Colonel Henry Ludington: A Memoir

by Willis Fletcher Johnson

LEWIS LUDINGTON,
Son of Col. Henry Ludington.

(From portrait by Frank B. Carpenter.)

The sixth son and youngest child of Colonel Henry Ludington was Lewis Ludington, who was born in Fredericksburgh on June 25, 1786. At the age of twenty he engaged with his elder brother Frederick in conducting a general store near their home. A few years later he married Polly Townsend, the daughter and oldest child of Samuel Townsend and his wife Keturah Crosby. The Townsends had come to Dutchess County many years before from Long Island, and Polly Townsend’s great-grandfather, Elihu Townsend, settled on a farm in South East Precinct, close to the Westchester County line. He died about 1804, at the age of 102 years, and was able to walk about the yard six weeks before his death. For several years after their marriage Lewis and Polly Townsend Ludington lived in a cottage near the Ludington homestead at Fredericksburgh, or Kent, as it was then renamed. Then, in the spring of 1816, they removed to the village of Carmel, where soon after Lewis Ludington bought property which is still owned by members of the family. In the fall of 1855 he completed and occupied the house which is still the family homestead. The wood of which this house was built was cut on lands owned by Mr. Ludington in Wisconsin, was sawed in his mills at Oconto in that State, and was shipped from Green Bay to Buffalo in the lake schooner Lewis Ludington. This circumstance suggests the fact that Lewis Ludington was strongly identified with business interests in Wisconsin. He went West in the fall of 1838, in company with his nephew, Harrison Ludington, already mentioned, and Harvey Burchard, of Carmel, N. Y. They visited Milwaukee, which was then a mere village, and during that winter made several long trips on horseback through the interior of Wisconsin, for the purpose of selecting government lands. They purchased extensive tracts, largely with a view to the lumber trade, and in 1839 they formed at Milwaukee the general mercantile firm of Ludington, Burchard & Co., of which Lewis Ludington was the eldest and Harrison Ludington the youngest member. A year or two later Burchard retired and the firm became Ludington & Co., Harrison’s younger brother Nelson being taken into it. Nelson Ludington, by the way, was afterward president of the Fifth National Bank of Chicago, and for many years was at the head of large and successful lumbering and manufacturing interests and was prominent in commercial life in Chicago. For nearly twenty years Lewis Ludington was the head of the firm of Ludington & Co., which was one of the foremost in Milwaukee, and which conducted what was for those days a business of great magnitude. The firm also had lumber mills at Oconto and docks at Milwaukee. About 1843, Lewis Ludington bought a tract of land in Columbia County, Wisconsin, and in July of the following year laid out thereon the city of Columbus. For many years he personally directed and encouraged the development of the new community, which grew to be a city of considerable population and wealth.

Thus for almost a quarter of a century Mr. Ludington conducted a number of enterprises in Wisconsin, enjoying at all times the respect and confidence of those who knew him and ranking among the best representative citizens of the two States with which he was identified. He was a Whig in politics, and exerted much influence in party councils, especially opposing the extension of slavery, but would never accept public office, though frequently urged to do so. He died on September 3, 1857, at Kenosha, Wisconsin, and his remains were interred in the family lot in Raymond Hill Cemetery, at Carmel, N. Y.

CHARLES HENRY LUDINGTON,
Grandson of Col. Henry Ludington.

The fifth child of Lewis Ludington is Charles Henry Ludington, who was born at Carmel, N. Y., on February 1, 1825. Among the schools which he attended in boyhood was one conducted in the former home of “Peter Parley” at Ridgefield, Conn. In 1842 he became a clerk in a wholesale dry-goods store in New York, and later was for many years a member of a leading firm in that same business—the firm of Lathrop, Ludington & Co., at first on Cortlandt Street, and afterward on Park Row. A considerable portion of the business of this firm was with the southern States, but a few years before the Civil War its name was published in the notorious “black-list” of the pro-slavery Secessionists, as an “Abolitionist” concern, and as a result all trade with that section of the country was ended. The “black-list” at first comprised only the names of Bowen, Holmes & Co., Lathrop, Ludington & Co., and a few others, but in time was increased until it embraced about forty of the leading houses in wholesale lines in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, and was widely published throughout the South, to injure if possible the business of those who, like Bowen, Holmes & Co., “sold their goods but not their principles.” Of course the outbreak of the war ended what little trade remained for these houses in the South, but Lathrop, Ludington & Co. more than recouped elsewhere the losses of their southern trade, and before the end of the war had become the third leading firm in that line in New York. Mr. Ludington was an ardent upholder of the Union. Unable himself to go to the war as a soldier, he employed and sent a substitute, and his firm contributed large sums for the recruiting and equipping of troops in New York City and in Putnam County. Retiring in 1868, he has since that time been engaged in various personal enterprises in New York and in the West.

James Ludington, the sixth child of Lewis Ludington, was born at Carmel, on April 18, 1827, went to Milwaukee in 1843, worked in the establishment of Ludington & Co., aided his father in founding the town of Columbus, and was for a time his father’s resident agent there. Later, at Milwaukee, he was treasurer of a railroad company and vice-president of the Bank of the West at Madison, Wisconsin. In 1859 he acquired extensive saw-mills at the mouth of the Père Marquette River, in Michigan, and there founded the city of Ludington. He died on April 1, 1891.

In addition to the impress thus widely made upon the military, political, business and other history of the United States by members of the family, the name of Ludington, in memory of the influence and achievements of those who have borne it, is honorably inscribed upon the maps of no fewer than four of the States. A village of Putnam County, at the site of the old homestead of colonial and revolutionary times, bears, as we have seen, the name of Ludingtonville—at once a tribute to the Ludington family and an unfortunate example of the unhappy American habit, now less prevalent than formerly, of adding “ville” to local names. Far better was the bestowal of the simple and sufficient name of Ludington upon the lake port in Michigan, referred to in the preceding notice of James Ludington’s life. The same name is borne by a village in the parish of Calcasieu, in southwestern Louisiana, while the part the Ludington family played in the settlement and upbuilding of the State of Wisconsin is commemorated in the name of a village in Eau Claire County, which retains an old and familiar variant of spelling, Luddington.