Hanging at the top of the main stairs at Brookside Museum in Ballston Spa, Saratoga County, NY, is a pair of portraits. With them is a framed brooch which contains locks of hair. These portraits are of Thomas McDonnell and his wife Frances Halsey McDonnell and were painted in 1852 and 1853 respectively by John G. Taggart, a New York trained artist with a studio in Saratoga Springs. In her portrait, Frances is wearing the brooch that now hangs beside her.
But who are they? That is the question their great-great-great-grandson and his wife, who gifted the paintings to the museum, wanted to know.
Thomas, who was born on February 28, 1795, and his younger brother Robert, arrived in the city of New York from Ireland in 1816. By 1823, Robert was in Saratoga Springs, opening a store selling groceries and liquor in a prominent position in town, on Broadway, opposite the United States Hotel.
In 1827, Thomas joined his brother, became a joint owner, selling “a great assortment of groceries,” and later taking sole ownership in 1831. Over the following years, the brothers owned a succession of stores, together, or with other people.
According to the New York Daily Herald, early in the morning of June 4th, 1846, a devastating fire, “doubtless the work of an incendiary” broke out in the offices of the Saratoga Sentinel.
Although “the capacious reservoirs of the United States Hotel” across Broadway were made available to the firemen, six buildings were burnt, including one owned by Thomas McDonnell. This building was occupied by a grocery store, McDonnell and Bennett, and, on the 2nd floor, by a billiard hall. His property was insured for $2000, though damage was estimated to be $3000.
But Thomas was still doing alright. The 1855 census lists his house as worth $4500, and his neighbors at the time were Samuel Root and Gideon Putnam, both prosperous gentlemen. By 1860, the value of his real estate was $12,000 with personal property valued at $15,000.
Thomas and Frances married on November 23, 1828 at the Vandewater Street Church in the city of New York. They had five children, and it is the children’s hair contained in the brooch.
Two children, Thomas and Maria, died young. The eldest child, Jane, married Frederick L. Root, a neighbor from Saratoga Springs. A son, James S., died, at 30 years of age, in 1870.
Interestingly, Thomas’s will, written in 1864, left his estate for the use of his wife, and, after her death, to be divided between his daughters; James was not mentioned. James, together with young Thomas and Maria, is buried with their parents in Greenridge Cemetery in Saratoga Springs.
The second child, Frances, married a Greenfield, NY, lawyer, John T. Wentworth on October 4, 1852 at her father’s house. She was described as a “beautiful and accomplished young lady.” She was certainly accomplished.
Frances and her husband moved to Chicago, IL, and then to Wisconsin, ending-up in Racine, WI where John worked in multiple legal positions, including as a circuit court judge.
Frances threw herself into causes, including being an early advocate for the temperance movement, and a very strong proponent for women’s suffrage. In 1909, in response to a request for names for a petition to Congress in support of the Federal Suffrage Amendment, “Mrs. Wentworth, over eighty years of age… obtained 1,000 names.”
Robert and Thomas’s seemingly rapid rise to wealth in Saratoga Springs suggests that the brothers were not poor Catholic Irish immigrants. According to a Wisconsin biographical note on his grandson, Thomas was Presbyterian Irish, of Scottish descent, from Portaferry, a small coastal town in County Down, Northern Ireland.
After arrival in New York, he went to Charleston, SC, from there to Syracuse, NY, and then to Saratoga Springs, where he stayed until his death. The Charleston connection is not as unusual as it may appear. From 1750-1820 a wave of Scots Presbyterian Irish traveled to Charleston and frequently these immigrants were from wealthy backgrounds, though were probably not eldest sons.
Thomas died on February 22, 1866. His death announcement in the Saratogian describes him a gentleman who had “won a high reputation for integrity, promptness, order and general business capacity,” but, more importantly than that, “[h]e had a warm heart [and] his sympathies were generous”, and “his tenderness often spoke when his lips were silent.”
Frances died on December 1, 1876. Her death notice describes “her ready sympathy and benevolence, her cordial greetings and friendship, and her genuine integrity of character, [which] secured to her affection and respect.”
Thomas and Frances appear to have been kind, generous, hardworking people. We are proud and honored to have their portraits hanging in Brookside Museum.
Isobel Connell is a native of the United Kingdom and a retired engineer. She is President of the Board of Trustees of the Saratoga County History Center at Brookside Museum and also volunteers in the research room there.
