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Note: Allan Macdougall found in: Census Microfilm Records: New York, 1900
Lived in: Manhattan Borough, New York County, New York
Series: T623 Microfilm: 1105 Book: 2 Page: 152 [a- 153]
The family is renting 361 (W) 101st St.
MacDougall, Allan, H, W, M, Feb 1854, 46, M (11 yrs.), NY, NY, SC, Coffee Broker, R
Alice, Wife, W, F, Mar 1867, 33, M (11 yrs.), 3 ch, 3 liv, NY, Mass, NY
Gladys Daughter, W, F, Mar 1891, 9, NY, NY, NY, At School
Allan, Son, W, M, June 1894, 5, NY, NY, NY, At School
Donald, Son, W, M, Feb 1897, 3, NY, NY, NY
Cooper, Mattie?, Servant, B, F, Sep 1870, 29, M (7 yrs) 0 ch, 0 liv, Va, Va, Va., Servant
Davis, Hattie, Servant, B, F, July 1873, 26, M (7 yrs) 2 ch, 0 liv, Va, Va, Va, Servant
Birth and death dates taken from stones in the William M. Allen Plot, Woodlawn Cemetery, Bronx, N.Y., which Plot is immediately behind the William H. Leggett Plot (Lots 522 and 523, Section 9 Spring Hill Section, Magnolia Drive) near the Cemetery office at the Webster Avenue gate in the extreme northeast corner of the grounds.
Not found in the 1920 Census, Nov, 2002
Or in the 1910 or 1930 Census, Jan, 2003
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Excerpt from
Autobiography of a Business Woman
By Alice Foote MacDougall (1867-1945), 1928
Boston: Little, Brown and Company.
These pages describing her ancestors and the first forty years of her life, up to the point of her debut as a businesswoman, transcribed by David John Leggett (b. 1961), her second cousin twice removed, 27-28 January 2003.
I
CHILDHOOD
I WAS born in the home of my mother's grandfather, Stephen Allen, at Number 1 North Washington Square, New York, on the second day of March, 1867. He was known as "Honest Stephen Allen," and was mayor of the city of New York from 1821 to 1824. To him and to my father's father, Homer Foote, and to my own beloved father, Emerson Foote, I owe whatever I have of business ability.
The first great affection of my life was born out of the tender care my Quaker grandmother, Catherine Maria Leggett Allen, gave me during my first five years, while my frail mother struggled back to health after my birth. She all but gave her life that I might have life.
To-day, as I drive past my birthplace, a vision of my father rises to my mind. On the night I was born he wandered, despairing, lonely, through the Square, praying to God that the young wife whom he adored might live. In later years, I too wandered, sometime in the midst of seething lower Broadway, when the noon hour carried hundreds of light hearted men and women to laugh and loiter on the busy thoroughfare, sometimes under the cold beautiful skied of a wintry night, alone in that irrevocable aloneness of sorrow, and prayed as did my father, to the same God, for my own life, for life to live bravely, forcefully, for my little children.
What is the root of our affection? Is it possible that even a tiny newborn infant can sense this all-pervading guardian love, and cling to it throughout life? I do not know. But to my dainty, sweet Quaker grandmother I still cling. She was the only daughter in a family of eleven children, exquisitely beautiful, petulant, gay, and lovable. She was born to be adored, and she was, not only by her father, mother and the ten big brothers, but by her husband, William Mortimer Allen, who used laughingly to call her "the Dragon." Yet in a long, grave illness which came upon him, with patient devotion did the dragon attend him.
This grandmother loved me with imagination. She was patient when I was impatient, tolerant in an amused kind of way of my many vagaries, and always filled with tenderness and understanding for my woes, whether I wept over the cracked head of Minnie, my beloved doll, or the passing of faith in some friend I adored. There were plenty of times when I was everything a child should not be, spoiled, erratic, too imaginative.
How delightful those first five years were, and what funny memories creep out of that past! True to my later anti-sufferage, anti-feminist proclivities, I was then very much of a little girl-mother, and wonderful and varied was the life I led with my many doll children. Minnie, named for my mother, was a substantial china-headed American lady of wobbly cotton body and fixed and permanent smile. My mother-heart opened wide its portals of love to her and never did later and smarter-looking children cause me to forget her entirely. Of course, when Papa, returning from Paris, brought Lillie with him, her modish clothes, beautiful blonde hear, real kid body, and delicate face, cast Minnie quite into the shade. I did Lillie the credit to think she wanted to express her aestheticism, and so I tried to teach her to play the piano. But she fell off the stool. I can remember how I howled as her lovely face broke in two. For long she rested quietly on an attic shelf, where I tenderly nursed her. But moths invaded her golden tresses, and Mamma said, "Toots, why on earth do you want to keep that broken toy?" Cruel, good-housekeeping Mamma-only a mothy, broken toy to her; to me, a crippled child in very fact.
