07/29/12

Biography: WASHINGTON, Henry Augustine (b. 1870)

Henry Augustine Washington, a leading realtor of Memphis, conducting business under the name of the Washington Real Estate Company, was born at Somerville, Fayette county, Tennessee, on the 29th of March, 1870, and is a son of Dr. James S. and Ella V. (Jackson) Washington. Through the paternal line the family is connected with the Washington family of which George Washington was a representative, and through the maternal line is identified with the same family as General Andrew Jackson. Dr. James S. Washington was born in Fayette county, Tennessee, at Newcastle, February 24, 1838, and died on the 29th of June, 1921, in his eighty-fourth year. He was a physician and surgeon, who served throughout the Civil war as an army surgeon in Dobbin’s Brigade. He had been graduated from the Jefferson Medical College of Philadelphia in 1861 and had thus thoroughly qualified for important and onerous professional duties. With his return from the war he entered upon the private practice of medicine and remained strong and vigorous to almost the time of his demise. He left a large estate, which he had accumulated throughout a period of fifty-four years of medical practice. As his financial resources increased he had made investments in land. He had enjoyed a remarkable record as a physician, particularly as an obstetrician, never losing a single case in all of the half century and more of his practice. Prospering as the years passed by, he acquired valuable property holdings and one of the features of his estate was forty-three hundred acres of good farm land in Tennessee and Arkansas, of which twenty-seven hundred acres bordered the White river in Arkansas. When land values were at their height during the World war, he could have sold at two hundred dollars per acre, but he refused to dispose of a single acre, as he owed not a dollar and recognized that after all land is the basis of all values and no matter what happens to the country the man who owns good land is on the safe side. It was his rule from which he never deviated that not a dollar of mortgage should be placed upon any of his property and he advised his sons and daughters, who still own the land, to follow his example in this respect, which they have done. It was on the 24th of December, 1865, that Dr. Washington wedded Miss Ella V. Jackson of Monroe county, Arkansas, who still survives and is in excellent health, at the age of seventy-six years. She yet lives in the old home at Somerville, Tennessee, in which her son, Henry A., was born. Besides him there were four other children in the family: Dr. Clarence J. Washington, who is a dentist practicing in Memphis: Loulah, the wife of R. W. Sessums of Somerville, Tennessee; James G., also living in Somerville; and Emma, who is the wife of W. T. Cartwright of Memphis.

Henry A. Washington was educated in the public schools of Somerville and afterward pursued a commercial course in Eastman’s Business College at Poughkeepsie, New York. During ten years of his early manhood he was employed in the Peoples Savings Bank at Helena, Arkansas, holding various responsible positions and winning promotion from time to time. In 1905 he came to Memphis, where he embarked in the real estate business, which he has since followed uninterruptedly, building up a business of large and gratifying proportions. He now has many clients and has negotiated many important realty transfers. His judgment concerning realty values seems at all times of the soundest and his purchases and sales have been most judiciously made.

On the 5th of June, 1890. Mr. Washington was married to Miss Olive Oates, a native of Helena, Arkansas, and they have five children: Edith, now the wife of E. E. Bailey; Jane; Benjamin; James S.; and Ella V., the youngest, being now twelve years of age. Mr. and Mrs. Washington attend the Episcopal church, in which they hold membership and to the support of which they make generous contribution. Mr. Washington belongs to the Knights of Pythias and to the Woodmen of the World. He is fond of hunting and fishing and on one of his farms, a tract of six hundred acres in Monroe county, there is a fine fishing lake bordering his land and he there derives much pleasure in luring the finny tribe. Hunting is also good in that district and he not infrequently brings as trophies of the chase, deer and wild turkeys. He wisely mixes pleasure with business, maintaining an even balance in their relation and his friends find him a most congenial campanion on trips into the open, while his associates and contemporaries in the business world recognize him as a most alert and energetic man, ready for any emergency and for any opportunity, handling the former wisely and making use of the latter to the extent of substantially enhancing his fortune.

Source: Moore, John T, and Austin P. Foster. Tennessee, the Volunteer State, 1769-1923. Chicago: S.J. Clarke Pub. Co, 1923.

07/29/12

Biography: FALLS, James Napoleon (1841-1919)

Mr. Falls was born in Macon, Fayette county, Tennessee, on the 20th of February, 1841, a son of Gilbreath and Frances (Manees) Falls. His paternal grandfather emigrated from Iredell county, North Carolina, to Athens, Alabama, and during his stay there, Gilbreath Falls was born. From there the family removed to Somerville, Tennessee. The grandfather was one of the first of the race of hardy aristocrats who moved across the mountains and created that wonderful community from La Grange up to old Belmont and across to Bolivar. The progenitor of the Falls family in this country was Charles Falls, who came from England in 1635. The paternal great-great-grandfather fell in action during the Revolutionary war, whereupon his fourteen-year-old son, with his father’s sword, slew a Tory in the act of robbing the body. Gilbreath Falls came to Memphis in 1845 and under the name of G. Falls & Company he engaged in the buying and exporting of cotton, being active in the conduct of that business for many years. He was one of the most prominent and farsighted business men of his day and was held in high confidence and esteem in Memphis.

In the acquirement of his education James Napoleon Falls attended private schools in Memphis and later attended school at McLemoresville, Tennessee. He completed his literary course at Antioch College, Yellow Sulphur Springs, Ohio. He returned home a short time before the outbreak of the Civil war and enlisted promptly in the Bluff City Grays, later Company B, One Hundred and Fifteenth Regiment, Tennessee Infantry, and was later mounted under General Forrest. He fought from Belmont to Gainesville, with the exception of a short time after the battle of Murfreesboro, where he surrendered to be with a mortally wounded brother, but escaped immediately after the brother’s death. He received severe wounds at the battle of Shiloh.

 In 1865, upon the close of the war, Mr. Falls returned to Memphis and joined his father’s firm, then known as Falls & Cash. James Napoleon Falls was a pioneer in the cotton seed oil industry. His first mill was built in 1873 at Friar Point, Mississippi, later he erected the Valley Oil Mill in Memphis, and subsequently the Dixie Oil Mill in Little Rock, Arkansas. The Merchants Cotton Press & Storage Company was then the largest institution in Memphis and Mr. Falls was president of that concern for twenty years, being a dominant factor in its continued progress. He had the distinction of being the first man to establish a factory for the manufacture of ice in Memphis, business being conducted under the name of the People’s Ice Company, and in that connection he sunk the first artesian well in this city, where the Linden station is now located. As president of the Chickasaw Building Company he erected the Falls building, the largest exclusive cotton office building in the world.

At Walnut Bend, Arkansas, on the 8th of November, 1871, was celebrated the marriage of Mr. Falls and Miss Clara Dunn, a daughter of Dr. Lawson Biscoe and Malinda (Lewis) Dunn. To their union the following children were born: Clara Frances, now Mrs. J. Alexander Austin; Lawson Dunn; Minnie Lee, now Mrs. Rayburn Dunscomb; John William (II); and Melinda Elizabeth, the wife of William Poston Maury.

Mr. Falls’ life was an active and varied one. For four years he was a soldier in as good a company as the Confederacy boasted of, and for half a century he was a leader throughout the mid-south in business, manufacturing, financial, social and religious circles.

Source: Moore, John T, and Austin P. Foster. Tennessee, the Volunteer State, 1769-1923. Chicago: S.J. Clarke Pub. Co, 1923.