2015.018

Seller, M. Charles.

Gift

Gift of M. Charles Seller.

1791 - 2001

Date(s) Created: 2015 Date(s): 1791-2001

Notes: Archives 2015.018.0003 Transcription of three page biography written by M. Charles Seller (1932- ), maternal grandson of Calvin Peck, April 6, 2015. ==== CALVIN PECK (1848-1923) Calvin Peck (1848-1923) was the namesake of his paternal grandfather, a physician who settled in Hancock County, Maine circa 1810, first at Castine and shortly thereafter at Ellsworth. The elder Calvin Peck (1791-1849) was born in Colerain, Franklin County, Massachusetts and completed studies at the Harvard Medical College before going to Maine (all of which in the early 1800s was still a part of Massachusetts). Dr. Peck was one of the first individuals to practice medicine along the then largely unsettled northern Maine coast. In 1815 he married Susan Joy (1793-1879), a native of Hancock County - she is thought to have grown up in either Ellsworth or the immediately adjacent town of Surry. Their grandson Calvin was born and raised in Ellsworth by their son Samuel (1820-1898), a merchant seaman at that time, and Samuel's wife, Nancy Conner Peck (1825-1862). Calvin and his younger brother Frederick W. (1850-1936) were in early adolescence when their mother Nancy died. She was just 37 and had wed Samuel only 15 years earlier in 1847. Peck family data handwritten on pedigree charts in a Bible published in 1836 indicates that two additional sons of Samuel and Nancy - Jerry E. and Charles - apparently did not survive beyond childhood. The sadness of losing two sons followed by the shock of his wife's death in 1862 could certainly explain why, within the next two years, Samuel evidently ceased going to sea and decided to leave Ellsworth. According to an 1864 New York City street directory, he was by then earning a living as a carpenter at 48 Talman Street, Brooklyn. Subsequent directories make evident that his teen aged sons Calvin and Frederick lived there with him initially. Perhaps not so long in Calvin's case, however, because by a couple of years following their 1864 arrival in Brooklyn he was the father of a little girl, Katharine Ward Peck (1867-1946). Virtually no information about Katharine's mother has been unearthed. Was her surname Ward, as the baby's middle name suggests it might have been? Did she die in childbirth or shortly thereafter? No firm answers are in hand. In later years, a couple of listings for Katharine in federal census records call her mother's birthplace "NY." But later on, in 1930, the intriguing alternative phrase "Canada - English" appears in the census for that year. Had Katharine made a discovery about her birth mother by then -or was this entry a census taker's error? Whatever the case, the 1870 federal census lists Calvin, by then 21 and a carpenter, and a 3-year-old called "Katy," living in the same household as Calvin's father Samuel, 65, now listed as a (house)painter, and a "Sarah Peck, 45, (born) N.Y." - almost certainly Samuel's second wife. And the location was no longer Brooklyn, but some 30-35 miles west in a northern New Jersey township called Acquackanonk. The township was in Bergen County, and by 1917 it went defunct because all of its land area had been annexed by several towns and cities, including Paterson which was by then in the portion of Bergen County that became Passaic County. Calvin and Katharine may not have been part of the Acquackanonk household for long. He is known to have gone with his daughter to the northwestern United States - definitely the western part of Montana Territory (probably Helena) and possibly Seattle as well. There appear to be only two time periods that this lengthy trek could have been undertaken by them - either 1871-1873 or 1885-1888 - because no information as to where Calvin was located during those years has been found. ==== Factors that may have prompted a decision by Calvin to journey west in the early 1870s include the evident absence of Katharine's mother and the apparent remarriage of Calvin's father Samuel. It's perhaps more realistic, however, to suggest the venture west did not occur until the mid-1880s. For one thing, Katharine was by then a young woman in her late teens rather than a young child requiring a great deal of care and oversight. Secondly, there was rapid expansion of the nation's railroads by the 1880s, including into Montana Territory, easing the challenges of long distance travel. Moreover, though statehood for the territory was not finalized until 1889, the largely treeless, ramshackle 1870s town of Helena had become the territorial capital in 1875, and Helena's gold and silver mining booms in the 1870s had generated by the mid-1880s the presence of large concentrations of wealth that were nurturing energetic economic growth. In which of the two time periods Calvin chose to go west and take Katharine with him isn't known. What is known, however, is that she appeared in her later years to have few if any positive remembrances of the experience and was very glad when it ended. If the Montana sojourn occurred in the early 1870s, she and Calvin had arrived back east by 1874, because a Jersey City, New Jersey street directory published that year indicates Calvin was living at 25 Prospect Street there and a carpenter located at 20 Hudson Street in adjacent Hoboken. It's could be that 1874 marked the beginning of Calvin's employment with the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad, which by then was operating a branch line from its Hoboken terminal across New Jersey to the Delaware River via its Morris and Essex Division. In 1874 Calvin also