there developed the business methods and traits of character which have won him conspieu- ous success in the field which he afterward chose as his real life seene.
A few years in the dry-goods trade in New England gave Mr. Davis sufficient confidence in his business ability to move him to seek a more extended field and a more enterprising occupa- tion. He looked to New York as the proper scene of his efforts, and to the keen contention of its financial center as the work in which he should find best scope for his energies.
He was still a young man-indeed, at an age at which many are only just entering business-when he removed to New York and began to seek, or to make, his fortune in the vast tumult and incessant strife of Wall Street. There he found himself not dis- appointed nor dismayed. The work was to his liking, and its successful accomplishment was within the compass of his powers. There was no thought of withdrawing from the ven- ture. Every day's dealings confirmed him the more in his choice. At the age of thirty years, in 1878, he became a member of the
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New York Stock Exchange, and thus qualified himself for participation in all the operations of the Street.
From that time to the present Mr. Davis has been continui- ously engaged in financial transactions in New York. He has long enjoyed prominent rank among his business associates, and has been recognized as a high authority in his special lines of activity. He is reputed to have an exceptionally thorough knowledge of the Stock Exchange and of the ins and outs of its business. There are few who rival him in quickness and sure- ness of judgment, and in the cognate qualities which unite to compose the successful director and operator. His other per- sonal qualities have, at the same time, secured for him a host of friends, including even those who are at times his keenest business rivals and competitors.
Mr. Davis's office is at 35 Wall and 15 Broad streets, in the very heart of the financial and speculative quarter of the city. He there conduets a large brokerage business, dealing in all the standard lines of securities known to the Stock Exchange. His office conveys the idea of being very quiet, but is far-reaching.
The engrossing duties of such a business career have left Mr. Davis little time or taste for seeking other fields of activity. He has neither held nor sought publie office, but has contented himself with discharging the duties and enjoying the privileges of a pri- vate citizen. He has sought the relaxation necessary from busi- ness cares chiefly in out-of-door sports, such as shooting and fishing and driving. He is a member of the well-known Engle- wood Club of Englewood, New Jersey, and of the Accomac Club of Virginia, and is at the present time president of the Thomasville Shooting Club of Thomasville, North Carolina.
HERBERT JEROME DAVIS
C KONCERNING innumerable men of progress and leadership in all professions and trades, and in all parts of the United States, the stereotyped record is to be made that their ancestors came from England and settled in New England. Often, too, the subject of present notiee, in whatever part of the country he may be, was himself born in New England and went thence, as a pioneer or as a seeker of fortune and leadership, to the place with which he has since been identified.
Such is, in brief, the record of Herbert Jerome Davis. His ancestors dwelt at Horsmonden, near the historic city of Can- terbury, in the famous shire of Kent, England. Thence, genera- tions ago, members of the family came to the New England which had been founded in North America, and settled at Worcester, Massachusetts. In the last generation James Davis was a merchant at Hancock, Hillsboro County, New Hampshire. He married Rebecca Symonds, and to them the subject of this sketch was born.
Mr. Davis was born at Hancock, New Hampshire, on June 14, 1844, and was educated at the academy in his native town and also at schools at Gloucester, Massachusetts. He was, however, only a little more than sixteen years of age when, in August, 1860, he left New England for the other extreme edge of the American continent and of the United States. His new home was in San Francisco, where he engaged in the dry-goods and carpet business. Those were growing and prosperous times in the Pacific coast metropolis, and the shrewd young New- Englander fully improved his opportunities.
Despite the sneeess with which his dry-goods business met in California, however, Mr. Davis was in time drawn into the
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enterprises so generally characteristic of the far West, to wit, mining, and in April, 1873, he returned to the East and settled in New York, in order the better to attend to the financial features of the undertakings in which he was engaged.
At the present time Mr. Davis is identified with a number of industrial enterprises having their business headquarters. in the Eastern States. Among these are the Davis Company of Davis, Massachusetts; the Davis Sulphur Ore Company of Davis, Massachusetts: the Davis Pyrites Company ; and the American Copper Extraction Company of New Jersey-of each of which companies he is the president and a director. He is likewise a director of the Sulphur Mining Company of New Jersey, and of the Rubber Goods Manufacturing Company.
Mr. Davis has held and has sought no political office. He is president of the Colonial Club, a member of the Down-Town Association, and a governor of the Lotus, Manhattan, Lawyers', Chemists', and Riding clubs and New England Society of New York, and of the Union Club of Cleveland.
He was married, on June 27, 1879, to Miss Sarah Stranahan, and has one child, a son, Virginio Patten Davis.
