Eleanor Silliman Belknap Humphrey

Eleanor Silliman Belknap Humphrey

Eleanor Silliman Belknap Humphrey
Born (1876-04-18)April 18, 1876
Louisville, Kentucky, United States
Died September 7, 1964(1964-09-07)
Coconut Grove, Florida
Resting place Cave Hill Cemetery, Louisville, Kentucky
Nationality American
Education Vassar
Occupation Artist, writer
Spouse(s) Lewis Craig Humphrey
Children Edward Cornelius Humphrey
Alice Humphrey Morgan
William Humphrey
Parent(s) William Richardson Belknap
Alice Trumbull Silliman

Eleanor Silliman Belknap Humphrey (1876–1964) was an artist, genealogist, writer, socialite, and philanthropist born in Louisville, Kentucky. She was the daughter of William Richardson Belknap, president of Louisville's Belknap Hardware and Manufacturing Company, and his first wife Alice Trumbull Silliman.[1][2]

Childhood in Louisville

When Eleanor Silliman Belknap was born on April 28, 1876, in Louisville, Kentucky, her father, William Richardson Belknap[3] was 27 and her mother, Alice Trumbull Silliman (daughter of Benjamin Silliman, Jr. and Susan Huldah Forbes), was 29. Eleanor lived at Lincliff, a home built in the early 1910s by her father.[4] The spacious house and gardens are now on the National Register of Historic Places. She was the older sister of William Burke Belknap, the owner of Land O'Goshen Farms in Goshen, Kentucky, and Alice Silliman Belknap Hawkes, who published the first limited-edition account of the travels around the world of Joel Root. Younger than Eleanor and Alice was their sister Mary Belknap Gray, who became a pioneer in the formation of nationwide public libraries and bookmobile systems in the United States. Youngest sibling of all was Christine Belknap,[5] who as a young woman married Charles Bonnycastle Robinson, Jr. in a private ceremony at Lincliff.[6] Along with her newborn daughter (also named Christine), Christine died from hemorrhaging during a caesarian childbirth. Christine was survived by her husband and first young daughter.

Lincliff gates

Years at Vassar College

Both Eleanor and her sister Alice attended Vassar College, then a women's college. Eleanor wrote short stories and anecdotes for the early version of The Miscellany News. She planned skits for campus performances and wrote essays, plays, and poems. She was selected salutatorian of her Vassar class. Although a mathematics major at Vassar, she wrote her salutatory address about modern art. She participated in intramural sports and is mentioned in a book about the evolution of women's sports in American colleges. The author Louise Tricard wrote in 1996 about American women's track and field from 1895 through 1980, using as a resource the Vassar College Library archives of scrapbooks kept by former Vassar students. Eleanor Belknap Humphrey's scrapbook is cited as one of the references in the bibliography (page 666 of 746 pages) of Tricard's book.[7]

Louisville debutante and socialite

The social pages of the Louisville Courier-Journal were filled frequently with news of the debutante balls, fashions, club events, and charitable fund-raising endeavors of the Belknap family. Eleanor planned theme parties such as Halloween parties which were described in detail in the press. For dinners and luncheons, the food, decorations, and fashions of prominent citizens of Louisville and their out-of-town guests, including a young Basil Davenport, who gathered at Lincliff[8] and at the Humphrey home (later known as the Humphrey-McMeekin House) were enthusiastically reported.

Humphrey-McMeekin House

Travels with Alice

In her European travels with her sister Alice, she kept a small cloth-bound book of watercolor paper pages on which to paint a visual journal of places they visited. The pages eventually with age fell from the book and were framed and exhibited posthumously in a three-person exhibition "It's All Relative" at the Women's Resource Center Gallery of the University of Richmond and in "Artists Collect, Too" at Artspace Gallery in Richmond, Virginia. Other sketchbook pages of her en plein air watercolor views of Paris, Rome, and Venice were distributed to her descendants after her death.

It may have been on one of her trips to Paris that she acquired a rare vase created and signed by Claude Renoir ainé (senior), nicknamed 'Coco', (1901–69), the ceramic artist who was the son (and when he was a child the frequent model) of Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Claude "Coco" Renoir was the only non-bastard son of Pierre-Auguste Renoir and his wife Aline Victorine Charigot, who is depicted in Renoir's painting, The Luncheon of the Boating Party. Claude Renoir's siblings, the actor Pierre Renoir (1885–1952) and filmmaker Jean Renoir (1894–1979), had a mother not wed by Pierre-Auguste. Pierre Auguste Renoir was also the grandfather of the filmmaker Claude Renoir (1913–1993), who was the son of Pierre and namesake of the ceramist Claude "Coco" Renoir ainé, painter of the vase in the collection of Eleanor Belknap Humphrey.

Artist and patron of the arts

Eleanor Belknap Humphrey was a donor of art to the Speed Museum and gave archives and artifacts to the Filson Club. She and her sister Alice were among the private sponsors of a large two-volume history of American architecture which was a Works Projects Administration (WPA) project.