married Catherine Elizabeth Cook (1854-1885), the daughter of a Rockaway, Morris County, New Jersey farmer and his wife. The 1880 census confirms that in addition to Katharine, by then age 12, there were two additional young children in Calvin's family, each born in Jersey City: Louisa, in December 1875 and William Henry, in October 1877. Sadly, both of these youngsters died soon after the 1880 census taker's visit: William in November of the same and less than a year later Louisa in July 1881. Grief over these losses must have been compounded by the death of a third infant born to Calvin and Catherine in May 1882, Frederick John, who died in January 1884. Then even more tragedy and heartache: after the birth of a fourth child, Francis Asbury Peck, in late April of 1885, Catherine died just 19 days later. A tombstone in a Dover, a Morris County cemetery close to where Catherine grew up identifies her burial site plus those of her three deceased children. Francis Asbury Peck did survive childhood and adolescence. But he was only 29 when he died in April 1915 at Belleville, Essex County, New Jersey, having sired a son, Calvin Frederick Peck (1914-1967), likely named after both his grandfather Calvin and Calvin's brother Frederick. It's not difficult to accept why 1885-1887 was more likely when the journey west occurred, given the number of family deaths Calvin and his daughter Katharine endured throughout the previous ten years. If this was the case, it was as brief as the 1870s trek to Montana would have been. An 1888 street directory makes clear Calvin was back in Jersey City then, living at 63 Waverly Street and still earning a living as a carpenter. Other sources hint that Katharine, by then 21, continued to reside in the same household and was involved in helping to raise her surviving and motherless young step-brother, Francis Asbury. In the 1890s new conditions evolved for Calvin. The annually published Jersey City directories continued to list 63 Waverly Street as his residence and carpentry as his trade, but only until 1895, the year Margaret Ina Forsyth (1860-1943) became his third wife. She was a daughter of a railroad engineer and his wife in Owego, Tioga County, New York. As was her older sister Eva Belle (1858-1944), Margaret ==== Forsyth was a dressmaker. The two of them had moved from Owego to northern New Jersey to live near a major source of the materials they required -- Paterson (the numerous silk mills there at the time had earned it the nickname Silk City). Calvin and Margaret proceeded to have two children: Donald Forsyth Peck (1896-1976) and Martha Noble Peck (1902-2001). Neither was born in Jersey City, however. The 1895 marriage brought to an end the more than twenty years Calvin resided there. During the next decade he continued as a carpenter but moved to Essex County - first 207 Fourth Street in Newark and after 1900 close by in East Orange at 19 South 17th Street. Each location was close to the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western's Morris and Essex branch line stations. So if Calvin was by then a DL&W employer, it was easy for him to commute by train to the DL&W terminal at Hoboken. Beginning in 1905 it seems certain that he was a DW&L employee, because from then on directories and other resources refer to Calvin as a "foreman," which was his DL&W job title throughout the rest of his working life (a 1915 Jersey City directory listing of Calvin includes the phrase "foreman, DL&W Railroad; h(ome) Bloomfield)." Calvin and Margaret and their children moved in 1905 to 244 Sixth Avenue in the Roseville section of Newark. After 1910 they lived in Bloomfield, first on Stockton Street and then at 9 Essex Avenue. The Roseville and Bloomfield locations, too, made convenient his commute to Hoboken and other DL&W station locations in New Jersey. While on a family outing in 1923 at Shelter Island on the eastern end of New York's Long Island, Calvin, 75, died suddenly of a stroke. Twenty years later, in November 1943, Margaret died at their Bloomfield home on Essex Avenue at the age of 83. Their gravesite is at Evergreen Cemetery in Margaret's hometown of Owego. Calvin's daughter Katharine appears to have remained in Jersey City for 25 years or more after her father married Margaret. Census records list her as a stenographer boarding at 106 Henderry Street in 1900, and by 1920 as a manufacturing company secretary living at 2813-15 Hudson Boulevard. In the latter years of that decade she lived for a time at 56 Walnut Street in Ridgewood, Bergen County. By the early 1930s she had moved to an apartment house at 165 Franklin Street, Bloomfield, and was in regular and cordial touch with her stepmother Margaret and other kin living at the Essex Avenue house until her death at 79 in 1946. M. Charles Seller Carlisle, Pennsylvania, USA April 6, 2015 ==== ==== ==== Additional notes received by email from Charles Seller, 2015: During the first decade-and-a-half or so of the 20th century (circa 1900-1915), and likely for some years prior to that period of time, my maternal grandfather, Calvin Peck (1848-1923), was employed by the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad. In a letter to me dated March 26, 1973, his son Donald Forsyth Peck (1896-1976), then of Coral Gables, Florida, stated that his father's title at DL&W was something like "Superintendent of Bridges and Docks of the Eastern Division." My uncle Donald Peck added the following: "This had mostly to do with the waterfronts in Hoboken and downtown Manhattan on the Hudson River, such as the ferry boats," ==== ==== Status: OK Status By: dw Status Date: 2015-04-08