When I was about five, Mamma and I accompanied Papa on one of his many business trips to Europe. Remembrances of that trip are still vivid. A breaded chop on board the City of Brussels made me weep tears of homesickness for Jane, our cook at home. Arrived in London, all my affection was given to a little black-and-tan terrier, Lufra by name, and my loyalty to that horrid little brute kept two perfectly good maids and one small persnickety child from seeing the glories of Westminster Abbey. A mild, gentlemanly verger assured us that dogs were not allowed. Beseeching looks on the faces of the maids were of no avail. Small, bad, imperious Me said, "Where I go, goes my dog." So I dominated, and missed the joy of that inspiring relic. As a punishment, perhaps, I contracted whooping cough, and we hurried to Brighton till it should pass-punishment mitigated by many delights on the resplendent beach and on the backs of the patient donkeys whose business it was to carry small travelers.
And it was at this early age that Paris, gay, beautiful, and alluring, captivated my awakening senses, and during all the years to come my memory was filled with dreams of its charm.
Returning with us on the City of Brussels was Livingstone, the great African explorer. He had brought with him a little African boy, Calulah. We used to play together on the deck, and I can remember a feeling of pity that was always present in my heart during our games as the big ship ploughed her way homeward. We talked to each other in a combination of sound and sign, but always I was wondering how this black-skinned little boy really felt, so far away from his mamma and papa, and my small heart ached for him and made me feel a trifle less selfish and exacting in our games together. What potential sorrows lay before him! Many times since I have thought of him and wondered how fate had treated him.
In the early days of my childhood, our home on Eleventh Street, New York, was quite an ordinary affair, stereotyped and conventional, and the days were prim in their well-regulated routine. But all this passed me by. I lived in Fairyland and in constant communion with all kinds of wonderful beings, performing countless amazing deeds which inevitably made me a heroine. Occasional interludes, in the form of governesses and parents, removed me from this Land of Sheer Delight, just as in later years God led me out of the Land of Romance to place me in the path of duty. But in my early days every morning brought the hope of a new adventure and my imagination made the dream come true. My real life was lived with my doll children in the Land of Let's Pretend; and as I played, mother care, mother responsibility, entered persuasively into my soul, and made there a safe abiding place against the advent of my own dear babies.
All my play and toys bore a certain relation to my expected duties as a woman. Froebel was gently Froebel-ing in the good old German way, but his theories, like Charity, had so far remained at home.
In later years the imagination that propelled my child mind played a vital part in bringing about my success. As I used to imagine conditions and opportunities for my dolls, my dogs, and my cats, so in later years my customers intrigued me to further imaginings. When I was five, Minnie, my doll, needed this or that for her soul or her digestive salvation. Later, when I was forty-five, Mrs. Smith quite unconsciously secured the ministrations of my imagination and became a G. C. (grateful customer) in consequence. Wiles and smiles that I used to subdue the evil spirits and bad fairies of my infant days worked their spells no less on importunate creditors in days to come.
Though wonderful and varied was the life I led with my doll children, "keeping store" interested me greatly, too. I took care of doll babies and kept store at one and the same time. It was a prophecy of what I was to do later in grim earnest.
A mocking bird was the means-or could have been the means-of indicating to my parents my particular calling. Papa loved flowers and dogs, horses and birds, and one of his acquisitions was a mocking bird. To make the bird comfortable and happy a large, a very large, cage was made, for Papa had an expansive nature. He was big in heart, big in mind and in body, and to him all things needed bigness. So the cage arrived, and Dick sang out a sweet content. But to Mamma, the practical, it presented an appalling problem. Where should it stand, this massive cage? A table had to be especially built for it, and in the table was a row of divided drawers to hold the many necessities of an accomplished seamstress-spools of cotton, fine and coarse; needles; bits of lace and muslin for mending. Here, incidentally and all unwittingly, began the Alice Foote MacDougall Coffee Houses; for day after day I played store and bought and sold to imaginary customers the dry goods of the mocking bird's table drawers.
