Thread: Robert Wade and the challenge of sorting history.

Originally Posted by Voidmonster

And it's worth noting that Heiffor's squiggles can be rendered with 6's, 9's, commas, quotes and semi-colons -- that is, it's made purely from type dies, just arranged with ... eccentricity.

Or at least some variations of it are. The ones on your blades emphatically are not.

It has been discussed here: http://straightrazorpalace.com/razor...or-blades.html

Since I started this thread well over a year ago, I've accumulated kind of a lot more information about Robert Wade.

But more importantly, I've accumulated another Robert Wade razor.

Here's a family portrait.



The new arrival is the one in black scales. It's hard to say for sure if they're the scales the razor came in since it's been repinned at some point, but they're plausible. The whole package, to my eye, says 'mid 1820's'. There are a number of things that interest me.



Looking past the ugly hone wear you might notice that the blade is awfully dark. The pile side is the same. Very uniform. Very dark, and the tang is light. I very strongly suspect this blade was intentionally blued, and probably when it was made.

That likely date of mid-1820's is also very interesting to me. Robert Wade partnered with the Butcher brothers in 1818, and he was dead mid-year 1825. That very, very strongly suggests to me that this razor was made by Jane.

In any event, Robert Wade was the son of a wealthy grain-vendor. He was born in the late 1700's and his mother and father attended the big dinners put on by the Cutler's Company. His father died at some point, but his mother significantly outlived him.

He died in June, 1825 and left two children: his son Robert and his daughter Jane Elizabeth. His wife, Jane, outlived him by only 4 years. At that point it appears that William and Samuel Butcher took in his kids.

At any rate, the young Robert Wade went to work for them and moved to America where he married a prominent socialite, the incredibly confusingly named Charlotte Bourne Swett. Why confusing? Because there were two women with the same name born within 2 years of each other to completely different families hundreds of miles from each other.

Charlotte's brother-in-law caused a minor stir in the papers by drowning while out swimming with her at Cape May, NJ. Some years later, Charlotte died either in child birth or shortly after her daughter, Charlotte Bourne was... um, born.

Charlotte retained her mother's maiden name, possibly because the Swett family took her in rather than leave a freshly widowed man with no local family to raise a newborn on his own. Years later, Wade remarried to Mary Anne Reed and they had two children: Eleanor (after Robert's still living mother, back in Sheffield) and Maida.

It was around that time that Wade got to know William Gilchrist. At the time, Wade and his family lived at the rather fancy Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, Gilchrist and his family was about a block away. The two got along well enough that when Gilchrist was charged with treason and faced hanging, he called Robert Wade as a character witness.

From there, Wade & Butcher begins to fade, and Robert retires to a quiet life in New York. He died in 1887, Mary Anne in 1899. Their daughters married well, and one of his granddaughters became a famous adventurer, had an affair with Buckminster Fuller and married the man who invented the New Times Roman typeface.

There's a whole lot more detail to all this, but I thought that thumbnail sketch of the family history might be fun.

Voidmonster, please don't stop researching, writing, and sharing with us - your posts are fascinating and each time I feel like I come away feeling more informed, intrigued, and drawn into the history of these wonderful tools! So, thank you!

+1 for Suavio post, knowledge is power! Very interesting history, wade, Gilchrist, Butcher's Bros, big names in the razor history world.

I've spent a LOT of time on Wade at this point... All because it never fully made sense that a partnership that lasted 7 years would dominate the trade mark of a venture like W & S Butcher. There's still lots of questions I want answered, but the biggest ones have finally been solved.

The last knot to come untied was the fate of Charlotte B. Swett. For over a year I could never find an obit for her or any mention after her brother-in-law drowned, but I guess new articles got scanned or someone fixed up the OCR, because her obituary is now findable and is within the margin of error for the birth date of their daughter.

I'm on pins and needles ........ so did they hang that Gilchrist fellow, or is he one and the same as the Jersey City Gilchrist who was associated with W&B ?

Originally Posted by JimmyHAD

I'm on pins and needles ........ so did they hang that Gilchrist fellow, or is he one and the same as the Jersey City Gilchrist who was associated with W&B ?

He's one and the same!

They held him in a military prison for 7 months and killed his business. He was ultimately released because the British consul started sending angry letters (Gilchrist remained a British citizen, though he lived in America for most of his life).

As near as I can tell, based on the court records, newspaper stories and career arcs of the folks involved, Gilchrist was charged with treason because his annoying insistence on pestering the war department about this guy buying primer cap and sending them to the south. Bringing that to the attention of larger authorities seems to have put a crimp in the steady pocket-lining that secret service agent Lafayette Baker had going in the rebel munitions business.

The whole thing was deeply weird. Gilchrist's claims that he had asked the war department about whether or not to keep selling to these guys seems pretty plausible, since his eldest son was a Union medic and his brother-in-law an important General. It's a bit hard to imagine he was happy to make money that might kill his family.

The official release was a 'do not prosecute' order. It let the prosecutors comply with the diplomatic will without ever admitting they were wrong. The stated reason being "he's unlikely to ever do this again."

Excellent thread and research.

I'm waiting for the book