The
letter was postmarked Toledo, July 1, 1849.
That was clear enough, but the handwritten address and text needed some
study. The address was sharp and bold: C. H. Boris, or possibly Bores, in Hudson,
Michigan, just across the state line. A
business letter, very short and to the point, written by (I thought) one H.
Ketcham. It read:
Dear Sir
Yours of
yesterday is at hand agreeable to your
request I have called on the cashier of our Bank & they tell me they are
not discounting any Paper (Excepting dfts [drafts] on the East, at
present) In fact it is seldom they take
such paper as you mention
It was probably just some correspondence about state
currency, notoriously inflationary and untrustworthy in the years before the
Civil War. There was not enough detail
to say what was going on. One man was
stuck with some worthless, or badly devalued, paper money. I thought there might not be enough for a
decent story, but I decided to check on who or what “C. H. Boris” was. It was thus that I learned to be careful with
nineteenth century handwriting, and after some missteps, followed the trail
from a merchant in Hudson to one of Toledo’s richest men.
Checking and rechecking the Lenawee County census left me
aggravated. The various online census
indexes did not lead me anywhere near Hudson Michigan, nor anytime near
1849. And the name on the envelope was
so clear, Bores, only one letter off from my own patronymic. After enduring much frustration, I decided
on a different approach. The writer was
apparently a banker, or someone with ties to bankers. I decided to at least skim a history of
banking in Lenawee County, and see what I could find.
The first bank in Hudson was called the Exchange Bank, and it was established by Henry M. Boies, John K. Boies, and Nathan Rude, in 1855. (Memoirs of Lenawee County, Michigan, Vol. 1 (Madison, 1909), p. 632.)
Wait
a minute! Boies? Not Bores?
I took another look at the front of the letter. Surprise, surprise; there was a dot floating
rather high above the last name. Not an
“r’ but an “i.” So I had been looking
for the wrong last name, after all.
Once I had the correct last name, my newly refocused
search for C. H. Boies was easy. The
Census of 1850 for Lenawee County, Michigan, taken just a year after my letter,
showed a Curtis H. Boise (the census taker had written it wrong as well), a 41-year-old merchant in Hudson. A native of Massachusetts, he had a wife,
Sarah Ann, and four children, thus far. He
had two more children by 1860.
So
much for the recipient of the letter.
Having caught one error in my reading of old handwriting, I took a
careful look at the signature of the sender, “H. Ketcham.’ Wait – what was that squiggle before the
“H?” When I first read the letter, I
thought it was just that – a squiggle.
Then I realized it was an alphabet letter: a “V”
The letter was from Valentine H. Ketcham, Toledo’s first
millionaire, and namesake of the Valentine Theater.
A native of Cornwall, New York, Valentine Ketcham
(1815-1887) arrived in Toledo’s earliest days, starting out as a wholesale
merchant in August, 1836. He married
into the influential Berdan family when, in 1841, he wed Rachel Berdan, the
daughter of mayor John Berdan. In 1851,
he switched to the financial industry, when he “commenced a private banking and
brokerage business.” After some mergers
and name changes, it emerged as the First National Bank in 1863. Ketcham held the position of president until
his death in 1887. Like many
businessmen, he speculated in land, and owned 900 acres of land in various
parts of the city.
At
one time, Ketcham owned a gilded chariot, which he took in trade for a grocery
debt, then traded it for some “worthless” bank paper in Monroe, Michigan lost
in a poker game. The bank paper turned
out to be securities that gave him ownership of thousands of dollars of real
estate in downtown Toledo. Fond of
outside work, he cut the brush himself from land he owned at St. Clair and
Madison, for which he paid $1,000, selling it later for $55,000. When Valentine
Ketcham died in 1887, he was able to leave each of his surviving children one
million dollars. [Valentine Ketcham clipping
file, Toledo-Lucas county Public Library.]
If
we are looking for a common thread between the Toledo millionaire and the
Michigan merchant, it may be that both
their stories feature bank “paper,” whether securities, deeds, mortgages, or
the “wildcat” money that circulate so freely and lost value so quickly before
the Civil War. That Valentine Ketcham
dealt in this financial world we know, and now that we know who C. H. Boies was,
we can connect the dots. Although it is
too late to teach them better penmanship!
[Quoted
material comes from the Valentine Ketcham clipping file, Toledo-Lucas County
Public Library.]
