USA > Pennsylvania > Colonial and revolutionary families of Pennsylvania; genealogical and personal memoirs, Volume IV > Part 7
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(II) JOSEPH WHARTON, son of Thomas and Rachel (Thomas) Wharton, became a successful merchant and large landowner, at whose country place, Wal- nut Grove, was held, after his decease, the Meschianza, that famous ball given by the British officers shortly before Lord Howe and his army evacuated Philadelphia.
(III) CHARLES WHARTON, son of Joseph Wharton, also a successful and wealthy merchant, died in 1838, aged over ninety-five years.
(IV) WILLIAM WHARTON, son of Charles Wharton, having by inheritance a sufficiency of this world's goods, which was supplemented by the considerable fortune of his wife, engaged in no business, but devoted himself to the care of his family and the exercise of hospitality, being also actively associated with many important trusts and charities. Mr. Wharton married Deborah Fisher, a descend- ant of John Fisher, who, with his son, Thomas Fisher, came from England with William Penn on his first voyage in the ship "Welcome" in 1682. William and Deborah (Fisher) Wharton were the parents of ten children.
(V) JOSEPH WHARTON, fifth child of William and Deborah (Fisher) Whar- ton, was born March 3, 1826, in the family home on Spruce Street, below Fourth, Philadelphia, and received his earliest education in the Friends' School. Subse- quently, he pursued a preparatory course in a private school conducted by Fred- erick Augustis Eustis, with the intention of entering Harvard University. His health, however, being somewhat impaired, he went, at the age of sixteen, to a farm in Chester County, owned by Joseph S. Walton, in whose family he remained for three years, rising at four o'clock in the morning and working long hours in the field. During the three winter months he lived in Philadelphia, studying in Boye's Laboratory and acquiring the foundation of that knowledge of chemistry which in time caused him to be regarded as one of the foremost non-professional scientists of Philadelphia. His evening hours were devoted to the study of French and German.
At the age of nineteen, Joseph Wharton entered the dry goods house of Waln and Leaming in order that he might acquire a knowledge of commercial methods.
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He worked without wages, being the first to arrive at the store in the morning for the purpose of sweeping out the office, but during the two years of this discipline he was becoming familiar with business methods and acquiring a thorough mastery of the art of bookkeeping, eventually keeping eight hundred ledger accounts. In 1847, being then twenty-one years of age, Mr. Wharton joined his eldest brother, Rodman Wharton, in the establishment of the large white lead manufactory which they sold a few years later to John T. Lewis & Brothers.
But still Joseph Wharton had not really begun his individual career, and it was only after all this that he seized upon an obscure opportunity, which soon proved the stuff that was in him. In 1853, some friends and himself took a horseback trip through the eastern portion of Pennsylvania, visiting, incidentally, a zinc mine at Friedensville. This mine was being worked by the Lehigh Zinc Company, and furnished the ore for Gilbert and Wetherill's white paint establishment in South Bethlehem. Becoming interested, he made arrangements to undertake the man- agement of the mine and business for $3,000 a year. The salary was afterward raised to $5,000. He was instrumental in obtaining a new and more advantageous charter, and when the company succumbed to the widespread financial panic of 1857 he leased the entire establishment for a few months, carrying it through the hard winter of 1857-58, and afterward resuming, on a wider basis, its management for the company. Within a short time Mr. Wharton had acquired $30,000 for him- self, and also handed over large profits to the company.
There had been several attempts in America to make metalic zinc, or spelter, as commercial product, but all unsuccessful. In 1859, Mr. Wharton determined that this could and should be done. So he proposed to the Lehigh Zinc Company that he try the experiment himself, getting ore from them, and this plan was adopted. He imported from Belgium experienced workmen, whose confidence he won by his ability to speak their language and his friendly interest in their personal affairs, and the business went on like clockwork from the start. He put up sixteen fur- naces at his own risk, which ran day and night, making big profits to the astonishment, if not the envy, of all zinc makers. When his lease terminated in 1863, he had produced 9,000,000 pounds of spelter, a unique accomplishment in this country. He offered to continue managing the works on a salary, but the company thought they could do without him, thereby keeping all the profit. This proved to be like the play of Hamlet with Hamlet left out, for the works quickly degenerated and were eventually sold by the sheriff.
