Family Man, Lawyer, Bond Trader

John Bell (1880-1926)

Eldest Son

John Bell was the fourth of eight children born to Julius Bythewood Bell and Elizabeth Jane Catherwood Bell, and the oldest of their five boys. Like his paternal grandfather and namesake, John was not given a middle name. At the time of his birth, the Bell family lived on Liberty Street in Savannah, GA with John’s widowed maternal grandmother, two uncles, and an aunt. The home was a few blocks east of the Central of Georgia Railroad depot, for whom much of the Bell family would at some point be employed.

Both of John’s parents had died by 1900, and John, his siblings, and a Catherwood aunt and uncle were then living in a household on Macon Street headed by his mother’s unmarried maternal aunt Caroline Arden. The Macon Street home would remain in the Catherwood/Bell family for many years.

Militia Man

When he was still a very young man, John joined the Savannah Cadets, a local youth militia attached to the First Georgia Volunteer Regiment. At the outset of the Spanish-American War in 1898, John had already risen in rank to company first sergeant. By age 20 he had been promoted to regimental sergeant major and by age 24 to 1st lieutenant and battalion adjutant. John took a great deal of pride in his military service, but high blood pressure apparently precluded him from progressing further in that avocation. Even so, John’s militia connections would prove key to his increasingly prosperous civilian career.

Stenographer and Clerk

As eldest son, John would have been expected to help provide for the family even before his father died in 1897. The invention of the typewriter and expanding business and service industries in the late 19th century led to more white-collar opportunities for working-class families like the Bells. John’s aunt and two eldest sisters taught at the local Catholic school, while John, his sister Mary Agnes, and his younger brothers found clerical jobs as receptionists, typists, stenographers, bookkeepers, and clerks. By 1898 John was employed as a stenographer for The Ocean Steamship Company (better known as the Savannah Line), which operated cargo and passenger ships between Savannah and New York. In 1900, John was employed as a stenographer at T.S. Wylly and Co., a lumber and timber company run by Thomas Wylly, Jr., his superior officer in the Georgia Volunteers.

John’s work ethic must have been impressive, as he advanced through a series of clerical jobs through his teens and twenties into positions of greater responsibility and prominence. Many of the organizations and firms for which he apprenticed were run by former First Regiment officers and colleagues. In fact, some of the men in the 1900 regimental roster below (Lawton, Wylly, Grayson, and McDonough specifically) would be destined to influence not only John’s life, but the lives of his siblings and their children as well.

FIRST REGIMENT INFANTRY, GEORGIA VOLUNTEERS - 1900
Armory, Abercorn, southwest corner Huntingdon.

FIELD AND STAFF.
  A. R. Lawton, Jr., colonel.
  T. S. Wylly, Jr., lieutenant colonel.
  W. L. Grayson, major 1st battalion.
  Thomas Screven, major 2d battalion.
  R. E. Dart (Brunswick), major 3d battalion.
  W. E. Coney, captain and adjutant.
  J. J. McDonough, Jr., captain and quartermaster.
  C. H. Richardson, captain and commissary.
  ______ captain and inspector rifle practice.
  J. G. Jarrell, captain and surgeon.
  A. A. Morrison and J. S. Howkins, lieuteants and assistant surgeons.
  J. H. Harte, 1st lieutenant and adjutant 1st battalion.
  Davis Freeman, 1st lieutenant and adjutant 2d battalion.
  ______ 1st lieutenant and adjutant 3d battalion.
  John Bell, regimental sergeant major.

SOURCE:CHRONOLOGICAL HISTORY OF SAVANNAH, From Its Settlement by Oglethorpe down to December 31, 1899, A. E. SHOLES, Compiler. SAVANNAH, GA.:THE MORNING NEWS PRINT. 1900. via usgwarchives.net 

Family Man

In 1903 John married Mary Helena Gallaher. Mary was born in Augusta, GA in 1881, the youngest child of recent Irish immigrants and dry goods merchants. The Gallahers outwardly exhibited their Catholic faith by giving their children the saintly first and middle names of Augustine, Ignatius, and Aloysius, while naming their only daughter Mary, the first and greatest of all the Saints. John’s maternal grandfather too was an Irish-Catholic immigrant. Like John, both of Mary’s parents had died by the time of their sacramental marriage. Mary had been living with her brother Louis (Aloysius) in the Savannah home of their maternal aunt. Mary was said to have been a dominant woman who was very involved in her children’s and future grandchildren’s lives. She was also apparently rather high strung, especially in crisis situations. John and Mary raised four children – Mary Elizabeth, John Jr., Louis Reid, and Margaret – as he advanced in his career.

Lawyer

At the time of their marriage, John was working as a clerk for a local lawyer, William L. Clay. By 1905 he was a stenographer in the prestigious law firm of his former regimental commander. The Lawton and Cunningham firm was general counsel for the Central of Georgia Railway. Col. A.R. Lawton Jr. was the son of Confederate General Alexander R. Lawton Sr., himself a railroad man, lawyer, and commander of the First Georgia Regiment during the Civil War. In 1882 Gen. Lawton was elected president of the fledgling American Bar Association. His son Col. Lawton’s partner T.M. Cunningham, Jr. was elected president of the Georgia Bar Association in 1909-10, when John himself was welcomed into the Bar. As a sad aside, Mr. Cunningham’s wife had her own tragic influence on John’s brother Joseph‘s family some ten years later.

