Woolsey Marine Paint Sign

Everything known about Charles A. Woolsey survives on paper. A receipt, a sworn trademark filing, a will and its codicil. A gravestone, a church register, the same name twice on the same page. Laid end to end, something like a man comes into view, faint, made almost entirely of dates, but a man.

The sign is the last of these documents, and the most stubborn one. An orange sky, white sails, a ship's wheel worked into the letter W. "Serving at Sea. Since 1853."¹ Fired, carefully, layer by layer, into porcelain enamel hot enough that a century hasn't faded its color.

"Since 1853." The earliest surviving record of "Established 1853" is a receipt from 1912², by which time the Woolsey company was run by the founder's younger half-brother, Frank. In 1853, Frank was three years old³.

In 1921, Frank Woolsey stood before a notary and swore, under oath, that the company's trademark had been in continuous use since March of 1876⁴.

A date is not an account. What the sign leaves out is a working lifetime. What follows is whose lifetime, and what filled it.

CHAS A. WOOLSEY

Charles Anthony Woolsey was born August 27, 1833, in Jersey City, New Jersey⁵.

His mother, Sarah Ann Anthony Woolsey, died when he was eight. His father, Thomas Woolsey, died intestate when he was eighteen. Nothing arranged.⁶ Whatever Charles built afterward, he built without either parent alive to see it.

On September 13, 1858, he married Mary Caroline Van Name of Staten Island⁷. He was twenty-five.

Their firstborn, Herbert, was born in June of 1859. A daughter, Alice, in 1862.⁸

Their second son, Charles Augustus, named after his father, was born August 14, 1868. On December 6, 1875, he died. He was seven⁹.

A third son, Edwin, arrived in March of 1875, before his brother died. They called him Eddie. On March 15, 1882, he died too. He was also seven¹⁰.

Herbert, the eldest, had known both of his brothers, and had buried them both, by the time he was old enough to be a man himself.

He became a merchant. In 1887 he married Virginia Maude Stansbie¹¹. On December 14, 1888, they had a son, and named him Charles, a name already lost once. On December 29, 1889, that Charles died too. He had just turned one¹².

Seven months later, on July 30, 1890, a second son was born. This one they named Herbert, carrying his father's name into the next generation¹³.

Eight months after that, on March 28, 1891, Herbert Sr. died. The last of Charles's three sons. He was thirty-one. No cause was recorded¹⁴.

WRITTEN TWICE

The record of what happened next survives in a church ledger in Jersey City, its pages gone the color of weak tea, the ink faded to a soft brown that was once black¹⁵.

The same hand fills page after page. Small, careful, slightly forward-leaning. Sundays, mostly. Infants. Ordinary entries, ordinary ink.

Then a Saturday.

March 28, 1891. Herbert Wallace Woolsey, born June 22, 1859. A man, baptized on the same day he died¹⁶.

Three lines down, the same ink, the same hand.

March 31, 1891. Herbert Wallace Woolsey, born July 30, 1890. His son, not yet a year old, baptized three days later¹⁷.

Whoever wrote the first line was the same person who wrote the second. He had already recorded the father's death when he sat down for the son's baptism. He knew exactly what he was writing, and he wrote it the way he wrote every name in that book, carefully, correctly, the letters no smaller and no larger than any other entry.

THE WILL

Three years later, Mary Caroline died on March 13, 1894, after thirty-five years of marriage¹⁸. Charles Woolsey had now outlived his mother, his father, an infant grandson, two young sons, and the son who would have carried the company forward and his wife.

That June, he sat down and wrote a will built almost entirely around his grandson, not yet four.¹⁹.

Alice was provided for. Virginia, his daughter-in-law, was given an annuity, so long as she did not remarry. As executors, Charles named his brother Frank, and two men he called friends, Robert A. Simpson and James P. Northrop, the same three men who would go on to run the company in the years after his death²⁰. Everything else, the larger estate, went into a trust for the boy, structured years in advance, with contingencies for a future Charles would not live to see, what happened if the boy came of age, what happened if he did not²¹.

A man does not build that kind of scaffolding for someone who is merely young. He built a will around the one person he had left to protect.

NO CAUSE RECORDED

Charles Woolsey died July 4, 1895, of long-standing heart disease. Not in his own house. At the home of his daughter-in-law, Virginia, on Upper Montgomery Street, Jersey City²².

The will was already filed. Whatever he could arrange, he had arranged.

In January of 1903, the paint company became insolvent. Robert Simpson, one of the three executors, died within a month of the failure. The two who remained filed their account that July. Alice and Virginia objected to it. A court sided partly with them; a higher court reversed. The dispute ran three years²³.

It was still unsettled in March of 1904, when on the twentieth, Herbert died. He was thirteen years, seven months old. No cause was recorded, no more than it had been recorded for his father²⁴.

The will had planned for this, in its own way. If the boy died without children of his own, and Alice did too, the estate would not simply pass to whoever remained. It would be divided as though Charles had never written a will at all, under the law of a state that had no particular claim on Virginia beyond the son she'd already buried²⁵. A man who wrote contingencies for almost everything had not quite written one for this. Virginia outlived all of it. What she was left holding is not part of the record.

By 1912 the company was printing three dates across the top of its paper.² Established 1853. Incorporated 1890. Reincorporated 1903. On the invoices, same type, same line, same size.

Two of them are filings. The third exists only there, on the company's own paper.

In 1853, Charles Woolsey turned twenty. Their father had been dead for two years. Frank was three.

_______

Frank outlived his son Harry, who had been the company's secretary.²⁶ The last trademark either of them signed was in 1932.²⁷ In 1949, the company applied to register a new mark for marine paint, Tradewinds. The application was signed by C. E. Raabe, President, from an office at 229 East 42nd Street, New York.²⁸