Just after the closing of this episode in his career, Mr. Wharton turned his attention to the manufacture of nickel, having been advised by a friend that the United States Government was in need of it for the Philadelphia mint, and could not depend upon a regular supply from Europe. Within a year he had bought the old works at Camden, New Jersey, with which he achieved the first success in American nickel-making. He also bought the only American nickel mine, in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, which produced in his hands more ore than any other nickel mine in the world.
Dr. Theodore Fleitmann was his partner for two years. Then the factory was destroyed by fire, and Mr. Wharton bought out Dr. Fleitmann's interest, continu- ing the business alone on a larger scale. He manufactured cobalt from the ore,
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and he originated the making of nickel magnets for ships. Nickel had always been regarded as a brittle metal, incapable of being worked alone. But after some experiments, he succeeded in producing malleable nickel-the first of its kind in the world. The government having ceased, temporarily, to use nickel for coin- age, it was for some time hard to keep the plant running, and it was after the Franco-Prussian War that Mr. Wharton made his first large profits in securing the contract to supply the Prussian mint with the nickel for a new uniform coin- age. For advances in the art of nickel making he received several medals, par- ticularly the gold medal of the Paris Exposition of 1878, for malleable nickel in divers forms, a display so novel that the jury at first doubted its reality. As early as 1876 Mr. Wharton made magnets of pure nickel, and in 1888 the increased magnetic momentum of forged nickel by the addition of tungsten was demonstrated from bars made by him for that purpose. He was the largest manufacturer of . nickel in America.
The notable sagacity and foresight displayed by Joseph Wharton in all busi- ness affairs was especially conspicuous in his investment in the stock of the Beth- lehem Iron Company, in which his interest dated from its inception. He pur- chased its stock from time to time, until he held more than any other person. He eventually became a director, and the result of his influence was immediately seen, in the impetus imparted to the business. Here, again, his initiative came into play. Joseph Wharton was the pioneer in the manufacture of armor plate used on the warships of the United States. When the United States Government first con- sidered making armor plate, the Secretary of the Navy, William C. Whitney, consulted him as to possible facilities. It was arranged that Bethlehem should undertake the venture, so Mr. Wharton went abroad to investigate the systems recently started in England and France. This resulted in the building of Bethle- hem's vast steel plant, which has produced the armament for our modern war vessels. In 1901, a syndicate interested in the manufacture of steel endeavored to negotiate for the purchase of the Bethlehem Steel Works, and while the company was willing to consider the proposition, Mr. Wharton was invested with absolute authority for the conduct and completion of the transaction, and Charles M. Schwab became the purchaser. Mr. Wharton's advocacy of the manufacture, by the Bethlehem Iron Company, of steel forgings, has resulted in a vast steel-making establishment producing steel and nickel-steel armor plates, gun forgings, shaft- ings, cranks, and similar articles of unrivaled excellence but for which the modern navy of the United States or the new ship-building industry in this country would have been well-nigh impossible. To him belongs the distinction of having been one of the few business men who were the first to discern the possibilities of the development of the manufacture of steel in Pennsylvania, possibilities since so marvelously realized.
Constantly enlarging the scope of his activities, Mr. Wharton bought exten- sive property in Northern New Jersey and built at Port Oram (renamed Whar- ton), in that State, furnaces with a capacity of 1,000 tons of iron daily. His own iron mines, coal mines, and coke ovens supplied these furnaces, whose working made him the largest individual ironmaster in America. His ore lands aggregated 5,000 acres, and he was also the owner of 7,500 acres of coal land in Indiana
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County, Pennsylvania, and 24,000 acres of coal land in West Virginia and North- ern New York.