Pawn Broker

By 1913 John not only had his own law office, but he also listed himself as an officer in the Jefferson Loan Society (JLS). John McLaughlin Jr., president and treasurer of JLS, was the next door neighbor of Col. Lawton on Isle of Hope, a recreational and residential area at the terminus of the streetcar line seven miles south of Savannah. It was not through the influence of his former regimental commander that this new business relationship was built, however. John McLaughlin was John Bell’s brother-in-law, the husband of his older sister Mary Agnes. Despite its uptown name, at its inception the Jefferson Loan Society was a storefront pawn shop, though through it and/or the law firm John must have been introduced to stock and bond trading.

Sylvania

In 1914 John moved his family to the town of Sylvania, GA, located about halfway between Savannah and Mary Gallaher Bell’s childhood home of Augusta. Sylvania, the seat of Screven County, was connected to the Central of Georgia Railway by a short spur line from Rocky Ford and according to a contemporary sketch of the town:

“The militia district in which [Sylvania] is situated had in 1900 a population of 3,135, although the town proper contained only 545 inhabitants. It is an important shipping point for the county and handles large quantities of lumber, turpentine, cotton, sugar-cane, fruits and vegetables. It has express and telegraph offices, a money order postoffice with rural free delivery, a bank, several successful mercantile houses, a lumber company, an oil mill and a court house and jail.”

Georgia: Comprising Sketches of Counties, Towns, Events, Institutions, and Persons, Arranged in Cyclopedic Form (1906 -Transcribed by Kristen Bisanz) via genealogytrails.com

Bond Trader

John’s initial occupation in Sylvania was still JLS officer, so it seems that he and his brother-in-law felt there might be opportunities for their loan company there. John became involved in the local government in Sylvania, where their fourth child Margaret was born. The family lived in Sylvania during the Great War, and whether or not the McLaughlins and Bells were involved in market speculation at the time, there were sectors such as materiel supply and war bonds where profits could be made. Following the World War, the economy began to boom as Americans bought radios, vacuum cleaners, and washing machines, went to concerts and picture shows (“silent” films until 1927), and took to the road in their new automobiles in greater numbers. Small investors discovered the stock market, and by 1920 the financial industry was well into a bull market that would last until 1929.

Atlanta

The Bells left Sylvania in 1919, when John was hired by National City Bank of New York to be an Atlanta representative of their investment securities arm, National City Company. The family moved to Ansley Park in what is now Midtown Atlanta, about three miles north of John’s downtown office. They must certainly have owned a car, and their growing prosperity was evidenced by the fact that Ansley Park was “Atlanta’s first driving suburb, a motorcar-oriented suburb of wide, winding streets and green parks designed to attract Atlanta’s wealthiest and most prestigious families.” The Atlanta Preservation Center also notes that “Ansley Park was home to Georgia’s Governors Mansion for many decades and to Margaret Mitchell [author of Gone With the Wind] for most of her life.”

The family would have worshiped at Sacred Heart of Jesus Church, a twin-towered structure of brick and terra cotta built at the turn of the century in the French Romanesque style that still stands on Peachtree Street. The church was administered by Marist priests, and adjacent were Sacred Heart High School and Marist Military High School, where Mary Elizabeth and John Jr. attended respectively. Atlanta was a major railway hub in the 1920s, and not only did the family return to Savannah periodically to visit their relatives by train and by car, but John traveled between Atlanta and New York at least once each year for business, as did others in his office, including his sales manager J.W. Speas. John’s family too may have accompanied him North on occasion, a precursor to their later migrations.

John was 42 and Mary 40 when in April 1922, in anticipation of the birth of their fifth child, Mary was admitted to St. Joseph’s Infirmary, a Catholic training hospital (also near Sacred Heart Church) run by the Sisters of Mercy. Sadly, the unnamed boy died before he took his first breath. John and Mary both must have been especially devastated, as the death certificate was signed by their neighbor.

Bell, Speas, and Co.

John continued to work and travel for National City Co. for six or seven years, but in 1925 he went into private practice with his long-time sales manager. In what was obviously an equal partnership, J.W. Speas was listed as president, while John received first billing in the incorporated name.

Death and Legacy

The entrepreneurial partnership was unfortunately short-lived. John had been long diagnosed with very high blood pressure, which kept him from serving in the Army during World War I. He suffered a fatal heart attack at his home in Ansley Park on October 10, 1926. His wife Mary was apparently again overwhelmed, as John’s sister Mary Agnes McLaughlin came from Savannah to sign the death certificate and to help Mary Bell cope. John, only 46 years-old, was buried in the Bell family plot in Savannah. Mary Gallaher Bell persevered, though her youngest children were then but 12 and 9 years old.

Mary must have gotten strength from her then-married daughter Mary Elizabeth and son-in-law Maurice S. McGarry, who lived in the family home at the time, and 19 year-old John Jr., her oldest son. When he too died in an auto accident just two years later, Mary overcame her grief by focusing on her three surviving children, making it a point to live near or with them as she aged. All soon left Georgia, but not necessarily their sadness, behind. Louis and Margaret never married, but Maurice and Mary Elizabeth provided her with three grandchildren, whom Mary Gallaher Bell helped to raise. She outlived her husband John by 43 years, and when she died in in 1969, Mary’s remains were reunited with those of her husband at Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah.

With gratitude to cousin Bob Meinhard, John and Mary Bell’s great-grandson, for his family history outline on which this narrative is based and the photos that help tell their story.

Adapted from A String of Bells: Stories of a Southern Family © 2020 by Nick J. Guevara, Jr.