JOHN H. DEANE
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OHN H. DEANE is of English ancestry, Canadian birth, and United States citizenship. His father was James Deane, a friend of Sir John Macdonald and a conspicuous citi- zen of the Dominion, a native of England, and the son of a veteran of Waterloo. The wife of James Deane was of United States birth, the descendant of one of Lafayette's aides in the Revolutionary War.
Of such parentage John H. Deane was born at Kingston, On- tario, Canada, on November 2, 1842. When he was nine years old his father died, and his mother, with him and five other chil- dren, came over to Rochester, New York, to live. Three years later she died, and the boy, at the age of twelve years, was thrown upon his own efforts for support. He set out for New York city, walking along the railroad tracks most of the way. In the great city he maintained himself for a time by selling news- papers. In that occupation he had his feet frozen, and was taken to the Children's Hospital on Randall's Island, where he spent the winter of 1856-57. On leaving the hospital he walked back to Rochester, and entered the employ of Nathaniel Hall, a fruit-grower, at four dollars a month.
Despite these hardships, he determined to get a good educa- tion, and accordingly went to the Brockport Collegiate Institute, where he pursued the regular course, at the same time paying his way by sawing a cord of wood daily for four years. In 1862 he entered the University of Rochester, but left it to join the Union army. He was in the battles of Fredericksburg, Chan- cellorsville, and Gettysburg. In the last-named he was wounded in the leg. Later he was on a mortar-boat in the siege of Charleston, participating in many fights, and leading in the boat
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attack upon Fort Sumter. His valor won him eight promotions, and at the end of the war he was honorably mustered out.
In the fall of 1865 he determined to become a lawyer, and, with that end in view, entered the office of A. V. W. Van Vechten of New York as a student and employee. Among his fellow-stu- dents were Elihu Root, Francis Forbes, and Charles H. Tweed. He had a hard struggle, living on a dollar a day. But he perse- vered, and in May, 1867, was admitted to the bar. He at once began the practice of his profession, and soon secured many clients. His practice since has been of the most successful character. He also invested extensively in land in the upper part of Manhattan Island, and built some sixteen hundred houses there, in which operations he amassed a large fortune.
He has used his wealth with rare generosity. Between 1879 and 1883 he gave about $750,000 for educational and philanthropie work, including the endowment of a chair and three scholarships in the University of Rochester. The scholarships he named in honor of David Burbank, who had let him pay for his education by sawing wood at his institute at Brockport. He also purchased the Bnekland Library and gave it to the university. With Cyrus W. Field, he helped to organize and start the Garfield Fund in 1881. He is or has been president of the Baptist Social Union of New York, president of the American Baptist Publication Society, trustee of the Y. M. C. A., vice-president of the Baptist Foreign Missionary Society, trustee of Cook Academy, of Vassar College, and of the University of Rochester, treasurer of the Baptist theological schools in Berlin and Paris, president of the Society for Ministerial Education, a promoter of and first con- tributor to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, a founder of the Home for Intemperate Men, and a patron of the movement for the revision of the Bible. He is a member of the Union League Club of New York.
Mr. Deane was married, on November 16, 1871, to Miss Bertha Adele Fanning, a member of an old New York family. They have five children : Bertha, Edith, John, Sumner, and Alphonse. Mr. Deane has now retired from the practice of the law, and is interested chiefly in real-estate operations.
CHARLES CRIST DELMONICO
TITHE name of Delmonico, which for two generations has been world-famed in connection with the highest class of catering and restaurant-keeping, was first identified with that business in New York in the year 1833. At that time two brothers, Peter and John Delmonico, who had for some years been con- ducting a small candy-store in the lower part of the city, opened an eating-house at No. 23 William Street. This was destroyed in the great fire of 1835, whereupon they opened another, at No. 78 Broad Street, which prospered so well that the brothers presently took into partnership with them their nephew Lorenzo Delmonico. This second restaurant was burned in 1845, and then a third was opened, at Broadway and Morris Street, which ten years later was moved to Broadway and Chambers Street, where it remained for half a century. Another was opened at No. 20 Broad Street, which in time was removed to Beaver and William streets. Yet another was opened at Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth Street, which was removed to Fifth Avenue, Broadway, and Twenty-sixth Street, and finally to Fifth Avenue and Forty-fourth Street.
The entrance of Lorenzo Delmonico marked a new era in the business. He became the real head of the enterprise, and down to his death, in 1881, was deservedly the most famous restaurant- keeper in America. He associated with him his brother Siro, who died in 1881, and his nephew Charles C. Delmonico, who died in 1884. At the latter date the only heir of the family and to the business was Lorenzo Delmonico's sister, Rosa, who had married Charles Crist, and who had three children. Both as a matter of sentiment and as a matter of business, it was de- cided that the name of Delmonico must not be allowed to lapse.
