My grandmother, Jane Francis DeChantal Cushing Feil, was born on Sept 30, 1871 in Titusville, Pa, predating the birth of my daughter Elizabeth by almost exactly one hundred years. Jane's father, Joseph Russell Cushing had been sent there as a clerk shortly after joining the Pennsylvania Railroad. Oil had first been discovered in the U. S. at Titusville in 1859, so the family must have experienced some of the boom town frenzy. They lived in other cities in Northwest Pennsylvania, eventually returning to the family home in Philadelphia.
Joseph Cushing was born on Dec 28, 1840, making him nineteen at the start of the Civil War. His obituary cites service in the War and his disappears from the Philadelphia City Directory (like a phonebook without phone numbers) for the years 1862 through 1865. Family lore seems incorrectly to indicate that he paid someone to replace him in the draft, a custom of the period. Joseph was active in Democratic Party politics, a real challenge in Philadelphia, which was solidly under control of a Republican political machine. He retired around 1904 as Assistant Freight Cashier after a long career with the Railroad.
The Joseph Cushing family resided for many years at 847 N. Twenty-fourth Street in Philadelphia. Their home was a small, two-story brick row house - still very much in use - on a narrow pleasant street near Girard College. It is within walking distance of center city Philadelphia and even closer to the Philadelphia Art museum.
Joseph's father, William Freeman Cushing, was born in 1817 ????. He married Jane Francis DeChantal DeWitt of Atlanta, GA. If family history is to be believed, William was a very interesting fellow. He is said to have gone to sea as a young man. In the era of sail, a merchant ship would be away from its home port for years at a time. Word came to the family that William's ship had been lost at sea and that he had perished. Three years later, the missing sailor walked in the front door while his family was seated at dinner. A surviver of the wreck, he had been rescued by a whaler and been forced to sell his birthright (the rights to his inheritance) in order to raise funds for the trip home. The year was 1845, since Joseph was four when his father returned. This story is entirely plausible. William's name appears in the Philadelphia City directory of 1841, indicating his profession as grocer. He doesn't appear again until 1846, this time as a stevedore. His stepfather, who died in 1846, is listed during these years as proprietor of an illuminating oil factory, a business intimately related to the whaling trade, since petroleum had not yet been discovered. Evidently William did not inherit the business. He later opened a ship's chandlery in Philadelphia, becoming well known in maritime circles, and also worked for the J. H. Stetson, Jr. hat company, after selling (or losing) the business. We have elaborately framed glass painted photographs of him and his wife, Jane, made shortly before his death, of Bright's Disease, in 1872.
William's father, Augustus Cushing, was born at South Berwick, Maine on May 22, 1794. He was a merchant in Philadelphia, where he married Sarah Freeman, who had been born in London. They wed in the Baptist Temple. In 1819, at age 25, Augustus was appointed U. S. Consul to the Isle of St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. We have a letter written to him by his sister Mary, dated June 11, 1819, lamenting the unexpected death of her husband, James. The letter is beautifully written and touching, with the formal, sentimental tone and long sentences common to that era. Mary had been deeply shocked by her husband's sudden demise and she took consolation from an emotional religious faith. She also thanked Augustus for the help and support Sarah was providing her. The story is all the more shocking when one realizes that Augustus himself succumbed to Yellow Fever the following December. Then it must have been Mary's turn to console. Sarah gave birth to a daughter, Sarah Augusta, six months later.
The Cushing family has been around North America for quite a long while, the first to arrive being Matthew, in 1638, aboard the ?????. Matthew Cushing had many descendants, some of whom played significant roles in the history of New England and the early United States. Several of his progeny served as judges in the New England colonies long before the American Revolution.
Augustus Cushing's Great Uncle was William Cushing. He had been a judge for many years in the Massachusetts Colony and was appointed by President George Washington to the first Supreme Court of the United States. William Cushing administered the oath of office at Washington's second inaugural and Washington subsequently appointed him Chief Justice after John Jay's death. William declined the honor, citing advanced age and infirmity, and the appointment went instead to John Marshall. (Now there's an interesting turn of fate for all you constitutional scholars!) William remained on the Court until a year before his death in 1810, serving almost twenty years in all.
Jane Cushing's mother was Anna Elizabeth Henkels Cushing. Her parents were George Jacob Henkels and Elizabeth Regina Snyder. Elizabeth and George had thirteen children, of whom Anna was the first girl. We have a small picture of Elizabeth Regina taken in about 1855. She wears a Civil War era hoop dress, and a gold crucifix that has survived the intervening generations.
