Fun facts about my grandfather, Sherwood Mortley Pinkerton, Jr.
(Source: a newly discovered journal written by my mother.)
He was happily married and came home for lunch everyday, and so did the daughters from school.
He had a photographic memory and called all of his employees by their first names, 400 at one time.
He maintained a quarter-acre terraced garden with rock garden, arbor with sweet peas, and goldfish pool, formal rose garden with shaped boxwood hedges around each bed and a privet hedge around the outside of garden, with hibiscus in front of sunroom and stone bench on other side – 400 roses including rose garden and upper-terrace plantings. He crossed day-lilies and developed one that he named Helen, after my grandmother.
His grandfather, after the Civil War, had a grocery store and he got the idea of making chewing tobacco using clippings from a nearby cigar store. He began the Pinkerton Tobacco Company (and not Abner. Abner was one of the brothers involved in the grocery store, only.)
Kellogg’s “Pep” was a cereal in the 1930’s and 40’s, and Sherwood had chewing tobacco named Pep, so the Kellogg’s people wrote him and asked him to drop his Pep name from his tobacco. So he looked up the patent records and discovered that his patent preceded the Kellogg’s one, so he wrote them and told them to drop it.
Invented a humidor that could keep tobacco fresh — didn’t go.
Invented a rose food called Treet and sold it for 20 years.
His daughter Julia at age 11 wanted to do something naughty so she acquired a pack of Kool cigarettes, tried one and left the pack on windowsill between the house and the porch. When Sherwood looked out to check the thermometer on the porch, he noticed the Kools and asked, “Whose cigarettes are these?” Julia answered, “They’re mine, Daddy.” “Well don’t leave them on a windowsill where they will dry out.” She quit smoking them after this because her escapade did not make the impression she expected.
Sherwood ran the company as Vice President by himself when his Uncle Orr Bovard was President because he spent every winter in Florida.
He was always ready to help his daughters with homework, he took vitamins, he was happy and fulfilled, his employees loved him, he was an amateur weatherman and could tell you what the weather would be, he was not a materialist, and he drove a little maroon Ford for years, until Helen made him buy a new one.
My immigrant ancestor David Henry Mortley was born in Kent County, England in 1820. Not much is known about his parents – his father died when he was 7, his mother died when he was 10.
Orphaned so young, he came alone to America, at age 16, not knowing one person on the ship headed to New York City. He traveled to Coshocton County, Ohio, where he apprenticed with his brother, Ford, in the carpenter and joining trade.
He was a craftsman, a trait which perhaps contributed to his exquisite handwriting. When he was 30, he worked as a secretary on the 1950 Ohio constitutional convention, and it was with his hand that the parchment document of the new Ohio constitution was written. They paid him in today’s dollars $2,144 extra to do that. (“His chirograph being perfect, he wrote the great document on parchment.”)
In 1844 he married Eliza Jane Sherwood, daughter of William Sherwood from Malta, and had three daughters and one son.
He was the quartermaster for the 122nd Ohio Volunteer Infantry until he fell ill in December 1863.
After the Civil War, he was elected twice the Clerk of Courts in Morgan County.
In 1873, he went into the grocery business in Zanesville, Ohio with his son-in-law John W. Pinkerton, who is my great great grandfather.
In the summer of 1887 he was nominated for Senator by district convention composed of delegates from Tuscarawas, Coshocton, Guernsey, Monroe and nine townships of Noble. As the oldest man in the Senate, he presided over the 68th General Assembly.
He was a Justice of the Peace in Coshocton for many years. He died in McConnelsville and was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, in Zanesville.
My grandfather was named after David Mortley and his wife, a Sherwood – my grandfather’s name being Sherwood Mortley Pinkerton, of Westmoreland, in Toledo, the third-generation president of the Pinkerton Tobacco Company, that emanated from the Pinkerton and Mortley grocery business in Zanesville, that was helped along in its infancy by David Henry Mortley.
Sherwood Mortley Pinkerton, with Hebe, Goddess of Youth, Westmoreland, Toledo, Ohio, 1978. The white Carrara marble family heirloom is displaced, in the process of moving on to the next generation. Photo by Penny Gentieu
In 1997 I was invited to write about and submit a photograph of my grandmother for the book, Our Grandmothers, which was an anthology of the grandmother photos and memoirs by 74 granddaughters who are photographers. Amazingly, my photo was chosen by jury for the cover, and the jury included such heavyweights as Kathy Ryan, Photo Editor of the New York Times Magazine; Michelle Stevenson, Photo Editor of Time; and Michele McNally, Photo Editor of Fortune.
I was in great company, some of the other photographers were Sylvia Plachy of the Village Voice, Margaretta Mitchell, author of Recollections: Ten Women of Photography (1979) and long time ASMP leader; Helen Marcus, President of ASMP at the time I joined and she sponsored me; Deborah Willis, photographer, author, curator and scholar; and Annie Leibovitz, who is so cool, she didn’t even have to write anything.
22 years ago, I wrote down my impressions of my grandmother and her amazing house that was full of stuff, but now I can see her legacy, through my mother, to my daughter. I marvel at my new discoveries of my sweet, strong Mennonite-rooted grandmother.
