♂Robert Thomas Wilkinson

Robert Thomas Wilkinson (23 February 1850 – 15 September 1917) was an Illinois lawyer and merchant of Mount Carmel, Wabash County, the son of a pioneer county judge. Family records say he was mayor of Mount Carmel from 1887 to 1891 and, in later life, president of the First National Bank of Ravia, in Indian Territory, where he and his wife were living by 1908. He was the great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Mabel Wilkinson (1875–1954) and her daughter Mary Esther Schneck (1900–1968).

Early life

He was born on 23 February 1850 at Friendsville, Wabash County, Illinois, the son of William Robert Wilkinson (1816–1886) and Sarah Williams (1816–1885). His father kept the first drug store and the post office at Friendsville, built a flour mill there, and served as justice of the peace, county judge of Wabash County and a member of the Illinois General Assembly; his obituary calls his parents “Col. and Mrs. William Wilkinson”, among the prominent pioneer settlers of the county. A county history published in 1883 records that the couple had eight children, five of whom were then living. Robert appears with his parents and siblings at Friendsville in the censuses of 1860 and 1870.

He was educated in the public schools and the seminary of his native town, read law in the office of Green & Bell, and was admitted to the bar at Mount Vernon, Illinois, at the July term of the Supreme Court in 1879.

Mount Carmel

In the autumn of 1879 he moved to Mount Carmel. He spent two and a half years in the mercantile business with W. H. Besley, the husband of his sister Alice, and then went into partnership with J. Fred Stein, who had married his wife’s sister Mary Alice Harvey. The federal list of postmaster appointments shows him named postmaster of Mount Carmel on 5 January 1882, and family records say he was later reappointed. The census of 1880 had already found him in the town with his wife Julia and their children Robert Clyde and Mabel. and that he served as mayor of the city from 1887 to 1891. He was a ruling elder of the Presbyterian church there. The census of 1900 lists him as an attorney at law in the second ward of Mount Carmel, owning his house free of mortgage; the household included a young servant and his wife’s sister Laura E. Harvey, then unmarried and a music teacher.

Marriage and family

On 22 October 1874, at Mount Carmel, he married Julia Esther Harvey (1857–1951), the daughter of Dr. James Harvey and Eleanor Tougas Lovellette. The couple had four children: Mabel, born in 1875, who married Dr. Sereno Watson Schneck; Robert Clyde Wilkinson (1878–1951); James Harvey Wilkinson (1882–1924); and a son who died in infancy. The 1900 census records that Julia had borne four children, of whom three were living. The infant lies in the family lot in Rose Hill Cemetery, Mount Carmel, under a plain brick marker reading only “INFANT”; the family tree calls him Ross, a name no record gives.

Oklahoma

By 1906 the Wilkinsons had moved to Ravia, in the Chickasaw country of Indian Territory, which became part of Oklahoma in 1907. A family narrative describes him as president of the First National Bank of Ravia and quotes in full a letter he wrote from Ravia on the bank’s stationery on 29 December 1906 to the widow of Dr. Jacob Schneck, his daughter’s father-in-law, in which he recalled that Dr. Schneck’s care had once saved his life during a serious illness. The 1908 obituary of Julia’s brother Orian Ross Harvey names her as “Mrs. R. T. Wilkinson, of Ravia, Okla.”, and the census of 1910 still has him and Julia at Ravia. In 1917 their son Harvey was still living there.

Death

He died on 15 September 1917 at Mount Carmel, at the home of his daughter, Mrs. S. W. Schneck, aged 67 years, 6 months and 22 days, and was buried on 18 September in the Odd Fellows section of Rose Hill Cemetery, in the family lot where his infant son and, later, his wife were also buried. Julia survived him by thirty-three years, living in her last years in her daughter’s household at Mount Carmel.

Notes

The two family accounts of his time as postmaster give the dates 6 February and 3 April with the years 1873 and 1882 in opposite order; an appointment at Mount Carmel in 1873 would precede his move to the town, and neither order is certain. His obituary in the Mount Carmel Register says five children were born to the marriage and counts among them “Mrs. Thomas Penn” of Kokomo, Indiana, who had died a year earlier; she was in fact his sister Sarah, and the census and his widow’s obituary both give four children. The same obituary calls both of his parents natives of England, while the 1900 census gives his mother’s birthplace as New Jersey and the 1883 county history says she was born in Ireland. A cemetery memorial gives his death year as 1918, and a lineage application of the Daughters of the American Revolution gives his birth year as 1853; the obituary and the 1900 census support 1917 and 1850. His widow’s obituary gives their marriage date as 31 October 1875, against 22 October 1874 in his own obituary and the 1883 county history.