George Henkels had emigrated from Germany and become one of the leading furniture manufacturers in Philadelphia during the mid-Nineteenth Century. He had a factory at Thirteenth and Chestnut Streets, eventually the site of Wanamaker's Department Store. His work is sought after today by Victorian furniture collectors, many of his pieces being found in museums. A few can be seen in the Asa Packer Mansion in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania (formerly Mauch Chunk). (Packer was an early railroad magnate, the founder of the Lehigh Valley Railroad and the benefactor of Lehigh University.) Anna Henkels was a favorite of her father, who gave her many pieces of furniture as tokens of affection. We have a chair of hers in our living room.
The Henkels Family were Roman Catholic. Anna Henkels and Joseph Cushing were married in St. Joseph's Church at 506 Pine St. in Philadelphia on Nov. 2, 1865, shortly after he was released from military service. At some point he or his parents had converted to Catholicism, as all are buried in the New Cathedral Cemetary in Philadelphia. Joseph worked as a clerk and salesman in his Father-in-law's furniture factory until departing for the Railroad in 1871. During this period, the family resided at 334 Green St in Philadelphia. Anna and Joseph had four children, Elizabeth Regina, William Freeman and George Jacob (?) as well as my grandmother, Jane.
Jane Cushing grew up in Philadelphia in the latter years of the nineteenth Century. She saw the United States Centennial Exposition in Fairmount Park when she was five years old and recalled it to me when I was a child. She vacationed at Mauch Chunk in the Pennsylvania Pocono Mountains and rode the eighteen mile gravity railway which had been converted from a coal delivery system to a tourist attraction for the budding middle class. She also vacationed at the Jersey Shore and travelled at some point in her life to Niagara Falls, Boston, and perhaps St. Augustine, Florida. Jane attended the Philadelphia Normal School, a teachers college in Philadelphia, graduating in June, 1891. She became a school teacher and taught at Charles S. Close school, at Seventh and Dickenson Streets in Philadelphia. The school was in a Jewish neighborhood, most probably populated by recent immigrants from Eastern Europe. She taught sixth grade boys who were rowdy, then as now, but she learned to gain their respect and cooperation. She liked them and said they liked her too. She loved all children and was proud of her skill as a teacher.
In 1891, Jane became engaged to William Anthony Feil, of Bayonne, New Jersey. William, my grandfather, was born on November 15, 1871, the same year as his future wife. His father, Wilhelm Eugen August Feil, had been born at Schloss (Castle) Liechtenstein near Stuttgart, Germany on January 17, 1847, the son of Josef M. Feil, Schlossverwalter (administrator) of the castle. Joseph's father, ???? Feil, had been drafted into Napoleon's army and was killed in action during the Little Corporal's infamous march on Moscow. (This was a true disaster. Of some 400,000 men in the French Army, fewer than ten percent survived the ordeal).
Wilhelm changed his name to William after emigrating to the United States. He was a businessman on Staten Island, New York and married Catharine Cecilia Snyder in Philadelphia in 18?? . He owned a company which imported from Germany the raw materials for brewing beer and shipped back coal for industrial use. He had offices in the ???? brewery on the Island as well as in the Battery on Manhatten. Wilhelm travelled to Germay each year to choose the malt and hops he would sell in the coming seasons. Travelling on the sailing ships and early steamers of the era must have been a considerable ordeal. The family owned a large house in Castleton, on a hill at the North end of the Island. The house had a widow's walk on the roof, from which one could see all the way to Sandy Hook in New Jersey and watch for incoming ships.
Wilhelm's daughter Katharine (my mother's Aunt Kitty) said that her father was a tough customer. Each day when he came home from work, the kids had to line up at the door, one taking his gloves, one his hat, one his coat, etc. He was also a strong competitor, racing his carriage, driven by a pair of fast horses, from home to the foot of the hill at the St. Georges ferry. He hated to lose and once had his chauffer sell the pair when they were bested in the daily race.
As was the custom, the coal business also dealt in natural ice, the principle means of refrigeration at the time. The ice was brought in by ship for resale to companies and to individuals for use in ice boxes. On one occasion, it is told, a large shipload of ice arrived at New York Harbor in the midst of a heat wave. The frosty cargo melted and William's business was ruined. In another account, the ice arrived in winter and the harbor froze, trapping the ship and preventing it from being unloaded (possibly true, since the late 1880s were a time of unusually cold winters). In a third account Wilhelm lost the business because he was cheated by a partner. In any case, he died shortly thereafter, in 1890, of Tuberculosis. Jane Cushing, nineteen at the time, was Wilhelm's first cousin once removed, as well as his son's fiancee. She acted as his nurse and is said to have been the only one who could manage to keep his spirits up, She was a beautiful and caring young woman, who might well have seemed like Florence Nightingale to him. When Wilhelm died, he left Catharine and four children, William, Anthony, Charles and Katherine. Two other daughters did not survive childhood, one dying of illness and the other perishing at eighteen months when her nanny lost hold of her baby carriage at the top of a hill. Of the surviving children, only William was an adult when Wilhelm died. After Wilhelm's death, the family was forced to leave their home on Staten Island and move to Jersey City, a wrenching step downward in social status.
