♂Thomas Day Curtis

Thomas Day Curtis (6 July 1824 – 5 February 1896) was an American printer, newspaper editor and agricultural writer of central New York, who called the first meeting of the Central New York Farmers’ Club at Utica in 1870 and served as its first secretary, and who the next year was elected president of the National Dairymen’s Club. He was the great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his son Hubert Orestes Curtis (1868–1922), whose son Frederic Arthur Curtis (1903–1990) was Roger’s father.

Early life

He was born on 6 July 1824 at Norwich, Chenango County, New York, by family accounts the eldest of the eight children of Waterman Curtis (1793–1859) and Thirza Day (born 1802). His middle name was his mother’s maiden name. His father was a farmer who had come from Massachusetts, and the family moved from Norwich to the neighboring town of Smyrna about 1831.

New York and Brooklyn

He married Annis Wheaton (1827–1883), a native of New Berlin in the same county, at Norwich; a family compilation gives the year as 1846. By June 1850 the couple were living in the Eighth Ward of Manhattan with their infant son Alphonse, eight months old, and the census recorded Thomas as a printer. According to his obituary he started a ladies’ journal in New York, “which he conducted for several years”, and was later employed on New York papers. In June 1860 the family was in the 16th Ward of Brooklyn, Thomas entered as a clerk. His obituary adds that during the Civil War “he was one of the writers on the New York Times”, and an obituary of his son Frank, published in 1934, says he “worked under Horace Greeley on the old New York Tribune”; neither claim is confirmed by a record.

By June 1863 he had moved his family back to Smyrna, his father’s village, where the draft registration of that month listed him, aged 39 and married, as an editor. At the state census of June 1865 he was still at Smyrna, now recorded as a farmer, with Annis and six of their children in the household.

Utica and the dairy movement

In 1867, according to his obituary, he went to Utica as managing editor of the Utica Morning Herald, a post he held until 1873. The census of 1870 found the family in the Third Ward of Utica, Thomas an editor and publisher. There he became, in the words of his obituary, “a recognized authority on dairy matters”. He wrote a pamphlet on cheesemaking, and the obituary credits him with suggesting the Utica dairymen’s board of trade.

A letter published in October 1896 by one of the club’s founding members describes how the Central New York Farmers’ Club began. Curtis went from farmer to farmer to persuade them to meet, and “boldly took the initiative” by calling a meeting at Bagg’s Hotel in Utica on 21 January 1870. At the next meeting, on 4 February, the club was organized with the Hon. Samuel Campbell as president, Horatio Seymour, the former governor of New York, as first vice-president, and T. D. Curtis as secretary. His “full and voluminous reports” of the meetings were reprinted, the writer said, by the press across the United States and Canada. A history of Oneida County published in 1896 records that a meeting at Bagg’s Hotel on 1 March 1871 founded the National Dairymen’s Club, and that “T. D. Curtis was elected president”.

Syracuse, Watertown and the salt trade

From Utica he went to Syracuse, where his obituary says he worked on the Syracuse Standard; the state census of 1875 found the family there, Thomas the editor of a weekly paper. He then returned to Utica as editor of the Utica Republican, a paper started by Lewis Lawrence in the interest of the senator Roscoe Conkling, and the census of 1880 recorded him as a journalist on Elizabeth Street, Utica, with six of the younger children at home. When the Republican closed he worked briefly on the Utica Observer and then edited the Watertown Dispatch. While at Utica he had founded an agricultural paper, the Farmer and Dairyman, which he continued to publish at Watertown and later at Syracuse. Annis died at Syracuse on 15 May 1883, aged 55.

His standing with dairymen led to a second career. The American Dairy Salt Company engaged him to travel the United States developing markets for its salt, work in which, the obituary says, “he was quite successful”; he later did the same work for the Thurbers of New York, who handled Higgins dairy salt. His 24-page manual How to Make the Best Butter was issued at New York in 1886 by the Higgin’s Eureka Salt company. Alongside the trade writing he published verse: The Nazarene and Other Rhymes, printed at the Farmer and Dairyman office in Syracuse in 1885, and a verse “appeal to the men and women of wealth and power”, Resurgam, which he published himself at Chicago in 1888. His obituary called him “a concise and forcible writer”.

