Early Gilchrist?

My wife was searching through some boxes that were heirlooms of the family.
What do we have here?
Black buffalo horn and the symbols on the handle (2 diamonds and a shield) seem to be made of pearl.
Could they be a manufactures crest?
I also noticed that there is no Wade and Butcher symbol below the Gilchrist stamp.
Could it have been made before he sold the rights to them?

I'm 100% new to straight razors and I cant stop obsessing over them.
Any help would be GREATLY appreciated

Thanks in advance

Mikaeus

Can't help with any info but that sure is a nice find. Cleaned up and honed it should make a fine shaver with a family connectio, the best of two worlds. Congrats.

Bob

Unfortunately I cant find anyone within Halifax that can help me with honing, maintenance or getting a strop.
But I do have a honing stone we believe goes with it. Double sided and about 9 inches long.
somewhat coarse on one with and fairly fine on the other

There was a banned member up Greenwood way that would have been able to help you with the honing. Honing is something I would not recommend you try if you have no experience especially on a family heirloom in such nice condition. I'll send you a PM.

Bob

Welcome to SRP, thats a fantastic looking razor you found there, and a family heirloom. The horn scales and mother of pearl insert looks to be in very good condition.

WM Gilchrist was an importer of cutlery, so he didnt sell the right to Wade and Butcher, manufacturers produce cutlery and razors for his company. Im sure you are aware that a Gilchrist pocket knife was found on Abraham Lincoln when he past away.

An interesting newspaper clipping from 1861.
Attachment 141034
Attachment 141035
Attachment 141036

Lastly, being a family heirloom and all you should really consider sending this razor out for restoration and honing, and then use it!

That's amazing, I didn't know anything like that about Gilchrist.
He helped smuggle weapons in for the rebellion during the civil war?! CRAZY!
I'm loving this razor more and more

there are a few people in Canada doing restores and honing. Phil at Classic Edge comes to mind. The banned user BobH is talking about does a wicked edge too!

im gonna have to get in contact with him somehow it seems

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Originally Posted by Martin103

Welcome to SRP, thats a fantastic looking razor you found there, and a family heirloom. The horn scales and mother of pearl insert looks to be in very good condition.

WM Gilchrist was an importer of cutlery, so he didnt sell the right to Wade and Butcher, manufacturers produce cutlery and razors for his company. Im sure you are aware that a Gilchrist pocket knife was found on Abraham Lincoln when he past away.

An interesting newspaper clipping from 1861.
Attachment 141034
Attachment 141035
Attachment 141036

Lastly, being a family heirloom and all you should really consider sending this razor out for restoration and honing, and then use it!

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I came across this thread because I've been researching Gilchrist because of a razor I got (one of the Ramapo Razor Co. razors). I had what looked like a reasonable sketch of his history until I came across this newspaper clipping, but it certainly does explain some things.

All of this is extremely fragmentary and the records I can find are often contradictory. There are about 5 different family trees on Ancestry that list Wm. Gilchrist's mother as being born 30 years AFTER him. What follows is my reconstruction.

William Wallace Gilchrist was born July 29th, 1818 in Rivier-du-Loup, Canada to William Wallace Gilchrist (get used to that name, they were a real cut & paste kinda family!), a businessman from Scotland.

Sometime around 1820 the Gilchrists moved to America and the elder William set up shop as an importer. By 1830 or so, his son William Jr. was working for him.

As near as I can tell, by the late 1840's Wm. Gilchrist (which one? I don't know) was selling razors. All the directory listings I can find for him describe him as a manufacturer. He was definitely doing some kind of manufacturing because he managed to burn down a barn on the Ramapo creek while making the first steel pen nibs made in America. That happened around 1853. Though the 1882 Encyclopedia Britannica lists the date for the barn burning down as November of 1853, a newspaper report of the event is dated February of that year.

The same year he won a medal for razors produced under the Ramapo Razor Co. business name. I kind of wonder if the Wm. Gilchrist stamped razors were William Sr. and Ramapo were William Jr.

We'll get to William Jr, Jr, then William Jr, Jr, Jr later.

There are a couple variants of Wm. Gilchrist razors. Some have a bow on them, some have the Wade & Butcher arrow and cross, some just say Gilchrist. Most folks have assumed he was an importer, but I'm not so sure. For one thing, the Gilchrist arrow stamped razors are emphatically not using the same die as genuine W&B. More interesting still, I don't think I've ever seen an actual Wade & Butcher razor with that mark on it that predates the Gilchrist models. I strongly suspect that he was either under contract to the Butcher brothers to produce goods in America for the American market, and thus avoid tariffs, or Wade & Butcher bought the marks off him when he went bankrupt.

In any event, William Gilchrist (Jr, the Junior born in Canada) lived about a block away from Wade & Butcher's man on the street in America, Robert Wade (also a junior, his father, the co-founder of Wade & Butcher died when he was 7 years old. His mother, Jane, continued to produce razors with the Wade name on them for a few years until she too died in 1827). They were both associated with Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia around 1860. Wade was a year younger than Gilchrist. They both had lots of kids, and their kids probably knew each other.

That, of course, is all leading up to the arrest in 1861 for treason. In 1860 he's listed as a manufacturer of Razors in Philadelphia.

Then things get really complicated and sparse, beginning with that arrest.

Was it his father that was arrested? Or was it him? No clue. I can't find any records of the outcome of the trial, though accounts of the trial all seem to boil down to "hey, I know I got caught selling all these munitions to the South, but it was really the fault of these DIRTY FOREIGNERS!"