Eleanor Humphrey retrieved the Matthew Jouett portrait of her ancestor Catherine Cornelia Prather (first wife of Rev. Edward Porter Humphrey, one of the founders of Cave Hill Cemetery) from the Speed Museum collection. This portrait, known in the Belknap family as "The Little Grandmother" because it shows Catherine Cornelia Prather as a little girl, is now owned by her grandson Thomas M. Humphrey and was loaned in the 1970s to an exhibition of Kentucky artists at Transylvania University. A photograph of the "The Little Grandmother" contracted by the Humphrey collection was requested by art historian William Barrow Floyd for his 1980 book published by the Transylvania Printing Company in Lexington, Kentucky, Matthew Harris Jouett: Portraitist of the Ante-Bellum South. The Jouett portrait is documented in the listing of the Smithsonian Institution's American Portraits and was also listed in a book of Kentucky history listing portraits by Matthew Jouett.

Portrait of young Catherine Cornelia Prather by Matthew Jouett in an old book with partial list of other portraits by Jouett.
Edward Cornelius Humphrey and his sister Alice as children in Louisville, Kentucky

Eleanor requested a portrait of her young son Edward Cornelius Humphrey and his little sister Alice from the Standiford Studio in Louisville, Kentucky. This portrait, now in a private Humphrey collection, is a rare example of an antique photography process called autochrome which used a reflected mirror view inside a viewer called a diascope. The Autochrome Lumière process is described in Wikipedia's History of photography and Lumiere Brothers. The photographer of the autochrome of the Humphrey children was a young woman, Ethel Standiford-Mehlingan, an experimental photographer and artist who later moved her Louisville enterprise Standiford Studios to Cleveland, Ohio.

Philanthropy

Along with her siblings Eleanor Belknap donated inherited land to the University of Louisville. The sale of the land financed the purchase of the administration building on UofL's Belknap Campus, given in memory of their father, William Richardson Belknap.[9]

Marriage and children

Eleanor was the wife and widow of Louisville Herald Post editor Lewis Craig Humphrey (1875–1927), and her father-in-law was Judge Edward William Cornelius Humphrey (1844–1917). She married Lewis Craig Humphrey on December 19, 1904, the week before Christmas in her parent's home Lincliff, in Jefferson County, Kentucky, when she was 28 years old.[10]

She and her husband together commissioned in 1914 a colonial revival architectural design by Gray and Wischmeyer for their home in The Highlands (Louisville area). The house, known as the Humphrey-McMeekin House, was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983.[11]

Her husband Lewis Craig Humphrey died on February 3, 1927, in Louisville, Kentucky, at the age of 51. They had been married 22 years.[12] The couple had two sons and one daughter, Dr. Edward Cornelius Humphrey, William Humphrey, and Alice Humphrey Morgan.

WWII years in Coconut Grove, Florida

Eleanor developed crippling rheumatoid arthritis, perhaps the reason for her move to Florida. She and her sister Alice continued their interest in the arts and friendship with other artists, and Eleanor in the 1950s invited Paul St. Gaudens, the master potter and ceramic artist nephew of sculptor Augustus St. Gaudens, who was the son of Augustus's brother, Louis St. Gaudens, also a sculptor, to use the studio and pool adjacent to her home in Coconut Grove (a neighborhood of Miami), where he experimented with glazes and created ceramic jewelry.

While her son Captain (later Major) Edward Cornelius Humphrey, a medical doctor, was serving in the French theatre of the U.S.Army during World War II, the Humphrey clan settled in the area of Coconut Grove. Ruth MacGillivray Humphrey, Edward's wife, and their children lived nearby, also in Coconut Grove. Eleanor's other son William Humphrey and his wife Blanche also lived there. Her sister Alice Hawkes and her family were there, including Jon Lawrance Hawkes, author of an account of Joel Root's journey around the world, and his wife Winnie.

During these years Eleanor's family often joined her sister Alice and her family for Long Island vacations at the Hawkes beach house at Port Washington and the second Humphrey house in Lawrence, New York.

Some of Eleanor Humphrey's correspondence with her son during his service with the U.S. Army Medical Corps in France during World War II has been preserved and will be donated to archives in Kentucky. One of these letters to him contains a sketch by her with instructions on how to make a warm sleeping bag from an Army blanket.

Eleanor Belknap Humphrey died in Coconut Grove before her father William Richardson Belknap's historic Louisville Belknap Hardware and Manufacturing Company was disestablished in 1986.