Helen Moyer Pinkerton was descended from Mennonites in Germany who were persecuted and fled to Switzerland, finally settling in Bucks County, Pennsylvania in 1742. Her father, Joseph W. Moyer, the fifth generation of the American Moyer lineage, moved to Washington DC, where he worked in real estate. Her mother was also from a fifth generation American Mennonite family, originally from Palatinate. My grandmother comes from a 100% Mennonite background, the first generation born of a family that broke away from their Mennonite community. Wow, I just realized that.
Audrey and Helen Moyer, sisters, standing next to their grandmother, Catherine Hepler Freed in Lansdale, Pennsylvania ca. 1903
Helen was worldly, born in Washington, DC in 1892. She had two sisters. They had an older brother who was accidentally shot in a hunting accident at the age of 14 on the banks of the Potomac.
Helen graduated from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York with a degree in fashion design some time before 1918, when she met Sherwood Mortley Pinkerton Jr., who was in the Army, passing through Washington DC. “When I saw her in 1918, my inner voice said, she’s the one,” my grandfather would tell us. They were married on June 10, 1919, in Washington, DC.
They settled down in Toledo, Ohio, where Sherwood took his place in the family business founded by his grandfather, John W. – the Pinkerton Tobacco Company. The company began in Zanesville and moved to Toledo in 1909, having built a factory right on Swayne Field, behind the ballpark that opened that same year.
Helen gave up a fashion design career in New York, but she made up for it in her four creative daughters.
My mother, Audrey Moyer Pinkerton, was the second born, in 1922, and a child prodigy. She painted her entire life. This newspaper article even mentions that she had had continuous lessons with Karl Kappes starting at age nine! And there she is in the photo, painting a large canvas, no doubt carrying out a Karl Kappes painting assignment to copy a Thomas Gainsborough, or something.
In 1953, probably when my mother was pregnant with me, she painted a portrait of her aunt and namesake, Audrey (which I was named as well.) The painting was an amalgamation of two photos – source material that I recently recognized – a photograph of my grandmother, ca. 1918, and a photograph of the two sisters, whereas my mother used the body of her mother in the first photo and the face of Audrey in the second photo, to create a romantic portrait of her mother’s beloved late sister, a flapper who was married to the “Jazz Minister.” My mother gave the painting to her mother, whereupon it hung in their Westmoreland dining room, across from the Anna Hale Buckingham ancestor painting.
Thanksgiving, 1961 at the Pinkertons. Paintings on the wall are of Sherwood’s great grandparents, Alvah Buckingham and Anna Hale Buckingham.Painting of Audrey hanging on the dining room wall opposite the ancestor painting of Anna Hale Buckingham. December 1958. My sister, my two cousins, and me.
Then the painting hung in our Brooklyn apartment when our daughter, Anna was growing up. Anna was 21 when she used it in a photo series of self-portraits satirizing the Ten Commandments. One of Anna’s special talents is in her styling, and she has always loved fashion. Dressed in clothing reminiscent of a Dutch painting (Mennonites originated in Holland in the 16th Century, but that’s totally irrelevant), she held under her arm the painting of Audrey by Audrey for her rendition of “Do Not Steal.”
Anna won a prize for this photo in the Toledo Museum of Art’s annual 94th Toledo Area Artists’ Exhibition, in 2013. The photo was featured in The Blade and it inspired a solo show at the Paula Brown Gallery in Toledo. Anna sold editioned prints of the photo, and other photos, as well the entire set of 10 Commandments photographs. It was right after college, and she earned enough money to lease a pre-war apartment in New York.
The 10 Commandments series was published as the 10th Matte Magazine. The Museum of Modern Art’s periodicals curator bought it for the museum’s collection of millennium magazines.The series was also published online in 10 countries and in the Korean print magazine, Blink. The 10 Commandments were exhibited in Anna’s first New York solo show, in 2016.
I used the painting in 2009 for the logo of artistsoftoledo.com, which I created to honor my mother, who died that year. The painting in the logo represents the beginnings of the Toledo Museum of Art, when George W. Stevens placed a painting on the floor in front of a “filtched” chair to sit down rich folks and espouse the virtues of building of a museum to hang the painting, enticing them to donate money to build the museum. But I have digressed…
Now, back to my grandmother:
My grandmother talked on the phone with my mother for hours a day. This was her phone booth, in the hallway by the staircase of their house, around the corner from the kitchen.My grandparents in their living room at Christmas. To the left is the painting made by my mother at age 14, which you can see her actually painting in the above newspaper clipping from 1937. On the right are 11 cases of my grandfather’s Kodachromes, that were fortunately given to me when they moved out of their house in 1977, and from which this very picture originated – maybe from that middle box on the left.My grandmother posing with Agda, her Swedish maid. The two appear to have a very strong bond between them, as they both look so intentionally defiant in the photo, and my grandmother is holding her sash.My grandmother posing in their garden in a dress that she made. In fact, she probably made all of her clothes. She was 100% Mennonite, new-agey, sophisticated and educated with a fine art degree in clothing design.With my grandfather, who was an avid photographer and gardener in his retirement.Looks like Christmas 1957, one year before the painting on the left was replaced by the painting of Audrey. My dad is sitting on the left, my brother on the right, and I am sitting in my mother’s lap playing the accordion.The Pinkerton home on the corner of Richmond Rd and Woodruff in the Westmoreland neighborhood of Toledo, a Georgian Colonial Revival house that my grandparents built in 1927 and lived in for fifty years. My grandmother died in 1978 at age 86 on Thanksgiving, and my grandfather followed her on January 1, 1980, also at age 86. (My mother too was 86 when she died, in 2009.) When we moved back to Toledo in December of 2008, there happened to be a Westmoreland house tour, and their house was featured. My brother and sister and I got to see the inside of the house again, but there was a big something missing. It seemed so small, without them in it.