It has been said that every year of his adult life was one of giant activities, and while this is true it is also true that versatility was one of his marked traits, and that he sought exercise for his energies not only in great but in diversified enterprises. In addition to his interests in iron, nickel, and gold, Mr. Wharton owned copper lands on Lake Superior, having early in his business career become a stockholder in the Pennsylvania Copper Mine there. Having expressed his dis- approval of the company's management, he was asked to visit the mine and investi- gate, the company paying his expenses. It was not long before he was president of the corporation, spending money in the development of the mine and erecting a stamping mill and other buildings. Later the company's name was variously changed, becoming the Delaware Mining Company and the New Jersey Mining Company, and also assuming other forms. Mr. Wharton purchased the land of the New Jersey Company, amounting to about 2,300 acres. He possessed large holdings of gold lands in the West, and originated and owned the Menhaden Fish- eries of the Atlantic Coast, operating from Maine to Florida, possessing fleets of fishing boats and having factories for producing fertilizers and otherwise using the products of the deep.
Joseph Wharton came to be recognized as one of America's eminent financiers, and yet his business, extensive and important as it was, represented to him but one phase of existence. He was as widely known as a scientist and philanthropist. He studied the sciences as few men have ever done with the exception of those who have made them a particular branch of their life work, and for every process fol- lowed in the production of iron and steel he could give a scientific reason ; chemistry and metallurgy, even in their most far-reaching phases, being to him matters of the utmost familiarity. It should be said, moreover, that there was in his extra- ordinary successes nothing of chance or speculation, but they were, on the contrary, chiefly the results of long and patient original study in the metallurgical field. He gauged precisely the needs for the products, the demands for them, and the condi- tions which his own manufacture would eventually create. One who knew him well when he was active in the conduct of his mammoth iron industry said that his operations were planned with untiring application to things that most men would be likely to consider too trivial for their personal attention, and added: "Joseph Wharton used to work night and day in getting to the bottom of a question and there was nothing left of it to investigate after he had gone through it."
A career devoted to the manufacture of so many native products inevitably drew Mr. Wharton's attention to the importance of a protective tariff. And when the business men of Philadelphia united to form the Industrial League, he was appointed chairman of a committee for promoting the protection of industries, the other members being William Sellers and Henry C. Lea. He always remained firm in his protest against a low tariff, and in his allegiance to the Republican party. Yet with characteristic modesty he declined all public offices, except when he headed the electoral ticket which cast the Republican vote for President Mckinley in his first term. In reference to his attitude toward a protective tariff a Phila- delphia paper said :
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Free trade he regarded as mere sentimentalism, or the folly of crude or untrained thought. He spoke and wrote of it as a doctor might in describing some malignant disease. He early adopted the philosophy of Henry C. Carey as an expositor of the protective principle, and believed that the education of the people in that school of political economy was one of the foremost duties to which an enlightened statesman could apply himself. When the spirit of the "tariff reform" reaction, which sprang up in the 'seventies through the Wood bill in Congress and afterward in the Morrison bill and finally reached its highest point after the advent of Grover Cleveland, spread over the country, he assumed much of the direction of a propaganda for staying its spread and for bringing forward the doctrine that protection is a need for the permanent maintenance of the home market, even after an industry has been established. He quietly organized various protective forces for the circulation of economic literature, for reaching the press, and for counteracting what the tariff reformers called their "campaign of education." In his judgment the most critical period in the history of the country was. the year 1883, when Grover Cleveland's famous anti-protection message provided the chief 'issue of the canvass, and when William H. Harrison's election saved the country from what he sin- cerely believed would otherwise have been its industrial ruin.
With equal thoroughness Mr. Wharton understood all that he undertook in the field of philanthropy. He had no sympathy with charity that tended to make men dependent, but in all his benefaction, and particularly in the bestowal of his bounty on the University of Pennsylvania and the College of Swarthmore, the controlling thought was to fit them for work, for business, for useful industry, so that they might be trained into the best efficiency of which each individual is capable. In May, 1881, he founded the Wharton School of Finance and Economy (the name afterward being changed to the Wharton School of Finance and Com- merce of the University of Pennsylvania) to which he gave $500,000, and he also presented to the astronomical observatory of the university a reflex Venus tube, an instrument for calculating latitude which is duplicated only at the observatory at Greenwich, England. Another gift to the university was a plot on Woodland Avenue, opposite the Wistar Institute, which he purchased only a short time before his death.