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Therefore an act of Legislature was secured by virtue of which Rosa Delmonico and her children assumed her maiden surname, and her eldest son, Charles Crist, became legally known as Charles Crist Delmonico.
Charles Crist, thus renamed Delmonico, was at this time - 1884- a young man, well under thirty years of age. With the instinctive genius of his mother's family, he at once assumed full management of the great business which his predecessors had built up, and materially enlarged and improved it. It was under his management that the famous old house at the north- west corner of Madison Square was abandoned in favor of the present superb edifice at Fifth Avenue and Forty-fourth Street, a change which has been abundantly justified by its results.
Mr. Delmonico remained a bachelor until October 5, 1900, when he was married to Miss Jennie Ross Edwards, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. John J. Edwards of Brooklyn, New York. He was a man of enlture and fashion, as befitted one of the chief caterers of the fashionable world, and was a member of many of the best clubs of New York. It was his custom often to dine at other restaurants than his own, and in that way he became a familiar figure about town. In the last year or two of his life his health perceptibly failed, and he sought restoration in a pro- longed visit to Colorado Springs, Colorado. The change of eli- mate was ineffectual, however, it indeed it was not positively mischievous. His lung trouble was not checked, while the rarefied air seemed to aggravate a heart trouble, from which latter he died somewhat suddenly on September 20, 1901.
The great business with which Mr. Delmonico was identified survived him and now goes on unchanged, under the same his- torie name.
LOUIS PALMA DI CESNOLA
OUIS PALMA DI CESNOLA, the well-known director of 1 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York city, is of noble Italian origin, being descended from the family of Palma, eminent in Piedmont since the eleventh century, and having been Count of Cesnola until he renounced the title and became an American citizen in 1865. He is a son of the late Count Mauri- zio Palma, a cavalry officer under Napoleon Bonaparte, and liis wife, the Countess Eugenia Ricca di Castelvecchio. Born at Rivarolo Canavese, in northern Italy, on June 29, 1832, he was educated at first by private tutors in his native city, and later, from 1843 to 1848, in the seminary at Ivrea, where he com- pleted his course of study.
He entered the Sardinian army as a volunteer in the war with Austria of 1848-49, and on the battle-field of Novara, on March 23, 1849, he was promoted for valor to be a second lieutenant in the Queen's Regiment. After this war he was sent to the Royal Military Academy of Cherasco, where he completed his military studies and was graduated.
The young soldier voluntarily severed his connection with the Sardinian army, and at the end of 1860 he came to the United States. During that winter he taught Italian and French, and then, when the Civil War broke out, established a military school where infantry, cavalry, and artillery tactics were taught to more than seven hundred officers of volunteers. In October, 1861, he was commissioned as major of the Eleventh New York Cavahy, and two months later became lieutenant-colonel. In September, 1862, he was promoted colonel of the Fourth New York Cavalry. At the battle of Aldie, on June 17, 1863, he was badly wounded, captured, and confined for nine months in Libby Prison. At
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the end of the war he was brevetted brigadier-general of the volunteers, and thirty-four years later received from Congress the medal of honor for heroism on the battle-field of Virginia.
General di Cesnola has never taken part in political matters, and has held only one public office, that of Consul in Cyprus, to which he was appointed by President Lincoln in 1865, and which he held for twelve years. It was while he was thus in Cyprus that he made those archeological discoveries which Sir Austen Layard, of Nineveh fame, and Sir Charles Newton of the British Museum publicly declared had "added a new chapter to the history of art and archæology and revolutionized all the extant theories about ancient art." On his return from Cyprus in 1877 he was elected a patron of the Metropolitan Mu- seum of Art ; in 1878 he was elected a trustee, and made secre- tary of the board ; and in 1879 he was appointed director-general of the Museum; all three of which places he continues to fill with acceptability. He is a member of many of the chief archæ- ological and scientific societies of this and other countries, and honorary member of others, such as the Royal Society of Litera- ture of London, the Royal Asiatic Society of England and Ireland, the Royal Academy of Sciences of Turin, and of the Institut d'Afrique of Paris. Princeton and Columbia universi- ties have given him the degree of LL. D. He is the author of " Cyprus, its Cities, Tombs, and Temples," " Atlas of the Ces- nola Collection of Cypriote Antiquities," and many pamphlets, lectures, etc.
General di Cesnola married Miss Mary Isabel Reid, daughter of Captain Samuel Reid of the United States navy, known as the "Hero of Fayal," and designer of the present United States flag. He has two daughters : Eugenie and Louise di Cesnola.
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