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
Baby Shane collaged with an Ektachrome slide of an old castle shot by my grandfather, Sherwood Pinkerton, Jr., coming into the world with a history.
William Alexander Pinkerton, immigrant ancestor, was born around 1740 in Firth of Tay, Dundee, Scotland. In 1793 he was killed by Native Americans in Pennsylvania while he working in the fields, with his wife looking on in horror. Alexander, his son (1783–1837), was born in Allegheny County, and became a cabinet maker. After living in New Castle, Pennsylvania for a while, he took his pioneering family on a flatboat down the Ohio river and up the Muskingham, and settled in a new town called McConnelsville, Ohio. His son, David (1817–1894) became an Ohio district court judge, postmaster, and first Treasury Department comptroller in Washington DC. David died in Washington DC in 1894.
Capt. John Willson Pinkerton. Co A & B, 62nd Ohio Volunteer Infantry
David Pinkerton’s oldest son, John W. Pinkerton (1843–1922) fought in the Civil War. After the war, John W. became a wholesale grocer in Zanesville, Ohio. From there, he developed a new chewing tobacco formula, founding the Pinkerton Tobacco Company in 1887. He incorporated the company in 1901 with 945 shares of stock.
It was an interesting time in history because concurrently, the notorious monopolist, James B. Duke, of North Carolina, was aggressively buying up tobacco companies and putting everyone who was not with him, out of business. Duke and his “Tobacco Trust,” the American Tobacco Company, tried to own the entire tobacco market, unconcerned with breaking the 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act, an anti-monopoly law that was enacted the same year David Duke incorporated his business. Duke was big trouble for everyone in the tobacco business, – from the growers to the factories – including the Pinkerton Tobacco Company.
How the Pinkertons came to Toledo
The Pinkertons of the Pinkerton Tobacco Company — four generations: John W., Sherwood Sr., Sherwood Jr. (my grandfather), baby Elise, Toledo, 1920. John W. holding the baby.
This was never a family story, but I’ve discovered some unsavory monopolistic circumstances that led to the Pinkerton family’s move to Toledo.
It all began down in Zanesville Ohio in 1903 when the Pinkerton Tobacco Company’s treasurer, George Monypeny embezzled a sizable amount of money from the company. This loss of money and employee trust prompted John W. Pinkerton to sell his majority shares of stock to the Continental Tobacco Company in order to get George Monpeny and three other Monypeny stockholders out of his business. Unfortunately, Continental was owned by the American Tobacco Company.
All went well until January 1907, when John W. was summoned to New York to meet with the American Tobacco Company, when they told him that they were forcing control of his company. John W. was jaw-droppingly shocked.
And so, from that date on, the American Tobacco Company dictated what the Pinkerton Tobacco Company was to sell, where they could sell it, what size packages they could sell, and the price they could sell it for. It was all for the purpose of putting companies out of business or forcing them to sell their business to James B. Duke’s American Tobacco Company.
One of the casualties was the J. F. Zahm Tobacco Company in Toledo, which Duke and the Tobacco Trust forced out of the tobacco business in 1907. The president, Mr. Zahm was so troubled that one December afternoon in his office at the factory, he put a bullet through his head.
The former tobacco factory building, behind the former Swayne Field ballpark at Bancroft and Detroit Ave, is now a U-Haul storage facility.
14 months later, in 1909, at the direction of the Tobacco Trust, this same factory building became the new headquarters of the Pinkerton Tobacco Company. Those were the sad circumstances that brought the Pinkertons to Toledo. No wonder the effects of the tobacco monopoly were skipped over in our family lore.
John W.’s oldest son, Sherwood Pinkerton Sr. (1867–1939) managed the factory to start. They manufactured chewing tobacco and Sunshine cigarettes.
How terrible the casualties of the greedy monopolist. And to be forced into submitting to their whims. Yet back then, at least John W. could see the light at the end of the tunnel. The anti-trust lawsuits had been making their way through the courts, beginning with Teddy Roosevelt’s election in 1904. Finally, in 1911, by order of the Supreme Court, James B. Duke’s monopoly, the American Tobacco Company was divided into three companies, and Pinkerton Tobacco became a subsidiary of Liggett & Myers. John W. Pinkerton resumed control of his company, and the monopoly-busting of 1911 led way for the booming economy of the Roaring Twenties.
American Tobacco Company and Its Sixty-Five Subsidiaries Are Bumped By the Supreme Court, The Cincinnati Enquirer, May 30, 1911American Tobacco Company and Its Sixty-Five Subsidiaries Are Bumped By the Supreme Court, The Cincinnati Enquirer, May 30, 1911John W. Pinkerton’s City Point, Florida home. John W. Pinkerton was about 76 when he retired and moved to Florida. He died shortly after, in 1922 at age 79. (Sherwood Sr. also moved to City Point, Florida, after his wife died in 1920. He died there in 1939. He went into the citrus fruit mail order business.)