The Wharton School of Finance and Commerce-The purposes for which the income of the property is to be applied are those expressed by the founder-Joseph Wharton-in his deed of gift dated the twenty-second day of June, 1881, to wit : That the school shall offer facilities for obtaining :
(1) An adequate education in the principles underlying successful civic government.
(2) A training suitable for those who intend to engage in business to undertake the management of property.
In carrying out these two purposes, the general tendency of instruction shall inculcate :
(a) The duty of every one to perform well and cheerfully his part as a member of the community whose prosperity he thus advances and shares.
(b) The immorality and practical inexpediency of seeking to acquire wealth by winning it from another rather than by earning it through some sort of service to one's fellowmen.
(c) The necessity of system and accuracy in accounts, of thoroughness in whatever is undertaken and of strict fidelity in trusts.
(d) Caution in contracting private debt directly or by endorsement, and in incurring obli- gation of any kind; punctuality in payment of debt and in performance of engagements. Abhorrence of repudiation of debt by communities, and commensurate abhorrence of lavish or inconsiderate incurring of public debt.
(e) The deep comfort and healthfulness of pecuniary independence, whether the scale of affairs be small or great. The consequent necessity of careful scrutiny of income and outgo, whether private or public, and of such management as will cause the first to exceed (even if but slightly) the second. In national affairs this applies not only to the public treasury, but also to the mass of the Nation, as shown by the balance of trade.
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(f) The necessity of rigorously punishing by legal penalties and by social exclusion those persons who commit frauds, betray trusts, or steal public funds, directly or indirectly. The fatal consequences to a community of any weak toleration of such offenses must be most dis- tinctly pointed out and enforced.
(g) The fundamental fact that the United States is a Nation, composed of populations wedded together for life, with full power to enforce internal obedience, and not a loose bundle of incoherent communities living together temporarily-without other bond than the humor of the moment.
(h) The necessity for each Nation to care for its own, and to maintain by all suitable means its industrial and financial independence; no apologetic or merely defensive style of instruction must be tolerated upon this point, but the right and duty of national self-protection must be firmly asserted and demonstrated.
From 1883 to near the close of his life, when his health was impaired, Mr. Wharton was president, latterly called chairman of the board of managers of Swarthmore College, of which he had been one of the founders. He presented to the college the building known as Wharton Hall, a dormitory, the cost of which was $150,000 ($100,000 of this by bequest), and he also gave $40,000 for the endowment of a Chair of Economics and Political Science; $10,000 toward the endowment of the library; about $15,000 for the erection of the Friends' Meeting House, and $10,000 toward the erection of Science Hall. To the very last he was active in good works, offering to the city, but a few days prior to his decease, about twenty-five acres of forest land near Fernrock Station on the North Pennsylvania Railroad. This land was to be used as a park provided the city would properly maintain it as such. His wishes were fulfilled by his daugthers after his death.
Joseph Wharton greatly desired to give the city of Philadelphia good drinking water, and with this in view, he employed experts to examine the resources of his lands in New Jersey with references to obtaining a pure and adequate supply of drinking water for Philadelphia and Camden. Everything proved satisfactory, and although he would have supplied the water to Philadelphia at a cost far below that obtained from any other source, the Philadelphia city councils would not accept the water from New Jersey. To the present time Philadelphia's water supply is thus limited and not good.
Among the numerous scientific bodies in which Mr. Wharton was enrolled was the Academy of Natural Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society, before both of which he frequently read papers on astronomy, and he also pre- pared many papers on metallurgy and on gems, which he delivered before similar organizations. In a strong, logical and convincing argument in the "Atlantic Monthly," Mr. Wharton responded to the attack of Gideon Welles, then Secre- tary of the Navy, upon the protective tariff. His writings frequently took on poetic form, but his verses were usually reserved for the pleasure of his intimate friends.
