Carter Harrison of Lexington
Carter Henry Harrison III, only surviving child of his recently deceased father and Caroline Russell, was born in 1825 at “Clifton,” the family farm near Lexington, Kentucky. He graduated from Yale in 1845, and returned to Lexington to manage the farm and its nineteen slaves.1 His mother remarried in 1850, at which time Carter traveled to Europe and the Orient. In 1855 Carter received a law degree from Lexington’s Transylvania University.
Sophie Preston of Henderson
Sophonisba Grayson Preston (family reference #3331) was born in Henderson, Kentucky in 1830, the only child of Hebe Carter Grayson 333 and William Preston. Her grandmother Chinoe Hart Smith (1779-1870) is considered to be the first white child to have been born in Kentucky. Carter and Sophie were distant cousins, each with a grandparent of the Kentucky Cabell family, and through them each claimed direct descent from the Indian princess Pocahontas. The name Sophonisba, common in the Cabell line, honors a 3rd century Carthaginian diplomat.
Getting Away From Slavery
Sophie and Carter Harrison married in 1855. Carter had a natural opposition to slavery, and the newlyweds spent their honeymoon seeking a place for a fresh start. While visiting Galena, Illinois, “the mosquitos proved so great a pest that whatever enthusiasm the may have had for the young city quickly cooled.” In any case, the talk of Galena was of opportunities in Chicago, and the couple boarded a recently-completed connecting rail line to investigate. The future metropolis of Chicago had been parceled out around an isolated Lake Michigan outpost during the 1830s. Its population exploded from a few hundred in 1833 through 30,000 in 1850 to 80,000 by 1855. The Harrisons were smitten.
“Speculators, gamblers, adventurers of all kinds flocked to the frontier settlement, along with the solid and substantial citizens who came to found families and fortunes in this outpost of civilization…. Land was the great speculation.”
“Chicago Yesterdays,” pg. 9
Carter and Sophie returned to Kentucky, where they arranged to manumit their house servants and sell their Kentucky farm with its few remaining slaves. They lost a son in infancy and welcomed daughter Caroline (Lina, 33312) in 1857, with whom they were at last able to move north. Carter used the farm proceeds to invest in Chicago real estate.
Kentuckians, Growing Up With Chicago
In May 1860, Chicago hosted the historic convention which launched Kentucky-born Abraham Lincoln to the presidency. That same spring Carter H. Harrison IV (33313) was born on Chicago’s West Side.
“The old Harrison homestead… stood at the corner of Ashland Avenue and Jackson Street. In my [Carter IV] boyhood days, Ashland Avenue was known as Reuben Street. When, ‘Hey! Rube!’ came into vogue as a term of ridicule, the name of the street was changed… to that of the country home of Kentucky’s greatest statesman, Henry Clay. The subdividers were Kentuckians – clear-eyed, sharp-witted, big-hearted. There were then seven houses on Reuben Street, a dirt road bordered on either side by a deep ditch.”
The owners of these homes included Henry H. Honoré (from Louisville) and John E. Owsley (from Danville). “My father, in those early days, lived in the home he himself had built at the southwest corner of Hermitage Avenue and Tyler Street. Our family thereupon moved to the quarters vacated by the Honoré family, our old Hermitage Avenue home finally to be torn down to make room for the Presbyterian Hospital [now Rush University Medical Center]. These Kentuckians were farmers’ boys. On their grounds they kept their horses, cows, and chickens, and their gardens in which all the family vegetables were raised. My father cured all the hams and the bacon needed for his family use. On the day the martyred President Lincoln passed through Chicago to lie in state, a terrific windstorm lifted the Hermitage Avenue smokehouse of my father from its underpinning, its framework and planking, as well as its valuable contents, a jumbled mass of debris.”
“The two blocks east of us from Reuben Street to Loomis Street were vacant prairie. What with the rains and melting snows, these blocks were flooded deep all winter long and here we had our skating-rink. In summertime they served as cow-pastures, except on rare occasions when a baseball game was played by the better known nines of the city.” Young Carter recalled an 1868 game, ‘the Excelsiors and the Eurekas?” at which he was hired to pass out lemonade and chase foul balls. Further entertainments of the 1860s included dances, concerts, operas and theatricals, minstrel shows, New Years’ open houses, and Wood’s museum.
“As Chicago advanced in dignity and prosperity, Reuben Street became Ashland Avenue and the old homestead was given a street number – at first 163, later 231 Ashland Avenue. Here our family lived from 1866 to 1904 with the exception of three years, from 1873 to 1876, which we spent in Germany. In the dining room of this old home on the night of October 28, 1893, in the closing hours of the World’s Fair, at which he had put in a busy day, my father passed away – the victim of an assassin’s bullet.”
Ten Children
Sophie and Carter III had ten children, six of whom died in infancy. Daughter Lina married neighbor Heaton Owsley and had four children. Carter IV married Edith Ogden of New Orleans, who bore and raised two children. Wm. Preston (33318, b. 1869) married late and had one child. (The 1871 Great Chicago fire, which left 1/3 of the the city’s 300,000 residents homeless, mostly spared the West Side.) Sophie, in delicate shape after the loss of her 9th child, was advised to seek a better climate for the birth of her 10th. Daughter Sophonisba (3331(10)) was born in Germany in 1873. Her namesake mother died overseas at age 42.
1893 World’s Fair
After two terms in Congress, in 1879 Carter Harrison III was elected to the first of five terms as mayor of Chicago. He would preside over a metropolis that grew from 500,000 residents to more than 1 million in just ten years. The 1893 World’s Colombian Exposition, which opened in May, drew 27 million visitors to Chicago.
Assassination
In late October, “the closing days of the Fair were approaching; throughout it the gifted mayor of Chicago had represented his city at function after function. He had become a national character. Mayors’ Day had been celebrated on the grounds, Harrison had welcomed city executives with an eloquence still ringing in every ear when in his Ashland Avenue home, resting after the evening meal, he was shot down at his dining room door by a cowardly assassin,” a disgruntled office-seeker.
1 1850 U.S. Federal Census, Slave Schedule, for Dist. No. 1, Fayette County, KY, 16 Sep 1850. 7 of the 19 slaves were ages 8 and below. Other sources claim his family owned 100 slaves.
Quotes from: Harrison, Carter H., Stormy Years: The Autobiography of Carter H. Harrison, Five Times Mayor of Chicago, © 1935, Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis; and Kirkland, Caroline (ed.), Chicago Yesterdays: A Sheaf of Remembrances, © 1919, Duaghaday and Co., Chicago
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