Wilhelm's brothers also emigrated from Germany. Although we do not know the dates, this must have occurred during the 1860s and 1870s when Otto Bismark was consolidating the German principalities into a nation. He used war as one of his means, provoking three during these decades, one against Denmark in 1864, another against Austria in 1866 and, of course, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. The Feil brothers are said to have left Germany both for opportunity on foreign shores and to avoid Bismark's wars. This is not hard to believe. Aunt Kitty eventually married Emil Gotthardt, whose father, ????, had also emigrated to the U. S., settling in Bayonne, New Jersey. He had served with the Prussians both in Hungary and in France and kept a detailed journal of life in Bismark's Army. The report evokes a nightmare of discomfort, rotten food and brutal "leadership".
Wilhelm's brothers Friedrich and Otto settled in the United States, Otto becoming a very successful Brewer in Atlanta, Georgia and Friedrich in Philadelphia (????). Julius settled successfully in Australia. Many of his decendents reside there and in New Zealand.
At age nineteen, William Feil faced the need to support his widowed mother and younger siblings. He, too, was a businessman. Evidently he developed an expertise in financial management. He won the confidence of his employers and in the later years of his career became Chief Financial Officer at a number of firms which were owned by successful entrepreneurs. Because of William's family responsibilities, he and Jane, who had become engaged shortly before his father's death, were forced to postpone marriage. Their engagement lasted seventeen years. On one occasion, William rode his horse from Bayonne to Philadelphia to visit his fiancee. He was very handsome, somewhat resembling Woodrow Wilson. His pictures show a tall man, with silvery hair in later years and a thin, rectangular face, fine features and an open, friendly visage.
Jane and William were second cousins. Like his mother, William's maternal grandmother was named Catharine Cecilia Snyder. She was the sister of Jane's grandmother Elizabeth Regina Snyder Henkels. The Snyder family was also well established in the U. S., a forbear, ????, having been a general in the War of 1812. One of Jane's Snyder uncles was a professor at the University of Pennaylvania. The couple finally married at St. Francis Xavier Church in Philadelphia on April 18, 1907 - presumably after William was well established in his career. I have a friendship ring he gave to Jane in 1903. Because we shared the same initials, which were engraved on the ring, she gave it to me when I was born.
My Uncle Charlie (Charles Jackson Feil) was born in 1908, my Aunt Nancy (Anna Elizabeth Feil) in 1911 and my mother, Kate (Catharine Snyder Feil) in 1917. Jane and William were both forty-five when Kate was born. William loved his children. He was proud to be a father again when Mom came along, especially since strangers assumed he was her grandfather. Throughout these years, William worked as Chief Financial Officer at F. W. Dodge Co., a publisher of reports providing construction project bidding information to builders and contractors. The family purchased a small wood frame home, at 24 Lawrence Avenue, on a long, steep hill in West Orange, New Jersey. West Orange was a middle class commuter town. The neighborhood, or at least my grandparents' circle of friends, was ethnic German. The names on Grandma Feil's snapshots are distinctly German and her close friends, the Roys, had changed their name from Teitenberg during the First World War, in order to avoid anti-German prejudice.
Every day except Sunday, William took the train to Jersey City and caught the ferry to Manhattan (the ornate old Jersey City Station is still in use as the juncture for commute trains and the PATH train under the Hudson to Manhattan) . Mom recalled accompanying her father to work, lunch, and the splendor of New York City on a Saturday at Christmastime when she was five or six years old.
William contracted Smallpox at birth, which left him with a weak heart and generally poor health. He took an ocean liner voyage to England during the First World War, both on business and, we are told, in an attempt to relax and regain his vigor - although this is a bit hard to believe since the World War was raging and the Germans had commenced submarine warfare. William survived the war, but succumbed to pneumonia on December 28, 1924. My grandfather's death was a terrible loss, especially to my mother, who was only seven years old. Because of a legal technicality in her husband's will, Jane initially received only a third of her inheritance. Nonetheless, the family survived, in large part because of Jane's courage, resourcefulness and determination.
Jane's father, Joseph Cushing, died earlier in the same year. In order to be closer to her relatives, Jane moved the family from West Orange and bought a house in Brookline, Pennsylvania, on the Philadelphia main line. Her older brother William Cushing lived in Philadelphia and had been a successful undertaker for many years.
