Durant Family Saga
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Who Was Heloise Durant Rose?

4/3/2019

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Heloise (Ella) Durant. Courtesy, the Winterthur Library: Joseph Downs Collection & Printed Ephemera
PictureWilliam West Durant and his sister Ella. Isle of Wight 1869. Source: William West Durant Egyptian Diaries.
Heloise Durant Rose aka Ella Durant Rose was the daughter of railroad tycoon Dr. Thomas Durant, who was head of the Union Pacific while building the Transcontinental line across the western U.S. After her father's death in 1885, she and brother William West Durant were embroiled in a lawsuit over the family estate and 1/2 million acres of Adirondack land holdings for many years.

The tragedy of the lawsuit Ella brought against her brother in 1893 might have been averted if William acted more openly as executor of the Durant estate; and if Ella had not been so assertive in demanding her fair share.

Ella had good reason to be suspicious. William – who had very little money in his bank account at the time he became executor of his father’s estate in 1885 ‘persuaded’ Ella to sign a Power of Attorney, enabling him to take full control of her one-third share of the estate. He quickly accumulated all the visible trappings of wealth, including a large ocean-going yacht built to his own specification at a cost of over $200,000 in 1890. At the same time, he claimed that the value of their father’s estate was minimal and continued to provide Ella with a reasonable but unexpectedly low monthly allowance. Any questions from Ella about the discrepancies tended to result in angry outbursts about her ‘questioning his integrity’ rather than explanations.

As an American heiress, Ella would not let William get away with squandering the family fortunes while she lived a high society life in London, waiting for her due. Instead, she hounded him; asking family friends to intervene first, and when that didn't work, hiring lawyers. Finally, she returned to the U.S and had William arrested when she thought he might flee the country to avoid accountability.

Little is known about Ella except for the lawsuit she filed against her brother William. While William receives a lot of attention for his visionary style of architecture in the Adirondacks, Ella hardly receives a blip from historic accounts of the Durants. There is a Wikipedia page about her with links to her novel, plays and collection of poetry - now out of print. There are also numerous articles online she wrote for the New York Times - short stories and book reviews.

That's it. There's not much about her life at the museums and libraries that hold collections about the Durant family. And what few items there are relate to the lawsuit - nothing on her life in England where she befriended other literary figures such as Anne Thackeray Ritchie and Henry James. And there is not much information about her life in the U.S., especially her times at the Durant family summer camp Pine Knot in the Adirondacks, where she spent summers in her early twenties.

It would be wonderful to find the journals she talks about while testifying at the trial against her brother. Who knows? Maybe they are sitting in somebody's attic and will be discovered one day?

It has taken a bit of work to track down what motivated this woman.  She was an ambitious author, maneuvering for freedom from her over-bearing father Thomas C. Durant, and controlling brother William, during a time period when women were ostracized for questioning male authority.

Although they may have gotten along when they were young, Ella's biggest critic was her brother, William. At one point in time he wrote her that she loved playing the martyr. And I have uncovered from her own writing and other documents that she had a flare for the dramatic. One has only to read some of her poetry in Pine Needles or Sonnets and Songs to realize she was also desperately in love, more than once in her youth.

Ella also had a close friendship with Poultney Bigelow, perhaps they were lovers at one time. He visited Pine Knot in 1878, while a sophomore at Yale. Years later he became the godfather of Ella's son, Durant Trimbrell Rose. He and Ella corresponded while they were both in their eighties - his prose reveals that he was smitten with her in his youth, claiming in a somewhat exaggerated, whimsical tone:

"I spent a month with Ella Durant...... at their camp on Raquette...Of course I was in love with her and she was a beauty and we were perpetually together in canoe or forest paths. But I was poor then and she was a princess..."
(1938, Source: Syracuse University Collections)

At Bigelow's collection in the New York Public Library (over 10,000 letters, the index lists many famous people but not Ella) it took awhile but I uncovered  letters written from Ella to Poultney. They were both elderly, Bigelow had just lost his wife and Ella recollected a time in their youth when she pined for his letters.

But Ella had the misfortune of belonging to a family rife with financial and emotional turmoil at a time in history where men were in control. And although she tried, she is not remembered for her creative achievements, but for disrupting the Durant family status quo.

PostScript: Ella's scrapbook dated 1854-1920 were discovered in someone's attic. Hopefully one day they will end up in a museum or library collection for all to see. Read more here.


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Why Hide the Family Skeletons?

4/24/2015

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The news stations were all abuzz this past week over the revelation that actor Ben Affleck requested tv producers of the PBS show 'Finding Your Roots', hide from viewers the uncovered fact that one of his ancestors owned slaves (going back six generations).  When the news was leaked, Affleck responded by posting to one of his social media sites: "We deserve neither credit nor blame for our ancestors..." 

I agree with him. But what I find more intriguing is his eagerness to hide the information from the public to begin with. Why hide the family skeletons? If anything, isn't he impressed that the producers were able to uncover so much information about his ancestors?

As a novelist researching the history of one of New York's more famous families: the Durants, I ask myself whether what I am discovering will come as a surprise to the descendants, especially as I find new information that was not available in previous biographies.

History however is a moving target as new things are discovered. Take for example the history of the Credit Mobilier scandal of 1868.

This front company was established by Dr. Thomas Durant to handle construction contracts for the Union Pacific Railroad. At the time of its inception Durant was Vice President of the Union Pacific. As one of the founders of the Credit Mobilier he also benefited financially from the contracts he negotiated with the U.S. Government.

Even more scandalous was that he bribed politicians to look the other way while the Credit Mobilier charged exorbitant prices for the construction work. Given the propensity for fraud during the 'Gilded Age' the question is - did the men in power know what they were doing was wrong, or just par for the course?

In the case of Dr. Durant, who was never legally implicated in the Credit Mobilier scandal, (he was ousted from the board in 1867 before it became public) he may have known that history would not look favorably on his actions: why else would he have put all of the ledgers of the Credit Mobilier in a safe deposit box that he never told anyone about?

This box was discovered by one of the family lawyers, after Dr. Durant and his son William were dead. It was William's second wife Annie that saved these documents from a burn pile.

In 1937 Annie contacted Levi O. Leonard, a railroad historian who she knew was collecting Durant history. She notified him that she had in her possession more Durant documents, stating..."
these papers had turned up in a lawyer's fire-proof vault -- where they evidently [had] been put years ago for safe keeping."

Safe keeping? Or hiding? These were the ledgers from the Credit Mobilier Company dated 1863-68 and enough information to blackmail some major political figures of the time.


Leonard immediately went to New York City to pick up the documents and bring them to the University of Iowa where he was cataloging his research.

William Durant must not have known about these papers. He had donated what he thought were all of his father's Union Pacific papers to Leonard in 1926, telling him that he knew Leonard would do "justice to my father's memory".

I can only believe that if William knew about these discriminating Credit Mobilier documents when he was alive he would have destroyed them. But like Ben Affleck, you can't run from your ancestors. The lesson here is to embrace them, with all of their flaws and weaknesses, because they are after all, part of history.



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    Sheila Myers  Professor at Cayuga Community College in Upstate New York.

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