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Big catch: J.H. Jordan, fishing in Maine (probably 1920s) |
It’s July of
1910 and Joshua Hawkins Jordan is about to close his shop on West Thirty-Third
Street and head to Maine.
J. H., as he
is known, can afford to take a break. He’s
a 52-year old dealer in old prints and engravings for whom the past few years
have been quite profitable. Early
American art is in great demand and so is J.H.’s expertise. His store is flourishing while he earns
generous fees for advising wealthy collectors.
Right now, though,
he’s counting the minutes until he will drop a line in the Androscoggin River
near Brunswick. The bass await him.
It’s not
clear which came first, J.H.’s passion for fishing or his marriage into one of
Maine’s famous seafaring families. By
1892, when he wed Isabella Wilhelmina Curtis – known as Belle – her legendary
father and grandfather had been gone for many years.
It did not
matter that J.H. had never met them. He knew
all about their spirit. You couldn’t be
a successful print dealer if you lacked an affinity with the land, sea, and skies
of America’s first century.
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Advertisement, New York Tribune, 1899 |
Maine had
been home to his wife’s family since the 1700s.
Belle was one of eight children born to an intrepid sea captain, John
Curtis, and his wife, Leticia. After
Captain Curtis’s death, Belle’s older brother William became the family
patriarch.
Girded for
the Gilded Age with a full beard and mustache, William headed to New York City to
attend Columbia Law School. He quickly
made partner at the law firm which organized the U.S. Steel Corporation in
1901.
After
William became the company’s first president, which was the miraculous way of
business in those fortunate years, he bought a Beaux-Arts mansion on Fifth
Avenue where he lived with his wife and five children.
But Maine
was ever in William’s heart, so he built a cottage in Camden overlooking
Penobscot Bay. This sprawling house with
a deep wraparound porch was called Portlaw – the name of his father’s ship
which in 1870 put in for repairs at Bermuda, where a typhoid epidemic claimed
the captain.
Charismatic
and humble, weighing in at 325 lbs., John Curtis could have boasted of many
feats, including the rescue of his entire crew from a burning ship called the Windsor Forest as it sailed from Liverpool
to Bombay in 1864.
John’s
father, Captain Christopher Curtis, also died a long way from home. In 1839 he succumbed to yellow fever in
Natchez, Mississippi, where he and a partner owned a line of packet ships that ran
between Maine and Mississippi. Christopher
Curtis is buried in a tiny cemetery ten miles east of Natchez.
The Curtis
children revered their sea captain forebears.
In 1904, William established Brunswick’s Curtis Memorial Library in
honor of their father. Perhaps a bit of
a hothead, William had told Andrew Carnegie to get lost when the philanthropist
offered to endow a library for the town one year earlier.
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Curtis summer home, "Portlaw," in Camden, Maine |
That took
some nerve considering that Carnegie turned down many requests but was never
rejected anywhere as he proceeded to build libraries all over the United
States.
Belle had
none of that sharpness. Six years
younger than her brother, she was surely the kind, thoughtful woman who appears
in a series of Ancestry.com photographs that spans five decades.
Like
William, Belle left Maine for New York City.
It had been while working as a nurse during her early 20s that she resolved
to become a doctor. Most likely she met
J.H. during the years she studied at the New York Women’s Medical College.
Born in Saint
Martin, Dutch West Indies around 1860, J.H. was the eldest son of a widowed
Irish-born minister who brought his family back to the U.S. after the Civil
War. J.H. found a niche in the swirling
city, ambitiously working his way up from clerk in a print shop to general
manager of prints at G.H. Richmond, a prominent book dealer.
He had large
dark eyes and a dimple in his chin which would soon be covered by a
goatee.
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Young man: J.H. Jordan |
Belle
graduated from medical school in 1892, but there is no public record of her
work as a physician.
Three
children came along while J.H. went out on his own to specialize in rare
engravings and etchings. He became well-known
among the millionaire likes of his brother-in-law, who competed for a dwindling
number of valuable prints.
Many had
made their money in real estate. Somehow
the same men who transformed old New York into a metropolis were captivated by pictures
of country lanes and quiet harbors.
J.H. worked
as a dealer and appraiser until his death in 1932. His most famous sale was a handwritten
account of Lincoln’s death by a surgeon who accompanied the president from
Ford’s Theater to the Petersen House and held his bleeding head until
dawn.
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Advertisement, The Literary Collector circa World War I |
By July of
1910, the twentieth century was showing its true colors.
Women
increasingly entered the professions. Trusts
controlled the banks, railroads, oil refining, and steel industry. Jim Crow proliferated. Great wealth fostered indispensable
philanthropy. Abstraction emerged in
art, literature, music, and dance.
Meanwhile, in
time suspended like an old print, Belle and J.H. and William and their families
passed their summers on the wild coast of Maine.
*Isabella Curtis Jordan died in 1938.
https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2020/07/conjuring-past-in-brunswick-maine.html
I find myself intrigued by Belle's missing years as a practicing physician, but I note the year 1892 being both her year of graduation and her marriage, so it seems inevitable that was the reason. But I imagine some subplot where she practiced unofficially in some way during her marriage, or conducted independent medical research.
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