by Tom Castaldi
The Hamilton Family appeared in the northern Indiana frontier village of Fort Wayne in the early 1820s and soon
began to emerge as one of the most extraordinary families in the
community. The original homestead
occupied a vast area south of Lewis
Street stretching across the three blocks between
Calhoun and Lafayette streets. After the
Civil War, the family built a grand mansion and carriage house on the eastern
end of the property and enclosed the area with fences and hedgerows.
Despite this physical separation from the daily bustle of Fort Wayne, by the end of
the nineteenth century the Hamiltons
had become one of the premier families of Fort
Wayne. From
their position of wealth and privilege nearly every member of this remarkable
family left the confines of the homestead to make outstanding contributions to
the community, nation and even, on occasion, the world.
Allen Hamilton (1798-1864), the patriarch of the clan,
came to the United States
as an impoverished Irishman in 1817 and settled in the wilderness village of Fort Wayne in 1823. Almost immediately he was elected the
county’s first sheriff. He made the
family fortune, however, through a variety of typical pioneer enterprises, from
milling grain and fur trading to land speculation. It was in this last, especially as the
executor of the will of the Chief of the Miami Indians, Pechewa (Jean Baptiste de Richardville), that Allen Hamilton
established his family as the wealthiest in Northern
Indiana. For generations to
come, the family would benefit from this substantial patrimony.
As one of the foremost citizens of the community, Hamilton recruited the
town’s first schoolteachers, two New
York women named Susan Man and Aleda Hubbard. In 1828 Allen married the extraordinary
Emerine Jane Holman (1810-1889), a southern Indiana woman whose father, Jesse Lynch
Holman, was a judge on the Indiana Supreme Court, a United States District
judge and one of the founders of both Franklin College
and Indiana University. Her brother, William Steele Holman, was a
Democratic congressman for thirty-two years.
Emerine was the Matriarch of the Hamilton Homestead, an enclosed three
square-block area Hamilton Homestead where at one time as many as seventeen
cousins lived with their three sets of parents.
One of the distinguishing features of the mansion complex
was the thousands of volumes of rare and contemporary books that filled the
shelves of several libraries. Emerine
was a passionate reader who often lost herself in her books. Her children and grandchildren remembered
being enthralled by her stories and poems.
She was an introspective but generous woman with a great sense of
responsibility. Typically, she gave
away as much as one-fifth of her yearly income to the public and needy causes
and she paid special attention to the small African American community in Fort Wayne. She also gave to the American Women Suffrage
Association and counted among her friends and occasional house guests Susan B.
Anthony and Frances Willard. She was the
founder of the first public library in Fort
Wayne, which dedicated its first reading room in her
memory. The children of Allen and Emerine,
especially, continued their parents’ devotion to study and achievement.
Andrew Holman (1834-1895), who succeeded his father as
head of the clan in 1864, was an avid rare book collector (amassing more than
6,000 volumes, then the largest library of any kind in the city) and served two
terms in Congress (1875-1879). His
brother, Montgomery, attended Princeton but
left early to enlist in the Union Army during the Civil War. After the war, he led a Bohemian life in Germany where
he met and married Gertrude Pond, a kindred spirit and daughter of a Wall
Street broker.
Once settled back in Fort
Wayne, Montgomery
became involved in banking and politics; but he also took an intense interest
in the education of children. He and
Gertrude disapproved of the standard public school curriculum and chose to
educate their children at home, stressing language, literature, and history and
encouraging them to learn by reading on their own, including pursuing research
questions in the family’s ample library.
One friend recalls that it was not uncommon to come upon the Hamilton children all in
a circle outdoors heartily enjoying themselves reading Dante’s Divine Comedy aloud in the original
Italian.
Gertrude had a profound impact on the many young cousins
who grew up and were educated in the Hamilton Homestead. She fostered the notions of personal ambition
and achievement through learning. Her
daughter, Dr. Alice Hamilton, later recalled her mother’s admonition: “There
are two kinds of people, the ones who say ‘Somebody ought to do something about
it, but why should it be I?’ and those who say ‘Somebody ought to do something
about it, then why not I?'"
In
this atmosphere young Hamiltons
such as the sisters Alice, Edith and Norah and their cousins Agnes and Allen
grew and matured into extraordinary people.
Norah (1873-1945) was an artist.
She had worked in Paris
with James McNeil Whistler (whose father had been born at the original log
garrison of Fort Wayne,
which his father had built in the days of the Indian wars.) She
also pioneered in art education for immigrant children at Jane Addams’ Hull
House in Chicago.
Norah’s sister, Edith (1867-1963), was the most precocious
of them all. A passionate reader, she
graduated from Bryn
Mawr College
and studied classical literature in Germany at the turn of the last
century. She became headmistress of Bryn Mawr
School in Baltimore and developed
it into a rigorous college preparatory school for women before her retirement
in 1922. It was after she retired that
Edith became an internationally recognized scholar in Greek civilization and
culture. Her works on ancient Greece are
still required readings in many universities today, an achievement for which
she was awarded by the people of Greece the only honorary Athenian
citizenship ever granted an American.
Sister Alice (1869-1970) went to Fort Wayne College of
Medicine before attending the University of Michigan School of Medicine, from
which she graduated with an MD in 1893. Alice, driven by her
desire to reach out and help others less fortunate than she, joined the
settlement house movement at Hull House in Chicago and worked among the immigrant
neighborhoods for many years.
Her profession, however, took her into the new field of
industrial medicine, and there her meticulous skills as a scientist combined
with her rare abilities to negotiate and convince made her a formidable force in
changing the American factory setting to one more healthful for American
workers. In view of this, she was
invited to become the first woman on Harvard’s Medical School
faculty to be a specialist in the field of industrial toxicology.
Her activities also extended far beyond the classroom and
laboratory. Always deeply committed to
the primacy of personal freedoms, she became an active part in the movement for
American neutrality in World War I and an ardent anti-fascist. After World War II she was a fervent opponent
of Senator John McCarthy; in the 1960s. While in her nineties, she actively
opposed the Vietnam War. She died in
1970 at the age of 101. The last project
on which she was working was the problem of disposing nuclear waste.
Their cousin, Agnes (1868-1961) was a life-long friend of Alice. She also became intensely involved in Fort Wayne social reform
issues at the turn of the century and into the 1930s. She worked daily with immigrant mill workers
in the Nebraska Neighborhood in a community center she called “The Noon Rest,”
and she was the first president of the Fort Wayne branch of the YWCA. She spent the final decades of her life
serving others at the “The Lighthouse” the Presbyterian settlement house
in Philadelphia.
Her cousin Allen (1868-1960) became a physician and an
outspoken advocate for women’s suffrage and then women’s rights in
sex-segregated professions. His own
wife, Marian Walker, was a practicing physician and mother, a dual role for
women to which even most activists did not ascribe very readily early in the
twentieth century. Among the later
generations one of the outstanding members was Holman Hamilton (1910-1980) who
became an award-winning history professor at the University of Kentucky.
Throughout the Hamilton
family’s extraordinary career, the thread that tied the members together over
the generations and gave them all-purpose was education. It was this above all else that was shared,
relished, cherished and used by each in a world which they strove to make a
difference.
Originally published in Fort Wayne Magazine, “Along the Heritage Trail” with Tom Castaldi –
March 2005, No. 10, pp. 40-41