Whatever the outcome, William Wallace Gilchrist was a manufacturer of kerosene lamps and metal goods in 1862. I've got a copy of a letter he wrote to his son in early December, 1862. That suggests he was acquitted or the man arrested was Gilchrist Sr, but either way, there was still a William Gilchrist selling goods in Philadelphia in 1862.

And his son, also William Wallace Gilchrist, went on to become a minor figure in the history of American music.

And his son William Wallace was a painter.

The biography of the composer says only that his father fell on hard times with the outbreak of the civil war. That's backed up by tax records which list all his wealth in 1865 being in two watches (his and his wife's) and a piano, as well as an extremely meager income.

I don't entirely know how to untangle all that, but I'm still digging. With luck, I'll be able to get in touch with living family.

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Edited to add:

Two separate biographers of the son and grandson both failed to turn up even 1/10th of the information listed here, so it's not at all sure anything else can be turned up, or how accurate what I've found is. The only thing I'm sure of is the family tree. The one with about a zillion William Wallaces in it. (The Painter's son was named Bill).

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Originally Posted by RezDog

there are a few people in Canada doing restores and honing. Phil at Classic Edge comes to mind. The banned user BobH is talking about does a wicked edge too!

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Yup, Phil at Classic Edge is a real pro...no doubt about it. (Classic Edge is a member here)

Also, there's thegentlemansden, he's in Toronto, does great work, he is also a member here.

Good luck, that's a gorgeous blade in stunning condition!

That's a frameback razor isn't it?

Nice work on the history, Martin and Zak! Most interesting and appreciated! :tu

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Originally Posted by sharptonn

Nice work on the history, Martin and Zak! Most interesting and appreciated! :tu

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Just to add to the amusement, my grandmother had framed a print of one of William Wallace Gilchrist's paintings. I looked at that painting pretty much every day, growing up.

Attachment 146819

And pretty soon I'll be posting about the Hassam Brothers out of Boston... Who had a surprisingly similar story (minus the arrest for treason, that is)...

I'll spare folks the mind-numbing details. But I've been reading through the official documents about the conspiracy / treason case against Gilchrist. A summary is difficult, but the end result is that he was held in prison for 5 months and then released on a 'DO NOT PROSECUTE' order.

The whole affair is spelled out in repetitive, legalistic, mind-numbing detail here. There's a lot of stuff in that book other than this, so you'll want to do a search on Gilchrist to get the juicy bits.

However, the juiciest bit is that in Gilchrist's letter to the British Consul, he says that Robert Wade of Philadelphia will vouch for him.

Two years later, two of his sons enlisted. James as a surgeon, and William Jr as infantry. William Jr was really sick though, and begged his dad to pull strings to get him released. His mother wrote back to him pleading to not sound insubordinate to people in authority.

Oh, yeah... And the guy that was arrested was the guy that made the razors, the father of the composer. HIS father was a British soldier in Canada and he survived fighting in the Canadian rebellions of the 1820's. Looks like my earlier info on when he came to America was wrong -- it had to have been the early 1840's.

I've read through a huge pile of stuff now and I'm convinced.

William Gilchrist's arrest for treason was because he inadvertently uncovered secret service agent Lafayette Baker's sideline of selling munitions to the South. In short, Gilchrist was framed.

Baker was a slimeball and all of the especially damning evidence against Gilchrist is purely Baker's word. There are a couple of facts that don't square real good with the idea of Gilchrist as an enthusiastic gun-runner for the south.

First and foremost, his eldest son was a surgeon in the army since before the war. Well before the arrest. I was wrong, earlier -- it was after the arrest that his second son joined up. Secondly, his brother-in-law was an important general: Jacob D. Cox.

I'm trying to track down the letters back and forth, but Gilchrist claimed to have been in contact with the War Department about the goods that Baker was buying from him (and selling to another guy), and he claimed he was given the go-ahead to continue selling in order to accumulate evidence. When I say he claimed these things, his claim also took the form of sending those letters to his prosecutors.

The guy who actually was physically taking the stuff and reselling it was released to his friends on the advice of Baker.

After the case against Gilchrist was dropped, Baker went on to head up the first centralized spy agency... And be fired for tapping the telegraph lines his boss used -- but not before making a bunch of high profile arrests of members of the Treasury on corruption charges. It was widely considered at the time that Baker's wrath was due entirely to the graft not lining his pockets.

The Philadelphia police detective who assisted in the case against Gilchrist got Baker a job with the Pinkertons after he lost his government job, and it was with the Pinkertons that Baker found John Wilkes Booth (and collected almost the entire reward himself). He would go on, later, to accuse the president of being part of the assassination plot against Lincoln. Even the president's political enemies were unimpressed with Baker's evidence though, largely because he never produced the promised letters of proof.

Amazing stuff, Zak! Interesting history! :tu

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Originally Posted by sharptonn

Amazing stuff, Zak! Interesting history! :tu

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I'll have a lot more to say about it later, but it's going to be an epic writeup. First I need to get and read the book Gilchrist wrote about his imprisonment.

:)

Very Cool Zak! I always like Gilchrist because of the tie with Lincoln, like it even more now!

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Originally Posted by Martin103

Very Cool Zak! I always like Gilchrist because of the tie with Lincoln, like it even more now!

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I never would have found this stuff without that press clipping you found, Martin!

(Which, interestingly, seems to have been written by Baker -- at least, Baker quotes it near-verbatim in his 'History of the Secret Service')

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Originally Posted by Voidmonster

I never would have found this stuff without that press clipping you found, Martin!

(Which, interestingly, seems to have been written by Baker -- at least, Baker quotes it near-verbatim in his 'History of the Secret Service')

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Indeed, but you took it to another level, and its really interesting, some really big names are coming up, and perhaps some more.