Genealogical studies and ancestry

In her genealogical research, Eleanor Belknap traced the Belknap line back to her 6th-great-grandfather Abraham Belknap.[13] He appears on her fan-format family tree and was born March 1589 or 1590. He was married to Mary Stallion.[14] Abraham Belknap emigrated from England and settled in Lynn, Massachusetts in 1637.[15][16]

Eleanor Belknap Humphrey was the wife of newspaper editor Lewis Craig Humphrey, and she was the great-great-great granddaughter of Benjamin Silliman, the founder of the school of science at Yale known as the Yale Scientific School and eventually renamed the Sheffield Scientific School. The school of science at Yale retained the name Sheffield from 1847 to 1956. She was the great-great granddaughter of Benjamin Silliman, Jr., also a Yale professor and scientist. In addition to the Sillimans and Belknaps in her family tree, she traced her ancestry directly back to the Mayflower passengers John Alden and Priscilla Mullins and their daughter Elizabeth Pabodie, of whom it is said that she was the first white woman born in America.

Mayflower Society Headquarters (Mayflower House Museum) in Plymouth, Massachusetts in an early 20th-century postcard

The Belknap family tree researched and drawn by Eleanor Belknap Humphrey is now archived in the collections of the The Library of Virginia. The "Eleanor Belknap Humphrey Pedigree Chart" was presented to the Library of Virginia archives on October 2015 and is cataloged there for the use of other genealogists.[17][18][19]

Death and burial

She died on June 24, 1964 in Coconut Grove at the age of 88 and was buried in the Humphrey family plot in Louisville's Cave Hill Cemetery, the cemetery for which her husband Lewis's grandfather Reverend Doctor Edward Porter Humphrey was one of the founders and where he gave the dedicatory address on July 25, 1848.

Her will was disputed in court by three adopted grandchildren. Jefferson County, Kentucky Circuit Court was asked to determine whether the adopted children of her son William would share in the estate. [20]

References

  1. ↑ Kerr, Charles (1922). History of Kentucky (Volume 1 ed.). Chicago and New York: The American Historical Society.
  2. ↑ Kerr, Charles. "History of Kentucky". Archive of History of Kentucky. Retrieved December 9, 2015.
  3. ↑ http://www.filsonhistorical.org/archive/guide1.html
  4. ↑ "Lincliff". OpenBuildings.
  5. ↑ https://www.newspapers.com/clip/4776939/stylish_old_louisville/
  6. ↑ "Marriage of Christine Belknap" (Sunday). Cincinnati, Ohio: The Cincinnati Enquirer. June 21, 1914. p. 57.
  7. ↑ Tricard, Louise Mead (1996). American women's track and field. Jefferson, NC [u.a.]: McFarland. ISBN 0786402199.
  8. ↑ "Social Notes" (March 1, 1914). Louisville, Kentucky: Louisville Courier-Journal. March 1, 1914. p. 20. Retrieved February 13, 2016. Mrs. William Davenport and children, Masters Basil Davenport and John Davenport, are the guests of Mrs. William R. Belknap at "Lincliff," until Mrs. Belknap leaves for the south.
  9. ↑ Wiser, Steve (May 11, 2007). "The Belknap Twins:A Faded Louisville Legacy". pp. 1, 10. Retrieved January 2, 2016.
  10. ↑ "The Week Before Christmas Marked by Several Ceremonials". Louisville, Kentucky: The Louisville Courier-Journal. December 18, 1904. p. 20. Retrieved January 9, 2016. The first wedding of the present week will take place to-morrow evening at 7:30 o'clock. . . . It will be a Christmas wedding and the house will be decorated with holly and mistletoe.
  11. ↑ Mohney, Gregory A. Luhan, Dennis Domer, David (2004). The Louisville guide ([Online-Ausg.] ed.). New York: Princeton Architectural Press. p. 302. ISBN 1-56898-451-0.
  12. ↑ "Prominent Journalist of Louisville is Dead." Kingsport Times (Kingsport, Tennessee), February 3, 1927, p. 7.
  13. ↑ http://www.nssdp.com/membership/ancestors-of-the-society/
  14. ↑ Members, National Society of the Sons and Daughters of the Pilgrims. "Abraham Belknap". National Society Sons and Daughters of the Pilgrims. NSSDF. Retrieved December 18, 2015.
  15. ↑ Headley, Russel. "The Belknap Family:Orange County, New York Biographies". The Families of Orange County. Retrieved December 19, 2015.
  16. ↑ Headley, editor, Russel (1908). The History of Orange County. Middletown, New York: Van Deusen.
  17. ↑ Humphrey, Eleanor Belknap. "Pedigree of Eleanor Belknap". Library of Virginia. Retrieved December 17, 2015.
  18. ↑ http://lva1.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/F/?func=find-c&ccl_term=SYS=001710584
  19. ↑ Pedigree Accession number 51659.Catalog, Online. "Pedigree of Eleanor Belknap". Library of Virginia. Retrieved December 2, 2015.
  20. ↑ Suit Asks Humphrey Will Ruling, The Courier-Journal, Louisville, Kentucky. April 1, 1965, p. 7.

Further reading

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