Horatio Dalton Newcomb, 1809-1874

Brother and business partner of Warren Newcomb, JLN’s husband

JLN’s husband, Warren Newcomb, was one of nine sons and three daughters born to Dalton and Harriet (Wells) Newcomb in Barnardstown, MA. Another son was Warren’s twin brother, Wesson. However, it is their oldest born son, Horatio Dalton–Warren’s partner in a wholesale grocery business—who is of greater interest to our story. Their father was a successful and well-to-do farmer, a profession that failed to interest either Horatio or Warren.

H.D. Newcomb was to become a prominent Louisville, Kentucky businessman and civic leader. Every account of him makes note of his wealth, his “colossal fortune.” He was twenty-one -twenty-two years old when he made his way to Louisville and began working as a clerk in a small business. Within five years, he was a thriving merchant in the wholesale liquor business and began widening his business to include groceries. Warren was invited to join him and together they formed H.D. Newcomb & Brother. In 1840, the brothers went into the exclusive sale of sugars, molasses, and coffee. Their business was aided by the work of their brother Hezekiah, captain of a steamboat on the Tennessee River, who directed a sizable portion of the trade on the Tennessee River to them. This was the first of Horatio’s major business successes.

In 1850, Horatio supplied the capital to save from failure the cotton manufacturing firm of Cannelton Cotton Mills, at Cannelton, Indiana. The mill, which primarily employed women and girls, was said to have production “unprecedented in the history of modern manufactures” and became the source of the bulk of his fortune. With another brother, Dwight, Horatio leased the Cannelton Coal Mines and turned that business over to Dwight after a few years. By 1859, Horatio was one of the wealthiest men in Louisville.

In 1861, he was elected a director of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad and soon devoted his energy, talent and resources to building and extending the railroad. In 1868, he was elected president, and reelected each year until his death. It is this occupation for which he was widely known and now remembered.

However, it is not so much Horatio’s business acumen and wealth that interests us here, but rather the possible relevance of the scandals and court cases in which he was associated as a way of illuminating JLN’s fear of being wrongly declared insane and institutionalized against her will. The first scandal concerns his first wife; the second, his second wife; and the third, his son Victor. The commitment to an insane asylum of one of his relatives, his first cousin H.K. Newcomb, may also have contributed to her preoccupation with insanity.

In 1838, H.D. Newcomb married Cornelia Reed, the daughter of a well-known Kentucky family. They had four children: Horatio “Victor” (b. 1844, d. 1911); Ernest (b. 1847 or ‘48, d. 1852); Herman (b.1849, d. 1870); and Cornelia (b. abt 1850, d. 1852). At the time of the 1850 U.S. Census, Warren and Josephine were living with Horatio, Cornelia, and their three children. Then in 1852, Cornelia, “while laboring under a temporary derangement of mind, produced by recent sickness, on the night of the 21^st[December], took her four children to the attic, and threw them out of the window to the pavement below. Ernest, a boy about five years of age, was killed outright, and the smallest, a little girl, was picked up in a dying condition. The other two children, though greatly injured, are in a fair way to recover.” (The Sun, [Baltimore, Maryland] 12-28-1852)

The daughter, Cornelia, died during the night. Victor and Herman survived. Mr. Newcomb then placed his wife in the “McLean Asylum for the Insane” at Somerville, Massachusetts, known for offering a bucolic setting and humane approach to mental illness, and located in the town where her sister would reside. Horatio and Warren’s sister Mary came to live with the family in Louisville.

There is no mention of this tragedy in JLN’s letters. She and Warren were living in Louisville at the time, possibly with the family. However, JLN’s fear of being unjustly institutionalized for insanity may well have stemmed from the treatment accorded her sister-in-law. Cornelia was never tried in a court of law; never found to be guilty of murder, or legally “insane.” Yet she was institutionalized for the remainder of her life. Although institutionalizing Cornelia may have been considered more humane than declaring her legally insane or trying her for murder, it is possible that JLN also understood this event as the way powerful men exert their control over women.

In 1871, Horatio was able to influence the Kentucky Legislature to pass an act by which the grounds for divorce were expanded to include cases where the husband or wife was incurably insane. Under this act, Horatio was divorced from Cornelia in May 1871. Sometime after, the legislature repealed the act.

One month after the act was passed, Horatio married Mary Cornelia Smith (b 1848, d. 1905), about 40 years his junior. The marriage was deemed so unsuitable, no Episcopal minister in Kentucky would marry them and a clergyman had to be brought in from Canada. They had two sons, Warren Smith Newcomb (b. 1872) and Horatio Dalton Newcomb (b. 1873). Horatio senior died in 1874, setting off “the famous domestic tragedy suit, commonly known as the Newcomb case…” At the time of his death, Horatio was president of the Louisville, Nashville, and Great Southern Railroad leaving an estate of approximately two million dollars. Victor Newcomb challenged his father’s will with a resulting decision that decreed his mother, still institutionalized, the lawful widow and gave to her one-third of his father’s estate. His father’s marriage to Mary Smith was therefore void, though the children were recognized as legitimate, and received $400,000 each, as specified by will, as did their mother. The liquidation of the estate was reported with great interest in the papers, including the entire listing of art works sold at auction. The Newcomb mansion H.D. Newcomb built in 1859 at 118 West Broadway, Louisville, became home to the Louisville Female Seminary from 1887-1891. It is highly possible that JLN was aware of the Newcomb mansion becoming home to the female seminary.

To recap, among the immediate family of H.D. Newcomb were his first wife, Cornelia Reed; their son Horatio “Victor”; and H.D.’s second wife Mary Smith [later, in her second marriage, Ten Broeck] and their sons: Warren and Horatio “Dalton Newcomb. A first cousin was Henry Knox Newcomb.

For an image of H.D. Newcomb, see here.