Isaac LAWRENCE

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Facts about this person:
Record Change  June 20, 1999
                  

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S.R. Durand:
Isaphene Catherine Lawrence, one of my great-grandmothers, was born October 5, 1805 at her parents' residence at 480 Broadway, in New York City.  She was the fourth of seven children of Isaac and Cornelia Ann (Beach) Lawrence.  She spent her girlhood in New York and at her parents' country estate in Newtown, Long Island (now part of Bayside, Queens). She had one brother and five sisters.  Walter Barrett, in his 1868 book The Old Merchants of New York relates that the family went to St. Thomas's Episcopal Church,  on the corner of Broadway and Houston streets, in its palmy days, when Dr. Hawks preached there, and there never lived in this city such a family of beautiful daughters. They were the prettiest girls in the city (pp. 66-67).  Among mementos of the family I have an invitation to Miss Lawrence to attend a Yale College Ball in New York on September 11, 1822, and one from 1824 to attend the Lafayette Ball in Philadelphia, honoring General Lafayette.
Isaphene Lawrence was married to Dr. Benjamin Moore McVickar on November 12, 1825, in the home of her parents, which was then at 498 Broadway.  I know nothing about her life in New York, other than that she was active in charitable work with her mother.  After moving to Milwaukee in 1846, she was one of the women who organized the Milwaukee Orphan Asylum, and she was treasurer of this institution from 1850 until 1865. A resolution of the Board of the Orphan Asylum dated June 6, 1865 reads: 'Whereas the failing health of Mrs. I. McVickar, the beloved Treasurer of Milwaukee Orphan Asylum, has prompted her to resign the office so faithfully held for fifteen years, therefore resolved that the resignation of Mrs. I. McVickar be accepted with deep regret, and earnest wish that she may soon be restored to her sphere of influence in this institution of her adoption, and resolved that with one voice the Associated Managers would give full assurance to the retiring Treasurer, of their appreciation of her assiduous labors, and their entire confidence in the abiding feeling that the Board can ill afford to lose one whose fidelity and zeal have largely contributed to the prosperity and permanence of this institution.  In behalf of the Managers, Mrs. D. Newhall, Corresponding Secretary, Milwaukee Orphan Asylum, June 6, 1865.'
A clipping from an old newspaper reads: 'During the anxious days that preceded the bombardment of Fort Sumter, when patriotic feeling ran high through Milwaukee, the display of flags and bunting in the city was so great that the small stock was soon exhausted, and those that did not buy early had to make their own or go without.  It was during this flag famine that Mrs. McVickar, the wife of Dr. Benjamin McVickar, sat down in the old home on Van Buren Street and assisted by her three daughters made and American flag.  On the day that the guns of Fort Sumter told the north that a war was raging, the doctor cut a sapling in his yard, and tacking the flag to it, raised it from the roof of his house.  After every battle of the war, the flag waved from the roof of the old house, and after Appomattox sent its message of peace over the land, the old flag, now faded and tattered, was laid away in the garrett.'
Isaphene (Lawrence) McVickar was apparently in poor health the last three years of her life.  She died September 18, 1868, and was buriedin the McVickar family lot in Forest Home Cemetery in Milwaukee.  A lovely portrait by Henry Inman of Isaphene (Lawrence) McVickar as a young girl is in the possession of [the Durand family].
An obituary said of her that 'she was nurtured in the highest, most polished and refined society of the city of New York.  She brought hither [to Milwaukee] her engaging manners and her good breeding, and she has done her share in forming those gentle and lady-like manners which have given such a charm to Milwaukee female society.  She was a woman of excellent common sense, and wass most active in promoting all the useful charities of the city, and it is not too much to say that she is one of the most devoted and and most influential of those noble women who have done so much to build up the Protestant Orphan Asylum.  Whether as a wife or a mother or a devoted member of the Episcopal church, to which she was ardently attached, she was most exemplary in the performance of her duties.  Of later years, her ill health had confined her much to her home, and to that home the loss will be felt as one of those crushing blows which only God can assuage.'
Facts about this person:
Record Change  December 23, 1999
                  

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Walter Barrett, from The Old Merchants of New York City, 1863:
Isaac Lawrence had but one son, William Beach Lawrence.  He received all the advantages of an excellent education, and was intended for a public career.  He became Secretary of Legation at London, shortly after Mr. John Quincy Adams became president of the United States in 1825.  While in London he was extremely popular with all classes. Upon the accession to power of General Jackson, Mr. Lawrence was supplanted by a partisan of that gentleman.  Mr. Beach Lawrence moved to Rhode Island some years ago, and was adopted there by the Democrats.  He was elected Lieutenant Governor of the State.  He would have made an excellent merchant had he entered upon the career.  He married a daughter of Archibald Gracie, the great merchant, alluded to so frequently in these pages, and thus became a brother-in-law of James G. and Charles King, who had married [Gracie] sisters, and to the brothers Gracie.
No man was ever placed in a pleasanter position in life than Beach, as his relations called him.  Surrounded by loving sisters, a doting father who left him rich, he has known or felt but few of the thorns of life; and even now is quite a young man, and no one who meets him would suppose that he was only forty years old.  He has children. One of them, William Beach Lawrence, Jr., is a young man of uncommon promise and bids fair to keep up the reputation of the race he springs from.  There was one very painful matter connected with Beach, and his father; I allude to the father's indorsement[sic] for the son, and his final ruin in consequence.  In 1834 a lot of lots on Murray Hill of Isaac Lawrence were sold to pay Beach's debts for some $50,000, that last year were worth $800,000.
S.R. Durand:
Some time after this incident in 1834, Dr. Benjamin McVickar went into partnership with his brother-in-law, Beach Lawrence, between about 1838 and 1846.  Because of excessive speculations by Beach Lawrence, Dr. McVickar in his turn had to use a large part of his fortune to pay up more debts of his brother-in-law.  It was after this, and after a bad yellow fever epidemic in New York that he moved with his family to Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Facts about this person:
Record Change  December 23, 1999