This being the Roaring Twenties, Jane's friends advised her to buy the new home on a mortgage and invest her inheritance. She refused and purchased the home free and clear, a prescient move, as we shall see. Her sister, Elizabeth, who never married, had cared for their parents in their old age. When Joseph died, she moved in with Mom's family at Brookline. Lizzie was a talented, beautiful woman. She did water colors of exquisite quality, and was a pianist. Mom recounts being the youngest in a household of five, with two adults in their fifties and sixties - Aunt Lizzie had been born just after the end of the Civil War. The two women were an entire generation older than the parents of Mom's friends. They were fine women and every inch Victorians, sharing the genteel prejudices and prudery of that era, along with its finer qualities.
Jane supported the family on dividends from the preferred and common stock Grandpa had received as a corporate officer of F. W. Dodge. Friends had counseled her to convert her preferred stock, with lower, guaranteed dividends, to common stock which earned more, but with no guarantee. She declined. These investments sustained them through the the Twenties, until the worst years of the depression, when the common stock dividends disappeared. Jane sold her own handiwork to supplement their remaining income from the preferred stock and, with the help of relatives, held on until Charlie, Nancy, and Mom were old enough to begin work.
Charlie graduated from Stevens Institute High School in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1926. As a teenager, he worked for Thomas Edison in the famous inventor's Menlo Park, New Jersey lab. Charlie confirmed the curmudgenly Edison reputation, recalling tongue lashings when he crossed the old man's path. (Edison used to fire his workers periodically to assure that they would not be tempted to form a union). For a short while during the depression, Charlie worked selling Hoover vacuum cleaners, but eventually joined F. W. Dodge as a reporter. He married Peggy Baer in Oklahoma in 1935.
Nancy followed her mother's footsteps, preparing for a career in teaching. She attended West Chester State Teachers College and graduated in 1935, unfortunately into a market with no teaching jobs available. Instead, she got a job as a sales clerk at Wanamaker's Department Store in Philadelphia, becoming an assistant buyer in women's wear. In September, 1940, Nancy married Joe Garrity, my father's best friend from their childhood in South Philadelphia. In 1944, Joe and Nancy moved to El Paso, Texas, because Nancy had arthritis and would benefit from living in a dry, hot climate.
Mom graduated from Haverford High School in 1935 and taught piano for a while - she was an accomplished pianist. She attended secretarial school and got a job working as a stenographer in the purchasing department of a sugar refinery. The factory was located in a tough neighborhood along the Delaware River in Philadelphia. The distance, both physical and social, between Brookline and the sugar factory was great; but a job was a job and Mom stuck it out.
Mom did not want a career. She wanted to find a good man, get married, and raise a family. Luckily, a good man was near at hand. She met Pop at a party shortly before graduating from High School, but quickly lost touch with him. She attended fraternity parties at Lehigh University in Bethlehem and spent vacations at the North Jersey Shore with her cousins, Jack and Catharine Goddhart. Some years later, she and Pop met again by chance. Mom spotted Pop on the subway and arranged an "accidental" meeting. They became engaged in 1939 at Brookline, married on Feb. 8, 1941 and lived in a small apartment in King Manor. Pop worked at the nearby Bridgeport, Pennsylvania limestone quarry owned by Bethlehem Steel. Shortly after I was born in July of 1942, Pop was transferred to the main office in Bethlehem. Housing was short because of the war and we could only find an apartment in Allentown, at 431 North Eighth Street.
Charlie had drawn a low number when the draft was reintroduced in the late thirties. He was drafted, trained and released from service well before Pearl Harbor. After the attack, of course, he was reinducted. He trained as a medic and shipped out to France in Summer 1944, landing in Europe on D Day plus eighteen. Charlie followed Gen. George Patton across France and later Germany, serving there until after VE Day. After the war, he resumed his career with F. W. Dodge, which was eventually absorbed by McGraw-Hill. Because he was needed at Bethlehem Steel, Pop had a draft deferment which was successively renewed throughout the war.
Lizzie died shortly after the War and Grandma was no longer able to care for herself alone. She moved into the tiny one bedroom apartment with us in late 1947. The next Spring, we all moved to a house Mom and Pop purchased at 115 Sixth St. in Fullerton, just North of Allentown. I was almost six years old and my brother, Bill, was two and a half. My sister, Barbara was born in the summer of 1950. To say that our family life was busy would be a world class understatement, and Mom bore the brunt of the load, which had been steadily increasing on her since the beginning of the war. Jane died in the Spring of 1954 at age eighty-three, leaving Mom tired, but happily settled into the family life of the 1950s.
I have three fond memories of Mom I would like to share:
The first is the wonderful care and attention she gave me when I was sick with childhood illnesses; the second is of the times we worked together to keep the family going while Pop was on six week long assignments in South America with Bethlehem Steel; and the third is lunch together with her when I was attending Sacred Heart School in Seventh Grade and walked home every day at noon. This time was special because everyone else was at work or at school. We would listen to Fibber McGee and Mollie on the radio, talk through lunch and I would invariably be late returning to class.