A family business
Sherwood’s oldest son, Sherwood Pinkerton Jr. (1893–1980) was my grandfather. He turned 16 in 1909, the year the family moved to Toledo. They lived at 2510 Parkwood. Sherwood, a 1912 graduate of Toledo Central High School, graduated from the University of Michigan in 1916 with a degree in chemical engineering.
Sherwood served in the Ordnance Department of the U.S. Army during World War I. While stationed in Washington D.C., he met Helen Moyer. (“The first time I saw her in 1918, my inner voice said, she’s the one,” my grandfather would tell us.) They got married on a Tuesday in June 1919, towards the end of the Spanish Flu pandemic. They built a house in 1927 in the new Toledo neighborhood of Westmoreland. They had four creative daughters – one who became the inspiration for my website, artistsoftoledo.com, my mother – Audrey Pinkerton Gentieu (1922–2009).
Sherwood Jr. ran the family business for many years, becoming president in 1940, and retiring in 1959. He developed new chewing tobacco flavors. He put the first woman on the board of directors and instituted an employee retirement plan. After Sherwood retired, the company moved to new facilities in Owensboro, Kentucky. John W.’s greatest legacy to his family, his chewing tobacco company, managed to sustain three generations of the Pinkertons, all because monopolies were busted in 1911.
Sherwood Jr. had a blessed life, seemingly free of the business problems his grandfather faced. Besides personally enjoying the chewing tobacco he cooked up and brought to market, Sherwood Jr. and his family embraced the finer side of life, such as photography and roses. John W. bequeathed to my mother and my grandparents a life of grace and happiness. In turn, my Pinkerton grandparents were, to me, a major source of security and affection, and somehow I inherited the photo gene.
Sherwood Pinkerton’s Peace blooms, a few of many different strains of roses that he cultivated and photographed.
John W. would say to his grandson, Sherwood Jr., that retirement isn’t good for some people, if you lack activities you will shrivel up.
Sherwood proved to be excellent at retirement, as he cultivated roses for 17 years after he retired, and for at least 31 years before. Sherwood was Toledo’s first Rosarian. He gave up his rose garden in 1976, when, in their eighties, he and Helen decided they had to downsize and move into an apartment. Their health declined after that. Helen died on November 22, 1978, and Sherwood, who could barely live without her, died on New Year’s Day, 1980.
The Pinkertons lived in an elegant Georgian Revival house at 1978 Richmond Road. They created four beautiful gardens in their artfully landscaped bi-level yard, including a formal rose garden, an informal rose garden, a shade garden, a goldfish pond, a fountain, and a greenhouse. They had a Florida Room in the house. Their house was filled with never-ending curiosities and memorabilia from their long lives, stuck in the rafters, in the attic, in every corner, nook and cranny. It was a treasure hunt for their 13 grandchildren to explore.
Sherwood and Helen Pinkerton in their greenhouse, The Blade, April 8, 1973I made this photocomposition of Helen and Sherwood Pinkerton and their house. It was featured on the cover of Our Grandmothers, an anthology of photos and essays by photographer-granddaughters compiled by Linda Sunshine, published by Stewart, Tabori & Chang in 1997.
The Pinkertons held an estate sale in 1976 and moved out of the house.
Grandfather contemplating his mortality, with Hebe and her eternal youth displaced from her pedestal and destined elsewhere, October 1976.
In their living room was a neoclassical marble statue of Hebe, the goddess of beauty and youth, and wife of Hercules. Hebe is the one, in case you are interested, who brought the nectar (the drink of eternal youth and immortality) to the feasts.
The statue came from Italy, a family heirloom passed on to Sherwood by his Great Aunt Julia who picked out the statue with her U.S. Ambassador husband while on an overseas trip. Julia died and bequeathed it to Sherwood in 1911, the same year of the federal trust-busting that would benefit the Pinkerton family for the rest of their lives and on to the new generations. Next to the fireplace in their living room, Hebe appeared nonchalantly and purely incidentally in family photographs over the fifty years they occupied the house.
Then one day Hebe was picked up by movers and shipped to their daughter Julia, in Portland, Oregon. I captured that moment, one of my first black and white photographs, because the moment felt like a dichotomy, my grandfather letting her go.
My father flying me like an airplane, Hebe floating along side.
Fun facts about my grandfather, Sherwood Mortley Pinkerton, Jr.