The family

Annis bore fourteen children between 1849 and 1872, according to the family record, and by June 1865 the state census recorded ten already born. Several died young. Two infant sons, Alfred and Alphonse, died in Manhattan in April 1850 and April 1851. A daughter, Salenia, who appears in the census of 1860 as Flora, aged two, and another named Cristabel in the family record both died about 1862, and a son born and buried at Utica in July 1872 was the last. The children who grew up were Mary Ada, who married the Syracuse druggist Cone Williams; George Day; Frank Lionel, who became a pianist and head of the music department at Syracuse University; Albert Waterman; Florabel; Bertha E.; Orcus Allen; Arthur Lee; and Hubert Orestes.

Chicago and Fond du Lac

On 16 August 1887, at Chicago, he married Harriet J. Ray, known as Hattie, a widow. The Cook County record gives his age as 63 and hers as 51, and gives his residence as Cook County. They settled at Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, where he was described at his death as “a prominent resident”. On the club’s twentieth anniversary, 21 January 1890, he sent a history of its founding to the members at Utica, his last letter to them.

He died at Fond du Lac on 5 February 1896, aged 71. On 8 February a Milwaukee paper reported that Dr. C. F. Ray, Hattie’s son, had returned from Fond du Lac, “where he attended the funeral of his stepfather, the late Colonel T. D. Curtis, a prominent agricultural editor, formerly of Syracuse, N. Y.”; the Milwaukee Sentinel of 9 February printed the same news, and brief notices of his death ran in Oshkosh and Green Bay. His New York obituary listed his wife and eight children as surviving: Mrs. Cone Williams and George D. Curtis of Chicago, “Prof. Frank L. Curtis, the musician of Syracuse”, “Albert W. Curtis, the artist of Utica”, “Miss Bertha E. Curtis, an attorney of Chicago”, Orcus A. Curtis, then in Canada, and Arthur L. and Hubert O. Curtis of Chicago. Florabel is not named. He was buried that February in Rienzi Cemetery at Fond du Lac.

The dairy press noted his death too. On 22 February 1896 the New England Farmer of Boston listed “Col. T. D. Curtis, one of the few widely-known pioneers in associated dairying” among the recent deaths, though it placed the death at Milwaukee, not Fond du Lac.

Notes

No record of his own names his parents. The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography (vol. 25, 1936, p. 110), in its entry for his son Frank Lionel, traces the family from Thomas Curtis of Wethersfield down to “Waterman and Tirza Day, who were the grandparents of Frank L. Curtis”; the entry gives Frank’s birth as 23 April 1856 and calls Thomas “a journalist on the staff of the New York ‘Tribune.’” It is a compiled account, presumably supplied by the family. The rest of the case is circumstantial: his middle name, his birth at Norwich where Waterman and Thirza married, a place for a boy of his age in their household in the census of 1840, his own answer in 1880 that his father was born in Massachusetts and his mother in New York, and the name Albert Waterman that he gave a son (his son George Day carried his own middle name, so adds nothing). The exact birth date, 6 July 1824, comes from a family chart of 1994; the census and the draft registration of 1863 agree only on the year.

The Wisconsin papers styled him “Colonel”, and the state’s index of deaths enters him as “Col L D Curtis”, and the Wisconsin death-records index, which gives his burial, reads “L. D. Curtis”; the 1850 census of New York City is indexed under “L D Curtis” as well. The Oshkosh and Green Bay notices print “Col. F. D. Curtis”. His obituary, which covers the war years, mentions no military service, and none has been found; the title may have been a courtesy one. The death index points to volume 2, page 564, where no entry is recorded; the death-records index gives the burial as page 364 of a register, and the register entry itself is not known.

His New York obituary, in the Daily Sentinel of October 1896, says that he “died a few days since”. The Wisconsin reports of his funeral are dated February 1896, and the date given here follows them; the New York paper, far from Fond du Lac, was reporting the death eight months late.