But the greatest delights of all were the afternoon drives with Papa. He fancied trotting horses and in weather fair or foul we would sally forth. A long, slow progress up Fifth Avenue, where the stone pavement was bad for the horses' feet; a gentle swiftness through the Park, which was a little difficult, for the police-we did not say "cops" then-would not allow speeding, and by that time the mares resented the restraint; and then, with a tiny click, the faintest sound on my father's lips, and a loosening of the reins, the horses settled into their gait, trotting faster and faster.
It is cold, perhaps rainy, and clods of turf from unpaved avenues fly back into our faces, or perhaps snow is falling and we see our competitors through it. Always in our tingling ears is the pounding of the excited horses' feet, that curious snort of delight and excitement as a swifter horse passes us, or we, darting off into space, outdistance him.
Men were temperate in those days, but a "nip' of brandy or some other liquor was deemed an essential after a long day on Wall Street or an afternoon trotting on St. Nicholas Avenue. Papa took great pride in his wine cellar. He was accustomed to having wine at dinner always, not so much for himself as for the many English and French gentlemen who were his constant dinner guests. After our drive, Commodore Vanderbilt, Frank Work, Charles Lanier, Mr. Harbeck, or some other gentlemen would return with Papa to our home on Eleventh Street. Then Papa would set out his choicest wines for their delectation-brandy fifty years old, filling the room the moment it was uncorked with a delicious, indescribable aroma, whiskey, sherry, port, all choice and very old. Conversation sparkled and the open fire glowed, but not more warmly than did my father as he thus entertained his friends.
There was a transportation problem in the city even then, but it was a different sort from today's. Huge, lumbering, uncouth, uncomfortable busses bumped and banged over the crude pavements of New York in those days, the seventies, and my first approach in one of them to the business district of New York and my later business haunts was a journey of wild alarums and excitements when I was about five.
Grandpa Stephen used to say, "I don't want any poor grandchildren," and to guard against this he had purchased largely in what his now the lower part of the city. Consequently Wall and Front Streets were words familiar to my childish ears. On an eventful morning in early December in 1872, I boarded the bus at Eleventh Street to make my first journey to Wall Street to purchase Christmas gifts for our many relatives from an importer of East Indian and Chinese goods, a tenant of one of Grandpa Stephen's stores.
What wild imaginings, what "blank misgivings of a creature moving about in worlds unrealized" were mine, as that old bus lumbered and bumped the long, long journey southward. It was so bitterly cold that my lamb's- wool coat and turban did little good. But in spite of cold and discomfort, no more thrilling event ever happened to explorer than to me on my first journey to Wall Street. Hobgoblins and gnomes inhabited the straw covering the floor and peeped with malicious eyes from the corners or jeered in fiendish glee at my discomfort. And as the driver returned Grandma's change in a small brown envelope through a mysterious hole in the roof, I didn't doubt but that some good fairy would hop out to put an end to their malicious intentions.
What wonder, then, that when the bus finally let us down, it was at the door of the very same store where later my husband had his office, and where, following him, I entered the ranks. Chance? I don't think so; the fairies did it-the good, beneficent fairies who all along have helped me until finally the gnomes have been put to rout.
To-day that lower part of the city is still filled with romance for me. Not alone do the pungent odors of coffee and myrrh and frankincense fill the air after their long journeys from the Indies and South America, but if you have eyes to see and ears to hear, gay ladies and gentlemen from Holland walk happily up and down. It is hard to understand their somewhat uncouth language, but there they are, in high-heeled shoes, full skirts, or knickerbockers, wigs, and cocked hats. Even dear old George will appear once in a while if only to go to Faunces' Tavern to bid his officers farewell.
What a comfort it was in those drear days of 1907-1908, when I first entered business, to walk on Maiden Lane surrounded by the gay, enchanting maidens of those early days and forget the terrible present!
Crossing Wall Street, at what is called the lower end, is Front Street. Years ago it fronted the East River and was a place of gayety and gardens, but as the city grew and space became precious, the city was built out into the river, and at present South Street and not Front Street comes to the water's edge. Her centre the shipping interests that carry on trade in fruit, in spices, and in coffee, and here loiter idly at their quays the splendid ships of our South American trade. Naturally, then, Front Street devotes its entire attention to the coffee and tea business.
A word about my forbears before I pass these first five years of my life. For because of my intangible inheritances from them, in traditions, in ideals, in attitudes of heart and mind, I owe them a debt of gratitude quite too vast for words to express.
