Charles Augustus Wheaton (1809–1882) was a businessman and major figure in the central New York state abolitionist movement and Underground Railroad, as well as other progressive causes. He was one of the founders of the First Congregational Church in Syracuse, which took an abolitionist stand, and was part of the Vigilance Committee that formed in 1850 to resist the Fugitive Slave Law.
In 1860 he moved to Northfield, Minnesota, where he was one of two men who donated the land to found the Carleton College campus. There he served with the Minnesota legislature. The father of a total of 17 children, he had an active family life. He later became the editor of two local newspapers.
Early life and education
Charles Augustus Wheaton was born on 1 July 1809 in Amenia, New York, the son of Augustus Wheaton, a farmer and drover, and his wife. He had two brothers. The parents purchased a farm in the town of Pompey in Onondaga County in 1807. They migrated there from Dutchess County with their family in 1810. They had followed three of the elder Wheaton's sisters: Lydia, Sylvia and Loraine, who had already moved to Pompey with their families, part of a westward migration of many in the state in the years after the American Revolutionary War. Charles attended the Pompey Academy, a well-regarded boys' school.
Charles Wheaton's eldest brother Orlin J. became a farmer and drover like their father. Their brother Horace served as a Representative from New York in the US Congress and later became the fourth mayor of the city of Syracuse. He also became a partner with Charles in his future hardware business in Syracuse.
Marriage and family
Wheaton married Ellen Douglas Birdseye on June 24, 1834, at the First Presbyterian Church in Syracuse, where they were both members for a time. They had been neighbors in Pompey. He was 25 and she was 18.
She was the second of twelve children of Electa (née Beebee) and Victory Birdseye. The father was one of Onondaga County's leading politicians. Birdseye practiced law and served two terms in Congress. He was postmaster of Pompey Hill for 22 years, district attorney of Onondaga County for 14 years, and held numerous other political offices. The original Birdseye House is now part of the Onondaga County Freedom Trail. A descendant founded Birds Eye Frozen Foods.
Charles and Ellen Wheaton had twelve children together, including Cornelia (b. 1835), Lucia, Henry Birdseye, and Charles A. Wheaton (b. 1853).
Ellen was well educated, having attended a girls seminary in Cortland and music school in the state capital of Albany. She is reported to have owned the first piano in Pompey. She is best known for a notable diary she kept from 1850 to 1858, detailing her life as a wife and mother of a large family. The Wheaton family privately published The Diary of Ellen Birdseye Wheaton in 1923. Selections from the diary were reprinted in the Syracuse Post-Standard newspaper in March 2002. Birdseye Wheaton died in 1858 at age 42 from tuberculosis.
Progressive views and activism, particularly relating to abolition and women's rights, were an important part of the Wheatons' family life. They sent some of their children to the private school in New Jersey run by Theodore Weld and Angelina Weld Grimké, advocates for these progressive causes.
After the death of Ellen in 1858 and moving to join friends in Northfield, Minnesota in 1860, Wheaton married the widow Martha Elizabeth (Archibald) Wagener in 1861. She had also moved from central New York, migrating with her parents after losing her husband and their three sons to illness. The senior Archibalds owned flour mills in Dundas.
Charles and Mary Wheaton had five children: Frederick (1862–1881), Robert (1863–1898), Allan (1866–1934), Edith (1868–1950) and Annabel (1870–1946). They also reared together some of the younger of Wheaton's 12 children from his first marriage.
Career
As a young man, Charles clerked in the general store owned by his brother-in-law Moses Seymour Marsh. Retail businesses were a growing part of the economy.
In 1835, soon after the birth of their first child, the Wheaton family moved to Syracuse, where Charles went into the hardware business. Wheaton and a variety of partners, including his brother Horace, built a prosperous company. Over the course of 20 years, the Wheatons lived in seven houses, moving to larger homes as family and fortune grew. None of the Wheaton homes in Syracuse are believed to exist.