Biography:Eleanor Silliman Belknap Humphrey
Eleanor Silliman Belknap Humphrey | |
|---|---|
 Eleanor Silliman Belknap Humphrey | |
| Born | Louisville, Kentucky, United States |
| Died | Coconut Grove, Florida |
| Resting place | Cave Hill Cemetery, Louisville, Kentucky |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | Vassar |
| Occupation | Artist, writer, genealogist |
| 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 American 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]
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 Mead 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.[5]
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 1822 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 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[6] and was also listed in a book of Kentucky history listing portraits by Matthew Jouett.
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 Ethel Standiford-Mehlingan, an experimental photographer and artist who later moved her Louisville enterprise Standiford Studios to Cleveland, Ohio.
Philanthropy
In 1916, two years after the death of her civic-minded father, the hardware president William Richardson Belknap, residents of the Belknap neighborhood in Louisville opened the William R. Belknap School on Sils Avenue in his honor. No longer used as a school, the architecturally important building is now on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places. The Belknap neighborhood association and its logo also derived from the name of this landmark school.
In hopes of building a new University of Louisville Campus, Eleanor Belknap, along with her younger brother William Burke Belknap, donated land inherited from their father to the University of Louisville, and, in 1917, land east of the William R. Belknap School was developed as the University Park subdivision, named with the expectation that it would adjoin a new University of Louisville campus. However, in 1920, taxpayers rejected underwriting the construction of the new campus, and the land which the Belknaps had donated was sold to William F. Randolph for ninety-five thousand dollars. Randolph then developed the Aberdeen and Tecomah sections of the Belknap neighborhood. When the new administration building on the University of Louisville's Belknap Campus was built, it was named in honor of the Belknap heirs' tribute to their father.[7] Today the university's main campus is called the Belknap Campus, and the central quad is located there.
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 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.[8]
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.[9]
Her husband Lewis Craig Humphrey died on February 3, 1927, in Louisville, Kentucky, at the age of 51. They had been married 22 years.[10] The couple had two sons, Dr. Edward Cornelius Humphrey and William Humphrey, and one daughter, Alice Humphrey Morgan.
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 Craig Humphrey'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.[11]
See also
- List of people from the Louisville metropolitan area
References
- ↑ Kerr, Charles (1922). History of Kentucky (Volume 1 ed.). Chicago and New York: The American Historical Society.
- ↑ Kerr, Charles. "History of Kentucky". https://archive.org/details/historyofkentuck01kerr. Retrieved December 9, 2015.
- ↑ http://www.filsonhistorical.org/archive/guide1.html
- ↑ "Lincliff". OpenBuildings. http://openbuildings.com/buildings/lincliff-profile-21274?_show_description=1.
- ↑ Tricard, Louise Mead (1996). American women's track and field. Jefferson, NC [u.a.]: McFarland. ISBN 0786402199.
- ↑ "SIRIS - Smithsonian Institution Research Information System". http://siris-artinventories.si.edu/ipac20/ipac.jsp?session=14632V915W2E3.1537&menu=search&aspect=Keyword&npp=50&ipp=20&spp=20&profile=ariall&ri=&source=%7E%21siartinventories&term=&index=.GW&aspect=Keyword&term=Matthew+Harris+Jouett&index=.AW&term=&index=.TW&term=Prather&index=.SW&term=painting&index=.FW&term=Humphrey&index=.OW&term=&index=.NW&x=14&y=11.
- ↑ Wiser, Steve (May 11, 2007). "The Belknap Twins:A Faded Louisville Legacy". pp. 1, 10.. http://nebula.wsimg.com/4e3c0f7431bced90d1d6a744cab98bab?AccessKeyId=E53C33281F9C77371587&disposition=0&alloworigin=1. Retrieved January 2, 2016.
- ↑ "The Week Before Christmas Marked by Several Ceremonials". Louisville, Kentucky: The Louisville Courier-Journal. December 18, 1904. p. 20. https://www.newspapers.com/clip/4001938/christmas_wedding_plans/. 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."
- ↑ 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.
- ↑ "Prominent Journalist of Louisville is Dead." Kingsport Times (Kingsport, Tennessee), February 3, 1927, p. 7.
- ↑ Suit Asks Humphrey Will Ruling, The Courier-Journal, Louisville, Kentucky. April 1, 1965, p. 7.
Further reading
- The Filson Historical Society. "Belknap Family Papers, 1856–1904". http://www.filsonhistorical.org/archive/guide1.html.
- Yale University. Sheffield Scientific School. Biographical Record, Classes from Eighteen Hundred and Sixty-eight to Eighteen Hundred and Seventy-two of the Sheffield Scientific School. Class secretaries bureau, Yale university, 1910.
- E. Polk Johnson, A History of Kentucky and Kentuckians: The Leaders and Representative Men in Commerce, Industry and Modern Activities, (1912).
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