My great-grandfather, Stephen Allen, in whose house I was born, was drowned before my birth, when the Henry Clay burned and sank in 1852 in the Hudson. New York owes him its first steps taken in sanitation to rid the city of yellow fever, and he was the first to propose the Croton Aqueduct in order to ensure the city and adequate and wholesome supply of water. He was one of the original members of Tammany Hall. His name may still be found on High Bridge in New York City. In his pocket he carried a list of rules for conduct in life, which for years was known as "Stephen Allen's Pocket Piece." It was found in his pocket when his body was recovered from the waters of the Hudson. As a child I read the wise and humorous sayings, and unconsciously their truth took root in my soul.
1. Keep good company, or none.
2. Never be idle; if you hands cannot be usefully employed attend to the cultivation of your mind.
3. Always speak the truth.
4. Make few promises.
5. Live up to your engagements.
6. Keep your own secrets, if you have any.
7. When you speak to a person, look him in the face.
8. Good company and good conversation are the very sinews of virtue.
9. Good character is above all things else. Your character cannot be essentially injured except by your own acts.
10. If anyone speaks evil of you, let your life be so that none will believe him.
11. Drink no kind of intoxicating liquor.
12. Ever live (misfortune excepted) within your income.
13. When you retire to bed, think over what you have been doing during the day.
14. Make no haste to be rich if you would prosper. Small and steady gains give competency with tranquility of mind.
15. Never play at any game of chance.
16. Avoid temptation, through fear you many not withstand it. Earn money before you spend it.
17. Never run into debt, unless you see plainly a way to get out again.
18. Never borrow, if you can possibly avoid it.
19. Do not marry until you are able to support a wife.
20. Never speak evil of anyone.
21. Be just before you are generous.
22. Keep yourself innocent, if you would be happy.
23. Save when you are young, to spend when you are old.
24. Read over the above maxims at least once a week.
A dusky figure emerges from my memory-the colored butler who for many years superintended the great functions held by the Mayor. Special emphasis was laid upon the New Year's Day reception. Being generous of heart, my great-grandfather had acquired three wives during his triumphal passage through life, and the daughters of these many marriages graciously presided at his receptions when the elite of New York called to pay their respects to the Mayor. Aunt Mary Ann said it was not worth while dressing for less than three thousand, and the beautiful old Coleport punch bowl, large enough for me to drown in, as well as the huge silver cake baskets and the cut-glass decanters, attested to the liberality of my great-grandpa's housekeeping. All the appurtenances of the table were in keeping, and my soul craves for the gorgeous tea service that fed the hosts on those New Year's Days. We are so chaste and colorless in these things now. Whether or not there was any connection with the old colored butler who kept the New Year tradition by calling each year to remind us of his service and receive his due reward, I do not know; but certain it is that a firm of colored men, carrying on a carpet-cleaning business, used the so-called Stephen Allen Pocket Piece as an advertisement.
My father's father, Homer Foote of Springfield, Massachusetts, was the son of Adonijah Foote, the master armorer of the Water shops of that city, the place where the Springfield rifle was developed. Homer Foote, my grandfather, was apprenticed at an early age to James Scut Dwight, my great-grandfather, a hardware merchant in Springfield. His store was a famous rendezvous. The Boston and Albany stagecoach started at its door, and there forgathered many of the most prominent men of Springfield, the founders of the present Boston and Albany railway.
Among other visitors to Grandfather Dwight's store was his beautiful daughter Delia, and the inevitable resulted. Handsome, gallant Homer fell promptly in love with Delia and shortly thereafter married her. I remember hearing with delight Grandma's story of her first kiss, stolen under the heavy shadows of iron and steel rails, and of the beauty of her fair-haired lover, Homer Foote. He had a remarkable business capacity in the course of time the business of James Dwight was changed to Homer Foote and Company, under which name it grew to large proportions and became the leading hardware concern of all New England. He became auditor of the Springfield Institution for Savings and a director of the Pynchon Bank.
Added to his ability as a financier, Homer Foote had a fine sensitive feeling for the beautiful. As time brought him prosperity, he built a lovely home for himself on a little hill rising between Maple and Central Streets in Springfield. This he named Fairview. As a child, I remember he led me out on the verandah to show me the fair view of the Connecticut Valley, and recited to me, in words I never forgot, "I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help."
Music, books, and pictures abounded in his home and there I first learned to love beauty from the canvases of great artists. One of my grandfather's intimate friends was the artist, Chester Harding. He painted portraits of both my grandfather and grandmother. One day at a sitting he said, "Foote, I'm painting a portrait of Daniel Webster. I've got his face all right, but his legs bother me. You're about his size and build. Would you mind letting me paint your legs?" So there hangs somewhere-I believe in the Boston Athenaeum-a life-size portrait of the great Defender of the Constitution gaily disporting himself on my grandfather's legs.