Mr. Wharton married, June 15, 1854, Anna C. Lovering, daughter of the late Joseph S. and Ann (Corbit) Lovering, of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and they were the parents of the following children :
I. Joanna, wife of J. Bertram Lippincott, of Philadelphia. Their children are: i. Joseph Wharton Lippincott, born February 28, 1887; married, Otcober 29, 1913, Eliza- beth Schuyler Mills, and their children are: Joseph Wharton, Jr., born October 2, 1914; Montgomery Schuyler Roosevelt, born September 3, 1916; and Elizabeth Schuyler, born March 1, 1918. ii. Marianna Lippincott, born September 9, 1890; married William Paul O'Neill, on August 6, 1914; their children are: William Paul, Jr., born July 18, 1915; Sarah Lippincott, born February 7, 1917; Bertram Lippincott, born September 22, 1919; Hugh, born August 12, 1923; and Marianna, born January 15, 1928. iii. Sarah Lippincott, born July 14, 1895; married, on Feb- ruary 11, 1915, Nicholas Biddle, and their children are: Joanna Wharton, born
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December 27, 1915; Nicholas, Jr., born August 4, 1917; Sarah-Lee, born August 19, 1922; John Scott, born June 7, 1925; Wharton, born May 6, 1928. iv. Bertram Lippincott, born November 18, 1897; married, on January 7, 1922, Elsie DuPuy G. Hirst, and their children are: Bertram, Jr., born November 20, 1922; Elsie DuPuy, born June 25, 1924; Barton Hirst, born July 26, 1925; and Joanna Wharton, born March 11, 1931.
2. Mary Lovering, deceased, formerly of Philadelphia.
3. Anna, wife of Harrison S. Morris, of Philadelphia. They have one child, Catharine Wharton Morris, born January 26, 1899; married, on February 28, 1925, Sydney L. Wright, Jr .; and they have four children: i. Anna Wharton, born December 25, 1925. ii. William Redwood, born September 17, 1927. iii. Harrison Morris (twin), born October 6, 1928. iv. Ellicott (twin), born October 6, 1928.
Mr. Wharton built two homes: "Ontalauna," his Philadelphia residence, on the Old York Road at Chelten Avenue; a summer home at Jamestown, Rhode Island; and rebuilt another, situated on a large estate in New Jersey. He was the owner of about 116,000 acres in the southern part of that State.
Mr. Wharton was by birth a member of the religious Society of Friends, and he himself always remained an active member of that body, affiliating with the more liberal and less Trinitarian branch, the Hicksites, in whose meetings he was, during the later years of his life, a frequent speaker. He was also a profound and intelligent student of the Bible.
With remarkable preservation of physical and mental powers, Mr. Wharton enjoyed life to the full until his last year. When eighty years of age he went abroad. After his return from this, his last European trip, his health declined, and on January II, 1909, he breathed his last. One of the Philadelphia papers said of him, editorially :
He was among the foremost men of his time in the development of one of the greatest sources of Pennsylvania wealth; he conceived and carried out many enterprises of magnitude in business and finance, and to perhaps no other man in this part of the country could have been more fittingly applied in its full and legitimate sense the now much abused term "captain of industry." His influence was felt far and wide in his own State and largely beyond it, in the shaping of one of the cardinal policies of the Nation, and in cultivating for it the good will and support of his countrymen. For more than half a century he was a thinker and a planner in affairs of pith and moment in American industrial life. .... He never courted popularity or applause. He was far, however, from isolating himself, in the years of the fulness of his strength from those endeavors which originate in the beneficence of useful or practical public spirit ..... With the severity and sobriety of his intellect in the process of reasoning out his conclusions there was united keenness of foresight, and also, when the time would come for putting them into action, the zest and freshness of a concentrated vigor that went straight to the mark of his purpose. He loved and enjoyed work not alone for the money that it brought him and for the health which he thought it imparted to a man of clean habits, but because of the satisfaction of contemplating the opportunities which his plans and enterprises gave to thousands of men of all kinds to work for their own good. In his view modern business was a science which required no less preparation, when properly pursued, than the professions, and was entitled to no less respect.
The many-sidedness of Mr. Wharton's nature was a fact which comes into bolder relief with the passage of years. To his gifts as a writer of both prose and verse, he added those of a speaker, and great as was the development of his business abilities and his talents as a scientist, his social qualities sought and found expression in abundant hospitality and the various offices of friendship.
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