Notes
This letter belongs to a collection of correspondence primarily from Lucy Gray Henry Harrison (1857–1944) to Stanislaus “Stan” Vincent Henkels (1854–1926) concerning a proposed sale of Patrick Henry family heirlooms in 1910. Mrs. Harrison was Patrick Henry's great-granddaughter and the last Henry descendant to own and live at Red Hill. She grew up in Richmond, Virginia, and moved to Duluth, Minnesota, after marrying real estate millionaire Matthew Bland Harrison (1853–1892) in 1886. In 1905, she inherited Red Hill and moved onto the property, where she lived along with her sister, Elizabeth Watkins Henry Lyons (1855–1920), and her assistant, Elizabeth H. Kerper (1890–1964).
Mrs. Harrison inherited many of the family heirlooms that had belonged to Patrick Henry and many of his papers. In 1910, on the advice of Philadelphia neurologist and writer Dr. Weir Mitchell (1829–1914), she contacted Stan V. Henkels about a possible private sale or public auction of some of these pieces. Mr. Henkels was an antique dealer in Philadelphia well-known for his auctions and private sales to collectors. The correspondence from Mrs. Harrison to Mr. Henkels details their business negotiations from May 1910 leading up to the sale of the items in Philadelphia on December 20, 1910. It also includes letters concerning a settling of accounts between them up through February 1911.
The misunderstanding between Mrs. Harrison and Mr. Henkels around a letter’s appraisal concerns the April 20, 1776 letter from Richard Henry Lee (1732–1794) to Patrick Henry advocating for a Declaration of Independence. This letter was sold at the auction for $40.
Elizabeth Kerper lived with Mrs. Harrison at Red Hill for three decades as her secretary and assistant. She had traveled to Philadelphia a few weeks before this letter was written and met with Mr. Henkels on Mrs. Harrison’s behalf to discuss the cost of cataloging the collection. Ms. Kerper describes their meeting in her letter to Mr. Henkels on January 8, 1911 (04.13.22).
Thomas Sully’s (1783–1872) portrait of Patrick Henry is an oil painting on canvas commissioned in 1815 by Henry’s first biographer, William Wirt (1772–1834). An engraving of the portrait was featured on the frontispiece of Wirt’s 1817 biography, “Sketches of the Life & Character of Patrick Henry.” Sully based the portrait on one of the few images of Henry painted from life: a miniature created, not by a French artist in 1791, as Mrs. Harrison believed, but in 1795 by Sully’s half-brother, Lawrence Sully (1769–1804). Thomas Sully’s portrait of Henry was given by Wirt to Henry’s youngest son, John (1796–1868), who passed the portrait on to his son William Wirt Henry (1831–1900), who loaned it to the Virginia State Library in Richmond from 1873 to 1884 before he passed it on to his daughter, Lucy Harrison. In 1902, Mrs. Harrison loaned the portrait again to the Virginia State Library but reclaimed it in 1910 to sell it at Mr. Henkels’ auction, where it was purchased by Charles Hamilton (1847–1930) for $4,000. The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation later purchased the portrait from the Hamilton family and currently has it in its collection. Mr. Henkels’ doubt about the Sully portrait’s authenticity may be related to an unfounded claim published in 1909 in “The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography” that the Lawrence Sully miniature, which served as Thomas Sully’s inspiration, was not painted from life. The magazine’s editor, Charles Henry Hart (1847–1918), invalidated this claim before the December 1910 auction when he identified the miniature as a life portrait.
Lawrence Sully’s miniature of Henry was painted from life in 1795. The miniature passed through the family of Patrick Henry’s older half-brother, John Syme Jr. (1727–?), and in 1910, was owned by Syme’s great-grandson, John Syme Fleming Jr. (1842–1922). Mr. Fleming sent it to auction at the same 1910 sale that Mrs. Harrison sent her Henry heirlooms to. It was sold at auction for $660 to Gilbert Sunderland Parker (1861–1921), the curator of paintings at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. At some point, it passed into the possession of Herbert Lee Pratt (1871–1945), who left it to Amherst College in 1945.
Judge Spencer Roane (1762–1822) met Patrick Henry in 1783 when they served in the Virginia General Assembly and married Henry’s daughter Anne (1767–1799) in 1786. The portrait that Roane thought was a “better likeness” than the Lawrence Sully miniature was likely one known as the Meredith miniature. This portrait, by an unknown artist, was first owned by Henry’s brother-in-law, Col. Samuel Meredith Jr. (1732–1808), and was passed down through his descendants. The Meredith miniature is now in the Carnegie Museum of Art collection in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
The Henry heirlooms Mrs. Harrison sent to auction included a collection of Henry’s letters and other documents. One of the auctioned documents was Henry’s handwritten draft of the Stamp Act Resolves, which Charles Hamilton bought for $1,400 and is now in the special collections of the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library at Colonial Williamsburg. Two other documents, a draft of a 1795 letter (76.5.7) from Henry to George Washington (1732–1799) and a 1782 land grant (76.5.6) signed by Governor Benjamin Harrison V. (1726–1791), are now in the Red Hill collection after being purchased at Mr. Henkels’ auction by Charles Hamilton (1847–1930) and donated to the PHMF by Mr. Hamilton’s heirs in 1959. A copy of the receipt for the reimbursement of the gunpowder that Lord Dunmore ordered taken from the Williamsburg Magazine in April 1775 was bought at the auction by the Virginia State Library for $100 and is now housed at the Virginia Museum of History & Culture. Other papers included letters between Henry and Richard Henry Lee (1732–1794) and letters to Henry from Henry Lee III (1756–1818) and David Ross (1739–1819).
The silver caster set (96.1.1-6) owned by Patrick Henry is in the Red Hill collection. Henry may have purchased the casters at the 1776 sale of the belongings of John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore (1730–1809), as Mrs. Harrison mentions in her December 10 letter to Mr. Henkels (04.13.19). The set was sold to Charles Hamilton for $200 at the December 1910 auction. Mrs. Harrison also sent a silver plate frame (or stand) to Mr. Henkels, which was sold at the auction to a Mr. Smith for $16.
The two pieces of furniture Mrs. Harrison sent to auction were Henry’s desk and corner chair. A photographed image of the desk appears in the 1907 biography, “The True Patrick Henry” by George Morgan. Mrs. Harrison shipped the desk to Philadelphia in June 1910, and it was sold on order at the December auction for $500. The desk is pictured in Mr. Henkels’ December 1910 auction catalog (76.5.2), along with the corner chair and the caster set. The black walnut corner chair passed directly through the Henry family line from Patrick to Lucy Harrison, and it is said to be the chair in which Henry was sitting when he died on June 6, 1799 of complications from intussusception. An image of the chair appears in “The True Patrick Henry” and the auction catalog (76.5.2). It was sold on order at the auction for $225, then later given to the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation by Elizabeth Gribbel Corkran (1897–1976), a descendant of the buyer.
The Patrick Henry Memorial Foundation purchased this letter from an online seller in May 2004 as part of the collection of correspondence.