When a coffee date with a fellow presidential nerd brought me within 12 minutes of my maybe-ancestor George Rockwood, I decided to find him. I thought I’d just pop over for ten minutes, take a quick pic, and be on my way. I conducted a little “research” in the few minutes before I left the house and kept adding to the people I wanted to visit:

Emma Willard (I’m definitely related to her)
Russell Sage
Uncle Sam
Garnet Douglass Baltimore

Then I discovered Oakwood Cemetery is massive — 280 acres.

I’d started off excited about my little adventure, but then was anxious/nervous. Would I:

Find anyone I wanted to find? (Almost!)
Regret having an extra cup of coffee? (Absolutely. Loooooong hike to the bathroom.)
Lose my car? (Nope.)

Let’s get to it…

George Gardner Rockwood

I swear I’m related to this guy, but can’t prove it. Yet. I pulled together a post about him recently. And there’s a lovely, brief write-up about him on Oakwood’s site. George was a prolific photographer, taking hundreds of thousands of portraits — including Theodore Roosevelt and Ulysses S. Grant.

Araminta Bouton Rockwood

I learned before I left that George’s wife Araminta was an Emma Willard Association member. In my untrained opinion, that seems like another check-mark in the “we gotta be related” column. She was a graduate of the “Willard Seminary” (check), attending around the same time as her friend Olivia Sage (aka Margaret Olivia Slocum Sage, aka Mrs. Russell Sage; Russell Sage’s wife) giving me the opportunity to really dive into another tangent I planned to explore anyhow.

Is it just me…

their headstone looks like a camera, right? That’s got to be on purpose. Don’t you think…?

Emma Willard

I need to learn more about her; she sounds amazing.

At her father’s encouragement, she pursued academics.
Didn’t care for the whole “finishing schools” approach to women’s education.
Started her own school for “intellectually curious” women.
Received support from John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Governor DeWitt Clinton.
Clinton (the guy in the accompanying doodle) provided the support she needed (including financial) to relocate her school to Troy, New York.

I’m related to Emma through her husband, Dr. John Willard … who was 28 years older than her. This was news to me! That’s the same age-gap separating President Grover Cleveland and First Lady Frances Cleveland! (But two years shorter than the largest POTUS/FLOTUS age gap: John and Julia Tyler.)

This was Dr. Willard’s third marriage.

Oakwood+Cemetery+%2872%29_Emma+Willard.jpg

I saw four deer while at Oakwood Cemetery … and this one was right behind Emma’s grave! (Or maybe I saw five deer, and this wasn’t one of the deer I saw previously. That’s neither here nor there. The point is, I saw a bunch of deer.)

Russell Sage

I only know his name because there’s a college named after him around here. It wasn’t until I read Becoming Madame Secretary by Stephanie Dray that I even knew Russell Sage was one person, and that the college didn’t form because a Mr. Russell and a Mr. Sage got together and formed it. FDR’s Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins (the first woman to serve as cabinet secretary!) received a fellowship from the Russell Sage Foundation.

If you don’t live around his namesake college, you may never have come across his name. He was:

a businessman
a Gilded Age millionaire (think Commodore Vanderbilt; Sage was calculated as the 18th richest man ever)
a robber baron
a U.S. congressman

I just learned he had a reputation for being:

stingy (think Ebenezer Scrooge)

kind of a d*ck
anti-philanthropy, anti-women, anti-his-second-wife, and anti-higher education

Admittedly, that piqued my interest.

Then I read a transcript from Useless Information podcast and learned that the three previous bullets were completely untrue. Not as fun to write about, but also I’m glad that Mrs. Sage wasn’t married to an a-hole for nearly four decades just so I could have a little fun writing about him. Here’s the full episode if you want to listen:

Russell Sage left his entire fortune ($70 million in 19-whatever dollars) to Olivia Sage, his second wife, making her the wealthiest woman in the world.

Mrs. Russell Sage:

donated to Troy Female Seminary, where she attended. The school was renamed after its founder, Emma Willard. (Emma Willard!).
gave money to create a new school for women — Russell Sage College for Women.
donated $35 million to various causes (hospitals, women’s suffrage, colleges, YMCA, etc.); in today’s dollars, that’s more than $900 million.
made sure that his mausoleum was unmarked. Not to not give him recognition, but out of fear of grave robbers / not wanting his body held for ransom.
is buried with her parents, coincidentally a different Oakwood Cemetery.

His mausoleum is right next to (and largely blocking) his first wife’s obelisk. Rumor has it that was on purpose. But it’s not. Seriously give the podcast a listen because it’s fascinating. BTW so many obelisks at Oakwood Cemetery. For a second, I thought about taking pics of a bunch of them and arranging them in size order. But then I didn’t.

Backing up a bit...

I learned that once Robert Fulton’s monopoly was broken up, teenage Sage bought a sloop to transport horses. He made a ton of money on this and reinvested it. This provides an opportunity to share a doodle about how when the Livingston/Fulton monopoly was broken up, it was replaced with a new one by Vanderbilt … whose low, low pricing basically meant there was no competition.

Bob’s Folly: Fulton,Livingston and the Steamboat, by Travis M. Bowman

Sage lost up to $8 million dollars in the Grant & Ward pyramid scheme — the same one that left President Grant destitute and needing to write his memoirs to support his family... the same one that put him in Saratoga when he died!

President Grant’s cocaine (medicinal!) and typewriter. Grant’s friend’s business partner knew that “if [Grant] should die at [his hotel at Mt. McGregor] it might make the place a national shrine — and incidentally a success.” It’s nice to have friends.

Grant’s Tomb: The Epic Death of Ulysses S. Grant and the Making of an American Pantheon, by Louis L. Picone

Another tangent

The scheme that left President Grant broke was basically a Ponzi scheme. But not exactly. Because Charles Ponzi was a toddler at the time. Once Charles was grown up and Ponzi-scheming all over, Massachusetts governor (and future POTUS!) Calvin Coolidge had his attorney general look into him. While in prison (for a different kind of scheming), he received advice from Charles Morse… this guy. Yikes. Check out a little bit about him on day 26 of this scary post.

Uncle Sam

I lost steam for this post once I realized that the rumors about Russell Sage (that I wasn’t even aware of until the morning of my adventure) were all fake.

Luckily, I received a Restoration Obscura email shortly after… coincidentally all about Uncle Sam. Steam regained!

Legend has it that Troy meat packer Sam Wilson served as the inspiration for Uncle Sam — the personification of the United States. If you don’t know the story, read this post. It also includes an incredible restoration of a the only photo that is believed to be Sam Wilson.

I do not know where Sam Wilson fell (or would have fallen) on things like equality, the Chinese Exclusion Act, Jim Crow, etc. I also do not know if I have more doodles of Uncle Sam (I swear I do, but came up empty when I searched). This one isn’t particularly flattering. Uncle Sam sputtering about the idea of “legal and just treatment in every respect, making no distinction, either in law or fact, on account of their race or nationality.”

1920: The Year of the Six Presidents, by David Pietrusza

Robert Ross

I wasn’t familiar with Ross before seeing his statue. He was from a prosperous family, newly engaged, and died valiantly protecting the city from voter fraud (Irish-Americans allegedly voting more than once). Or perhaps he was from a prosperous family, newly engaged, and was an anti-immigrant (etc.) member of a sorta-secret group trying to get a Republican senator into office and died in the process.

Well, now I’m curious…