Lost & Found

Martha Johnson Patterson, devoted daughter
of President Andrew Johnson

Around 1900, President Andrew Johnson’s daughter entrusted a trunk full of her father’s papers to her dear friend, a spiritualist and writer who lived in Brooklyn.

The friend, Laura Holloway Langford, said that she planned to write a biography of the late president. Author of Ladies of the White House (1870), the first anthology of stories about American First Ladies, Langford had become close to the beleaguered Johnson family soon after Lincoln’s assassination. She may even have moved into the White House.

The president’s daughter, Martha Johnson Patterson, died in 1901. By that time, Langford claimed, she had expressed the trunk back to the Johnson family in Greeneville, Tennessee. But Martha’s son insisted most of the papers never were returned.

His claim would seem to have validity. In 1903, Laura Langford wrote to John Hay, who had served as Lincoln’s private secretary, and asked him to verify Lincoln’s handwriting on several letters which were in her possession. She told Hay that the letters “were given to me by the daughter of President Johnson.” Evidently Hay authenticated Lincoln’s signature. 

Here it's necessary to share more information about Laura Langford – a woman of many passions including suffrage, temperance, phrenology, Theosophy, Wagner, vegetarianism, industrial arts, Shakerism, and the cooperative movement. Due to hefty sales of her First Ladies book, regular work as a writer for The Brooklyn Eagle, and marriage to Col. Edward C. Langford (an investor in the Brighton Beach Company), she had not worried about money for a long time.

Telegram from Laura Holloway to Martha Patterson
following the 1875 death of President Andrew Johnson
(Library of Congress image)

But Col. Langford went bankrupt in the 1890s and died in 1902, leaving Laura to struggle financially for the rest of her life. Around this time, Laura began negotiating to purchase a farm in Canaan, N.Y., which belonged to a branch of the Shaker community of New Lebanon, N.Y. Subsequently she moved from Brooklyn to this farm with some scheme in mind.

Laura Carter Holloway Langford, close friend
of the Johnson family and possibly a thief

And in 1907, she sold the valuable papers which were in the trunk that she never sent back to Greeneville, including five letters from Abraham Lincoln to Andrew Johnson, to a New York collector named George S. Hellman.

In the midst of the Panic of 1907, Hellman offered the five letters to J.P. Morgan, whom he regularly advised on the purchase of art and manuscripts. “The letters were indeed superb,” Hellman recounted in a memoir. “When Morgan heard the price – less than four figures for the entire collection – he said: ‘Yes, that’s very reasonable.’”

The rest of the papers that Laura sold to Hellman remained in the collector’s possession. In the winter of 1913, Hellman wrote to Herbert Putnam, the Librarian of Congress, asking if the library would like to acquire some of them. Putnam declined for lack of funds.

After the end of World War I, Hellman put the 33 items up at auction. The description in the catalogue read:

This collection, given by Andrew Johnson’s daughter, Martha Patterson, to her life-long and most intimate friend, Mrs. L.C. Langford . . . is in many ways the most remarkable collection ever offered for public sale relating to a President of the United States.

Henry E. Huntington, California railroad magnate and landowner, purchased the lot. The papers now reside in the Huntington Library in Los Angeles.

Laura Holloway Langford lived until 1930, dying with few possessions at her farm in Canaan.

The Ladies of the White House
2nd edition, 1881

*There is a wonderful book about Laura Holloway Langford and spiritualism, which offers much more biographical detail than I have given here: Yearning for the New Age: Laura Holloway-Langford and Late Victorian Spirituality by Diane Sasson (2012). 

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/01/lost-found.html?m=1

Seth Kinman & the Bear Chairs

Seth Kinman testing the bear chair

When my family visited Washington, D.C. during the 1960s, we brought back a book called The Story of the White House. I pored over it so often that some of the pictures and captions remain stuck in my head. One is an etching of Theodore Roosevelt toasting the Prince of Prussia. Another is a photograph of sheep grazing on the lawn of the mansion during World War I.  

But not a bear chair in sight.

The story goes like something like this. During the decades before the Civil War, far up in northern California near the Oregon border, amidst mountains, glades, and marshland, the trappers of Humboldt County were famous for their bloodthirsty pursuit of wild animals and Indians. Mad River, Wild Cat Creek, the Siskiyou country; turn left at the second gulch you come to. Cold fog rolled in from the bay while sheep ran among redwoods and oaks. And cozy cabins were inhabited by tough men who would tell you to “git back to San Francisco.”  

Perhaps the most famous of these mountain men was Seth Kinman, born in Pennsylvania in 1815, who wended his way west to find gold and bring grizzly bears to their knees. (That story may be apocryphal.) A consummate hunter who supplied meat to the officers at Fort Humboldt, he led unspeakably brutal Indian massacres.

When James Buchanan was elected president in 1856, an elated Kinman celebrated his fellow Pennsylvanian’s fortune. He decided to make a gift for Buchanan, who is one of the lowest ranked presidents in American history. Kinman assembled elk horns and connected them with iron clamps to create a chair, then traveled by boat to New York and on to Washington to present it to the president.  

The six-foot trapper, who dressed in buckskin and carried a rifle and Bowie knife, enjoyed the trip so much that he decided to make chairs for President Lincoln and President Andrew Johnson. He took a break during the Grant administration but made another elk horn chair for President Hayes.

Kinman outdid himself with a grizzly bear chair for Andrew Johnson, also ranked as one of our worst presidents. The chair’s special feature was a cord that could be pulled so that the bear’s head would surge out from under the seat with its teeth bared.

All of the chairs are lost to history except the last, which is on display in the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center in Fremont, Ohio. Although one is tempted to visit Fremont to see the elk horn chair, a trip to the Johnson Homestead in Greeneville, Tennessee might be a better choice. I know because I have been there not once but twice.

Andrew Johnson began his career as a tailor. Our first visit focused on his original shop with all of its furnishings and examples of his work, now located inside a museum. Also, we had the opportunity to vote on whether to impeach Andrew Johnson.

During the second visit, a National Park Service ranger led us on an extended tour. She candidly told us about how alcoholism ran in the Johnson family and Mrs. Johnson’s lifelong deep depression. The one family member who held things together was the Johnsons’ daughter, Martha, who married a U.S. Senator. A natural protectress, Martha died too soon to go to war over some family papers, but she surely knew what became of the bear chair. As they say, the secret went to the grave.
 

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2015/12/bear-chair_5.html?m=1