Alice Milburn Wood vs. Hollis Amidon

Let’s lay out the course of events leading to the 1875 lawsuit over lot number 11. There are just two pieces of information that I’m relying on here, the newspaper article that presented the case to the general public in May of 1875 and the abstract of the case published in the following year with the court records for the term.

Lot number 11 was just one piece of the estate of George Milburn. When he died in 1838, the everything was bequeathed to his children and their heirs. But the use of the property and the decisions on how and when to distribute it were invested in George’s widow Margaret for her lifetime. As the children did come of age and marry, provision was duly made for them. When the fourth and last child to marry, namely George’s middle daughter Margaret Agnes, did finally become the bride of Hollis Amidon, nearly everything in the estate had been disposed in accord with the will. Old Mrs. Milburn retained only one piece of property. That was lot 11, sometimes called more explicitly part of lot 11, at the corner of Virginia Avenue and Seventh Street SW. And on that lot stood the house where all three of them lived—had lived for over ten years. Hollis and Margaret Agnes made some kind of improvements to the property. Old Mrs. Milburn then, in November 1866, turned over the whole, both the land and the house, to Margaret and Hollis Amidon, to be Margaret’s portion as George’s heir, and in consideration of her own—old Mrs. Milburn’s—need to be looked after in her later years.

We don’t know what the reaction by the rest of the family was to any of this business up to this point. But when Margaret Amidon died “intestate and without issue” in December of 1869, someone in the family put it to Amidon that he could not expect to have title to the land, since that belonged to George’s heirs by rights, and Mrs. Milburn lacked any power to deliver it to anyone else; that whatever contract appeared in the 1866 deed, it was void with respect to Hollis Amidon. But nothing else happened, it seems. In the 1870 census, Hollis's name appears on the record at the top spot in the household, with old Mrs. Milburn next, keeping house for everyone; and then follows the usual assortment of boarders.

In November of 1874 old Mrs. Margaret Milburn died. The following January Amidon registered the property in his own name. Straight away Alice Milburn Wood and her husband complained to the Court. The deed should be cancelled, since it was improper, and there should be a “partition.” I suppose that to mean a separate consideration of the house, which the Woods appear to have recognized as Amidon’s now, from the land which they believed was by right due to them. Who else took their side? The newspaper account of the suit names Violet Abell, George Milburn’s youngest daughter, as a defendant along with her husband. I can only think that this is a mistake. The only way, it seems to me, that Violet and her husband could ever be involved was as fellow Milburn heirs with an interest in the property. Surely they must have counted among the plaintiffs? The published abstract does not help to clarify who lined up with whom. It does include an “et al.” for Amidon, but I can’t imagine who those others could be or, indeed, why there should have been anyone else in his corner.

However this may be, Amidon, for his part, filed a “demurrer” to say that the Woods’ suit raised only invalid points and ought to be dismissed. The Court agreed. George Milburn’s will was consulted and found to give to old Mrs. Milburn all the discretionary power she needed to look after her own interests, so that she could give up the house and the land to the Amidons with the understanding that they would continue to look after her, while at the same time making this final distribution of George Milburn’s estate as a marriage portion for Margaret Agnes. It was all made so explicit by the language of the will and of the 1866 transfer that it’s hard to see how the Woods or their counsel thought they had the slightest chance to prevail.

So that was that. Alice Wood didn’t live too much longer, as we’ve already heard. Hollis Amidon got married one more time, his third wife being a widow lady from Vermont. The couple went to live in a new house clear on the other side of town. Amidon was eighty-two when he died in 1889, and the newspaper obituary mentioned his widow, but got his lady from Vermont confused with Margaret Agnes Milburn.

• • •

Why didn’t Mrs. Milburn marry Amidon? That’s one thing I can’t figure. Would she have lost control of her remaining property and income if that had happened? It just seems so much more likely that those two were the natural couple—compatible, near in age, close in religious experience. I suppose it is possible that there was some ardor between Amidon and Margaret Agnes. However, the brief mention of the Amidons’ union that we’ll get to hear in the eulogy for Margaret Milburn Amidon does nothing to convince me.

One other question comes to mind due to that description of Mrs. Amidon being “intestate and without issue.” Recall that she had tuberculosis and knew for a long time—perhaps years—that she was dying. How is it that she never made a will? I wonder about that.

End of the family in DC

What became of the Milburn household after Thomas William Milburn set off for Texas? His father, Mr. Thomas Milburn the carpenter, had died in 1872. TW's little sister Eva, the youngest of the children, had died in 1874 when just a schoolgirl. And the rest of them?