Many Springfield Twp. Farms Became Part of the City Zanesville Sunday Times Signal, Sept. 28, 1958
Dinner at the Pinkerton house in Toledo, 1954. Paintings of Anna and Alvah Buckingham on the wall.
I never thought of my ancestors as being activists by looking at these two in the paintings that I grew up with in my grandparents dining room. But now I see them in an entirely different way! They came from fierce New England Puritan stock who believed that the laws of God trumped the law of the land that allowed slavery. Putnam was a small village across the river from Zanesville Ohio, and my New England ancestors were among the original settlers. Zanesville, on the other hand, was settled by folks from Kentucky and West Virginia. And there were fights.
My ancestors’ names are Alvah and Anna Buckingham. Alvah helped build the Putnam Presbyterian Church in 1835, which was actively involved in the abolitionist movement. William Beecher, brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, was the first minister of the church. Frederick Douglass spoke there in 1852. For many years, the church held a monthly prayer service for the abolition of slavery. The first Ohio Anti-Slavery Convention took place in Putnam, as well as the first publication of the abolitionist newspaper, The Philanthropist. What a great community!
In 1799, when Alvah Buckingham was 8, his family moved to southeast Ohio, on horseback. In 1819 Alvah met Anna Hale of Glastonbury, Connecticut on a trip back east and married her. They built a house on Moxahala Avenue in 1821. (Three generations have subsequently lived in the house.) He was in the mercantile business with his brother and brother-in-law and later, opened a lumber trade. In 1852, he built the first grain elevator in Chicago, and owned the first grain elevator in Toledo.
In 1865 when Alvah was 74, he and Anna moved to New York City to be closer to their two daughters who also lived in New York City. They owned a home at 13 East 12th St.
In 1866, Alvah took a trip out west with his youngest son, James in a spring wagon over rough roads, “without any apparent fatigue.” (James is my GG Grandfather and grandfather of Elise Pinkerton, born 1904, see blog post, The Tea-Dyed Brown Dress.)
Anna Buckingham died of pneumonia on September 23, 1867, and her remains were brought back to Ohio. Alvah Buckingham died 11 days later, on October 4, 1867.
In 1639, Alvah Buckingham’s Puritan ancestors settled the farthest most reaches of America – Milford, Connecticut. Alvah was descended from immigrant ancestor, Thomas Buckingham, born in Minsden, Herts, England. Alvah’s father, Ebenezer Buckingham, fought in the Revolutionary War.
My grandfather, Sherwood Pinkerton Jr. later to be president of the family business, The Pinkerton Tobacco Company in Toledo, Ohio, is sitting in lower right corner. His mother, Julia Buckingham Pinkerton is standing behind him, next to her father, James Buckingham. James’ wife, Jane Wills Buckingham is in the center. The room they are in is the front right side of the 405 Moxahala Avenue house, shown above. Photo circa 1905.
Sherwood Pinkerton with the paintings of his great grandparents, in his Central Avenue apartment in Toledo, November 1979, six weeks before he passed away.
I recently found these photos in my inherited family albums. The first one, from 1908, is of my grandfather’s only sister, Elise. I never knew anything about her, but learned that she died at age 4 of typhoid fever, the year this photo was taken. The second photo is my Aunt Elise in 1925. I realized that she was named after this little girl. The third is my Aunt Julia in 1933, who was named after my grandfather’s mother, Julia Buckingham Pinkerton.
About 20 years ago, when my daughter was five, Aunt Elise gave me the dress. It wasn’t in any condition to put on my daughter. I didn’t know the story of the dress, but it seemed spooky. I kept it in a drawer, wrapped in tissue paper. I took it out last week when I discovered these photos.
Imbued with the mystery of the child who died in 1908 and my aunts who wore the dress for formal portraits by the famous studios of Bachrach in 1925 and CL Lewis in 1933, it is disintegrating at the sleeves, having been hand-patched in various places apparently long ago.
There was a lump in the fabric, something in the pocket — I was a little afraid to see what it was! I pulled it out, and the message from my female ancestors, going all the way back to my great grandmother Julia Buckingham Pinkerton, who probably sewed it, couldn’t have been sweeter. It was a century-old hand-crocheted hankie with a girl with a bow in her hair and bounce in her step, and the words, Tuesday’s child is full of grace.
Fun facts about my grandfather, Sherwood Mortley Pinkerton, Jr.
