Grandma Garretson: Ellen Howe Abbot Garretson (1836–1922)

Ellen Howe Abbott Garretson (1836–1922) and her daughter Ellen Garretson Wade (1859–1917) . This photograph can also be obtained through the WRHS Library/Archives at the Cleveland History Center of Western Reserve Historical Society (https://www.wrhs.org/research/)

Been thinking about Ellen Howe Abbott Garretson recently. She is mostly remembered today — when she is remembered at all — as the mother of Ellen “Nellie” Garretson Wade, the wife of Jeptha “Homer” Wade II. The lovely photograph above provided by the Wade family shows the two women and was taken before Nellie’s death in 1917, probably in 1916.

There’s such a lot of research to be done on the Wade family that I haven’t spent much time getting to know the Garretson side. The Garretson side is often given short shrift in the family. As exhibit A, I offer this photograph taken of Nellie, her mother, and her mother-in-law, at Mill Pond Plantation.

Ellen Garretson Wade, Anna McGaw Wade, and Ellen Howe Abbot Garretson at Mill Pond Plantation, Thomasvilled, GA. Photograph Courtesy of the Wade Family. This photograph can also be obtained through the WRHS Library/Archives at the Cleveland History Center of Western Reserve Historical Society (https://www.wrhs.org/research/)

The photograph has been thoughtfully labeled and re-label. We see here the women identified by their “grandmotherly titles” and by their maiden names. Grandma Wade (Ellen Garretson), Great-Grandmother Wade (Anna McGaw), and Great-Grandmother Garretson (Ellen G’s mother). Poor Great-grandmother Garretson her identity reduced to her role as Nellie’s mother.

The fact that she and her daughter both share the same first name “Ellen” has led to confusion and conflation. Even WorldCat Identities has it wrong but this is probably simply a typographical error and someone typed a 1856 when they should have typed 1836. So who was Ellen Howe Abbott Garretson?

Ellen was the daughter of an architect William Howe (1803–1852) and Azubah Stone, one of ten children of a Charleton, Massachusetts farmer and his wife, Amasa and Esther Boyden Stone. (One of Azubah’s brothers was Amasa Stone Jr. (1818–1883) who gained fame, and notoriety, as a builder of railroad bridges — it was a bridge designed and constructed by Amasa Stone that collapsed in 1876 over the Ashtabula, River in Ashtabula, Ohio that killed 92 people.)

Ellen’s father William Howe died in 1852 and soon afterwards, while still in her teens, she married a man named Abbot. The marriage was not of long duration and it is uncertain how it ended. In 1856 she married for a second time, and became the second wife of Cleveland businessman Hiram Garretson — a friend, Euclid Avenue neighbor, and sometime business partner of both her Uncle Amasa Stone Jr. and Jeptha H. Wade. Hiram Garretson had three children from his previous marriage. Of the three, only his son General George Armstrong Garretson lived to be an adult. Ellen would bear him three children as well , and only Nellie, who would become Mrs. Jeptha Homer Wade II, lived to be an adult.

More…to come….