If Homer Foote was a merchant and lover of the arts, he was also a farmer, and along, happy mornings I spent with him and my father at the farm, inspecting the garden, the fruit, and the cattle. My excursions to the farm had elements of humor, some of which might have ended disastrously for me. Papa had an expansive nature. Big men, big endeavors, and the splendid bigness of nature thrilled him. One warm June morning, his soul responding gloriously to the benign influence of nature, he conceived the idea that a sun bath would do me a world of good. Spreading some newspapers under and over me, he bade me lie down in the middle of a strawberry patch. He fed me with a few luscious berries, departed, and promptly forgot my existence in the rapture of a day on the farm. Toward two o'clock I was missed, and then, with some perturbation, they rushed to the strawberry patch, to find a rather groggy little girl verging on sunstroke. I hate to think of what my mother said to Emerson, or what Grandma Allen, usually so mild in her Quaker gentleness, remarked.
Another amusing event. One hot August day, my grandfather Foote and my father attempted to have me look through a sunglass at the sun. Obediently I placed the glass to my eyes, and bravely looked up. I was if a fiery iron pierced my brain. I dropped it, howling with pain. Papa and Grandpa looked a little sheepish and did not repeat the experiment. Again there were a few poignant remarks, which caused them to lead, for a time, a chastened existence.
My father, Emerson Foote, was his father's second son, one of ten children. He was born in Springfield, April 28, 1837. His mother had so many sisters and brothers that all her children had ready-made names beforehand; Emerson, Cleveland, and Sandford, as well as Francis, Edward, Homer, and James, were named for brothers and brothers-in-law. Papa's education was as curious as it was brief, for at fourteen he graduated from high school and had read six books of Vergil, Ceasar's Commentaries, and Cicero's Orations, and had a bowing acquaintance with Horace. In after years, his business required learning of sorts, and I never could get over the surprise I felt at his quick mastery of any subject. Banking, mining, patent law, each one was attempted as necessity demanded, and his knowledge always proved adequate to his necessity.
He was active in All Soul's Unitarian Church, holding the treasurership of that organization for many years. Dorman B. Eaton, to whom we owe our Civil Service system, Joseph H. Choate, Peter Cooper, and many other Unitarians were his intimate friends. But in these early days, before I was born, Dr. Henry W. Bellows, the minister, was the object of his affectionate admiration. With him Papa worked in the founding of what was then called the Sanitary Commission of the Civil War, from which the Red Cross developed. My grandfather, William Mortimer Allen, was living at the time of the Civil War on Fifth Avenue near Thirty-eighth or Thirty-ninth Street. I never tired of hearing my mother tell me stories of the meetings of the Sanitary Commission held there. Similar groups, organized by Dr. Bellows, met all over the city.
Mamma's friends would gather in the afternoon to roll bandages and make dressings. Afterward the boys of the Seventh Regiment, Company K, of which Papa and his brother Edward were members, would come in for a waffle supper. Horace Porter, afterward a general and a well-known diplomat, John M. Wilson, another embryo general, -- both sweethearts of my mother in West Point days before the war, -- came also, and for a time their hearts were lightened during evenings of homely pleasures.
Different, however, was the picture she gave me of the regiments passing down the Avenue for the front, and the pitiful return when the ranks were reduced to a handful of tattered and discouraged men. Each time I pass the Shaw Monument in Boston, Mamma's description of the splendid young officers flashes before my eyes. The sunshine, the courage, the animation as, with springing step, the most representative of Massachusetts youth passed gayly by. Then the return, slow and pitiful, of the decimated remainder.
When the Civil War ended, the Union League Club was another outgrowth of the Sanitary Commission and for years exerted a powerful political influence. Papa was a charter member. During many years the Club was one of the great pleasures of my father's life, for there he associated with men of learning, of political importance, as well as many who represented the world of art and literature. Papa often spoke of evenings spent listening to the animated conversation of Mr. Depew, of Mr. Choate, of William Winter, and sometimes of George Smalley, the English correspondent of the Tribune. It is impossible to remember the almost interminable list of men-travelers, artists, politicians, lawyers, and writers-who at intervals influenced and enriched my father's life, but of all, Mr. Gawtry, President of the Consolidated Gas Company and my adopted uncle, and Mr. Harris Fahnestock, first President of the First National Bank, stand out as those who were most truly loved by my father, and who most faithfully stood by him as the dark clouds of his later life gathered.
Continued under the notes for Alice's husband, Allan MacDougall...
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