Charles Augustus Wheaton
From CarlWiki
Charles Augustus Wheaton was born the son of Augustus Wheaton, who purchased land in Pompey, NY, in 1807 and settled there with his family in 1810. He is one of two men primarily responsible for the location of the Carleton campus.
He married Ellen Douglas Birdseye, b. 1816, the second of twelve children, who was a member of a prominent New York family that would later produce the creator of Bird's Eye Frozen Foods. Wheaton did well to marry into the wealthy and powerful Birdseye family. Ellen's father, Victory Birdseye, was one of Onondaga County's most prominent politicians. Birdseye practiced law, but also served two terms in Congress. He was postmaster of Pompey Hill for 22 years, district attorney of Onondaga County for 14 years, and held numerous other political offices.
Ellen was no great beauty, her own relatives admitted, but she was smart and well educated. The Birdseyes sent Ellen to a seminary in Cortland and then to music school in Albany. She is reported to have owned the first piano in Pompey.
Charles' family was respectable, but not as influential as Ellen's. His father was a farmer and a drover. Charles clerked in the general store owned by his brother-in-law, Moses Seymour Marsh, but he had higher ambitions.
He and Ellen married on June 24, 1834, when he was 25 and she was 18. Almost a year later, Ellen bore a daughter. Four months after Cornelia was born, the family moved to Syracuse, where Wheaton went into the hardware business. Their first home was at the intersection of Railroad and Clinton streets. In 20 years, they lived in seven houses, moving to larger homes as family and fortune grew.
The Wheatons were outspoken in Syracuse, where they were at the center of a large network of radical abolitionists. Their anti-slavery activities began as early as 1838, when Charles helped found First Congregational Church on abolitionist principles. When the Wheatons' seamstress, Mrs. MacManus, told census workers Charles was "president of the Underground Railroad," she wasn't too far off base.
In 1839, Wheaton built a home on South Salina Street near East Jefferson Street. At that time, it was on the outskirts of town. From his neat brick house, Wheaton could walk to his store, near the Erie Canal, and his wife, Ellen, could walk to shops, churches and the homes of her many friends. Syracuse was booming, although it was small by modern standards.
Wheaton was a busy man. He and a variety of partners, including his brother, Horace, built a prosperous hardware businesses. Horace later became Syracuse's mayor.
When his hardware store burned in 1851, Wheaton build C.A. Wheaton & Co. -- housed in the city's grandest mercantile block, a four-story building overlooking the Erie Canal and Clinton Square. In 1852, the Wheatons were at the peak of their wealth and Wheaton decided the family should move from East Genesee Street, near where it now intersects Crouse Avenue, to Fayette Park, one of the city's most fashionable neighborhoods.
Charles was not content with his success, though. In 1853, he sold his share of the hardware business. He also sold the Wheaton Block for $112,000, the largest sale to that date in Syracuse. He invested heavily in a printing press foundry and a project to build a railroad from South Carolina to Tennessee. For a short time, the future looked bright. In 1854, a banking crisis in New York City and an economic depression struck New York. By 1855, they would be broke.
Ellen Birdseye Wheaton is best-known for a diary she kept from 1850 to 1858, detailing her life as the wife of Charles A. Wheaton, abolitionist, hardware merchant, and railroad speculator, and as the mother of twelve children. Ellen Birdseye Wheaton died on Dec. 17, 1858, the day after the wedding of her eldest daughter, Cornelia. She was 42 when she died and is buried in Hilltop Cemetery in Pompey, NY.
In 1859, his friend, John North, wrote to Wheaton and urged him to come to the new town of Northfield, Minnesota. In 1860, Charles Wheaton gave up on Syracuse. He took many of his children and moved to Northfield, where other Syracuse families--including North's--had migrated earlier.
When John North suffered financial failure, Wheaton purchased North's interest in the local flour mill, which he sold to Adelbert Ames and family in 1864.
Wheaton and his daughter, Annabel, witnessed the James-Younger raid on Northfield in 1876.
He became editor of the Northfield Standard newspaper and in 1867 was elected to the Minnesota legislature.
In 1867, he and Charles Goodsell each gave a 10 acre plot of land to Carleton College for the purposes of establishing the college campus.
He married widow Archibald and they had five children together.
Wheaton's first house was located at 405 Washington Street South. It is house in the vernacular Greek Revival architecture style. In the 1930s, it was sold and moved six blocks south the corner of Washington and Woodley Street East.
