Marshall’s Great Grandfather
In
1889 a large earthen dam in Pennsylvania that had been expanded to create a lake for wealthy sportsmen’s recreation, boating and fishing, burst. This was after several days of extremely heavy rain in the area. The
resulting flood, named the Johnstown flood killed 2208 people. There was no warning, although there should have been – twice that morning a local man at the dam, seeing that the dam was likely to be breached soon, rode on horseback
to the nearby town of South Fork to the telegraph office to send warnings to Johnstown explaining the critical nature of the eroding dam. But the warnings were not passed to the authorities in town, as there had been many false alarms in
the past of the South Fork Dam not holding against flooding.
It took 57 minutes for the flood to reach Johnstown, which was 14 miles below the damn.
The raging flood waters were temporarily dammed up several times by debris and bridges on their way down the valley, but the time the flood reached Johnstown it was traveling at 40 miles per hour and was up to 60 feet deep. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnstown_Flood
My great grandfather
on my mother’s side was killed in the flood. He was a mechanical engineer employed by the Cambria Iron Works in Johnstown. Family history passed down to me says that he had time to reach the second story of the brick
building that he worked in, but a train steam locomotive that was swept down the valley by the flood hit the corner of the building, collapsing it and my relative was killed in the water and debris.
His name was Charles Alfred Marshall. He was 34 years old. Charles had recently married my Great Grandmother, Dulcenia (Dullie) Coleman. And
Dullie was pregnant. It goes without saying that she was devastated. She moved back into her parent’s large house outside of Louisville, Kentucky where she and her soon to be born little girl lived for the
next 20 or so years. When Charles was killed Dullie promised that she would name her new born child after him. She did – but the baby was a girl: named Charles Alfred Marshall, AKA Charlie. This was
my grandmother, my mother’s mother. Note that my mother’s name was Dulcenia, and my name is Edward Marshall. Edward after my father, and Marshall after my great grandfather, (or maybe after my grandmother).
The Coleman family history is interesting, and I will return to it later in this narrative, but now for a few paragraphs I will follow the history
of my great grandmother Dullie and my grandmother Charlie.
Charlie grew up in a large family in her mother’s parents house, called
The Meadows in Shepherdsville KY. She rode the train to school every day in Louisville. On the train she met her future husband, Edgar Straeffer. He was a second generation American of German descent.
Family history says that Charlie’s mother and family were very much opposed to the budding relationship between her and this lower working-class man, but the relationship grew, and they became engaged and married. Wedding day
pranks were evidently much more serious than they are now. Immediately after the priest said “I now pronounce you man and wife” Edgar’s groomsmen locked a ball and chain around his ankle, carried him to the departing
train that he and his bride were to go on for their honeymoon, and then put his bride Charlie on a different train going the opposite direction.
Family
history does not include how they eventually got back together but they apparently did because they bought a big house in Louisville, raised four children including my mother, who was the oldest of the four. Edgar, who we all called Pop,
was a successful entrepreneur. As a young man, he and his brother bought a couple of flatbed trucks and started a moving company. When I was a kid he told me that they used to move furniture during the day, but as
the workday was ending they would put benches on the back of the trucks and take commuters from the Ohio River ferry landing in Louisville up to the street car line. This moving company grew; they named it The Safety Transfer and Storage
Company. It continued to expand and grow through acquisitions and mergers into Allied Van Lines. My Grandfather was Chairman of the Board of Allied Van Lines until he retired and moved to Florida.
We called Charlie, Bama. This was what my sister Ellen, the oldest of her grandchildren came up with when she was learning to talk and tried to say grandma. One measure
of how much Pop loved Bama is that before they were married Pop was informed that Bama’s mother Dullie (who we called Nannie) was part of the deal. She moved in with them and lived with them until she died many years later.
Note – this is his mother-in law living with them for most of their married life. And she lived to be 91 years old!
I wrote earlier that I
would write a little bit about the Coleman family history. This is my great grandmother Dullie Coleman’s family. Her father was Thomas Cooper Coleman.
The family knew him and his wife as Dear Mama and Dear Papa. They lived on a large estate in Shepherdsville, KY. They were a Southern family, and before the Civil War were slave
owners. (Bama, who was a perfect Southern lady, never swore or even said a bad thing about anyone, when talking about a Northerner, would say that he was a Damn Yankee, as if there was no such thing as a Yankee.)
Thomas Cooper Coleman worked for the DuPont Corporation. Family history says that he was instrumental in turning the company
around in the late 19th century. I can’t find a record of this work there, but it is interesting that one of the
Presidents of the company was named Thomas Coleman DuPont. He lived from 1863 to 1930. He was born in Louisville, and among other things he was a US Senator from Delaware. I strongly suspect that he
was named for my relative, whose management skills saved the company.
Dear Mama and Papa had 13 children, 11 girls and two boys. Only two of
them ever married, one being my great grandmother Nannie. The other girl who married, married a DuPont. Her name was Kathrine Dulcenia, called Katedulwe. Her husband, being a DuPont, had money.
Aunt Katedulwe was my mother’s great aunt. She bought my mother a powder blue Chevrolet when she graduated from high school. (See picture above.) We still have many sterling silver pieces that she gave my
mother and father, especially as wedding presents.
One of the two boys was killed at The Meadows when the gas
plant blew up. Big old houses in the country used gas lighting. The gas was generated on site using carbide. Extremely flammable
acetylene (C2H2) was created by the reaction of calcium carbide (CaC2) with water (H2O).. Apparently, something
went wrong in the gas house; it blew up and killed the boy.
The unmarried girls continued to live at The Meadows after
their parents passed away.
The Meadows was written about in a newspaper article that my mother had. This piece is not dated,
but probably was written about 1900:
“Romance of an altogether different quality is that suggested by the lovely old Coleman home. “The Meadows”,
set about a half-mile back, along a straight, tree-bordered lane, from the highway approaching Shepherdsville.
Back in 1848, young T.C. Coleman II, captaining, for the experience
of it, one of his father’s line of river steamboats, saw tripping up the gangplank of his boat at Louisville, Miss Dulcenia Payne Johnson, daughter of Capt. William Johnson, of Danville, setting forth on a trip down the river under the chaperone of her
parents. Said young Captain Coleman, on the instant, with all the gallantry of his Irish forebears, “I will marry that young lady!” And, in the following year, he did.
The Colemans were well-established people; there was the iron business and there were other interests; steamboats were sort of a side-line. Soon T. C. Coleman II bought the old Fields place near Shepherdsville,
an old-fashioned Southern mansion, with ample slave quarters and all comfortable appointments of the day, and thither he took his young bride. In time there were sons and daughters who went out into the world, all save Miss Alberta and Miss
Ophelia, who happily remained, and still happily remain, to keep up the old house, in an atmosphere of lavender and old lace, of old silver and old mahogany—but in shy retirement from the world that speeds outside.
Meanwhile, T. C. Coleman II, come out from Louisville to take a big part in the affaire of Shepherdsville, has gone his way, leaving a substantial record of his own. And the Coleman name has been crossed with
DuPont, with Marshall, and with others who have not let it down—names that, for their large accomplishment, are known to anyone who reads the public prints. So, dear ladies, the chronicler does not feel altogether guilty of unwarrantable
intrusion into your proper privacy. But he’d like to write a book about you and your home.”
I Googled Thomas Cooper Coleman, and
found a really great newspaper article about him, his family and The Meadows. It is definitely worth taking a look at. https://bullittcountyhistory.org/memories/meadows1.html
It has photos of Thomas and Dulcenia, and the house.