TW’s older sister Alice was married and not living at home any more. Before her marriage she had been—like a number of women in the Milburn line—a schoolteacher. For five years she had taught in the Fourth District schools around where they were living, first primary school, then secondary. In October of 1870 she resigned her post, and married John R. Wood. Mr Wood, a Virginian, was a river boat pilot. The Woods moved to a house of their own a few blocks further south. They apparently tried to start a family (this is not clear to me), but never got very far. Alice took sick with a “lingering illness” and died in the summer of 1877. Her husband stuck around Washington. He was now a boat captain taking day-trippers and pleasure-seekers on excursions to, say, Leonardtown down on the Maryland shore. I’m sorry to say I don’t yet know what happened to him, nor where he ended up.

TW's sister Ada was just out of secondary school when she married in January of 1876. Her husband George Kleindenst came from Washington, from the neighborhood, so they had likely known each other for years. Right away they started their large family. Suddenly in 1880 George headed to Texas, following his brother-in-law to San Antonio, and Ada and the children came and joined him there.

Mrs. Pamelia Milburn, TW’s mother, decided to remarry, a few months after Ada wed George. Pamelia's second husband was Mr James H. Granger of Washington. Granger was another carpenter. He was a little bit older than Pamelia, and had been married twice before, with a grown son. For a time the Grangers stayed in Southwest DC, but in the coming decade they wound up moving out to the suburbs south of the Eastern Branch. All of Pamelia’s own children were either dead or living far away.

TW’s mother Pamelia

There will be more about Pamelia Granger in another post, and more about Ada Kleindenst when we get back to Texas.

Thomas W. Milburn and family in Washington DC

Thomas William Milburn came from Washington, DC, where he was born on 20 January 1855. He was the son of another Thomas Milburn and his wife Pamelia Sawyer. At home TW had an older sister called Alice, born about 1848. He should have had an older brother George, but that boy died the year before TW was born. We know about George from the notice run on 6 July 1854 in a District newspaper,

On Sunday, the 2d instant, at Vineyard Farm, Charles County, (Md.) George W., aged 17 months, only son of Thomas and Pamel[i]a Milburn, of this city. 

Another sister was born in 1858 or 1859 (there is some difficulty settling on the year) and was named Ada Violet. Two more babies, born during the time of the Civil War, we know only from their graves in the family plot in Congressional Cemetery, where they were buried with no given names recorded. And then one more child, the youngest sister, called Eva, born in 1866. She brings the Milburn family up to its largest number, the four children shown in the census of 1870, Alice, Thomas, Ada, and Eva.

TW’s father, Mr. Thomas Milburn, was described in his census records as a carpenter. That term evidently was applied to the occupation we might call contractor  or builder. Although Mr. Thomas Milburn is very little mentioned in the newspapers, there is one article, reporting estimates submitted for constructing “the new asylum,” which shows him turning in a $34,950 bid. Now, which building might this have been? I’ve never found any asylum in the city to match the date of construction and the architect talked about in the article. The Milburn bid was not, by the way, either the highest or the lowest of the ones recorded. Mr. Milburn seems to have done well enough at his business. He is mentioned in another article carrying $170 in gold on him, which he lost to a pickpocket! In addition to getting on with his business he was a member of both the Odd Fellows and the Masons, and he was elected Commissioner of his city ward (the Seventh). He was evidently a pleasant enough fellow of the common sort, well enough liked, but there isn’t so much to tell about him.

One possibly interesting thing, to me, is the appearance starting in 1869 of advertisements for the partnership of Angus & Milburn. Mr. Angus worked in Northwest Washington. Our Milburns lived and worked in the Seventh Ward, which is to say Southwest Washington. I think the early signs of the decline of that latter part of the city must have already been felt in the 1850s with the coming of the railroad. The B&O eventually crossed through Southwest, in fact right beside the Milburn home. A nuisance of itself, what with the noise, soot, and embers, the train also changed a small scale residential and commercial neighborhood into a more industrial one. Then, after the Civil War was ended, the population of the area started to grow dense from newcomers to the city. So when Mr. Thomas Milburn found a partner in Job Winans Angus, a very well respected builder who flourished in a far more illustrious quadrant of the city, that alliance might have begun a transition to a better established business, in a prosperous and expansive locale.

from an 1869 directory

Mr. Thomas Milburn died in 1872. He was just 48 years old. The paper says it was “after a lingering illness.” Perhaps that was tuberculosis—quite common. And Mr. Milburn’s death was not the only loss happening for the family. Mr. Milburn’s sister Margaret died in 1869 (definitely tubercular), his sister Mary Ann in 1870. In 1874 his little daughter Eva, TW’s sister, went to her grave in May; and old Mrs. Milburn, Mr. Milburn’s aunt, who had been the guardian of the family property, died in November. The following spring the family split into opponents in a lawsuit over some of the property, and TW joined up with the Signal Corps bound for Texas.