As mentioned in a prior post, Rev. Charles Edwin Brown (my maternal great-great grandfather or 2nd great-grandfather in Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s terminology) was a Baptist missionary to the Iowa Territory in 1842. His and, therefore, my lineage in the U.S. has been traced to at least 1686.[1]
William Brown was born somewhere in England around 1669 and emigrated to the American colonies sometime before 1686. William was one of the early settlers of Hadley (later Hatfield), Massachusetts and the builder of its first house. By 1720 he had relocated to Leicester, Massachusetts approximately 45 miles west of Boston. He died in Leicester, Massachusetts in 1752. (William was my maternal 7th great-grandfather.)
One of William’s sons was John Brown, who was born in Hatfield, Massachusetts on November 3, 1703. Sometime before 1720 he and his family moved to be among the original settlers of Leicester, Massachusetts, where he became an important figure. John was a representative in the Commonwealth’s legislature for many years between 1749 and 1768. He died on December 24, 1791 in Leicester. (John was my maternal 6th great-grandfather.)
One of John’s sons was Perley Brown, who was born on May 27, 1737 in Leicester, Massachusetts and who died on October 28, 1776, in White Plains, New York. (Perley was my maternal 5th great-grandfather.)
John and Perley and four of John’s other sons (John, Jr., Benjamin, William and Daniel) had significant military experience, including the American Revolutionary War, that will examined in subsequent posts.
One of Perley’s sons was Nathaniel Brown, who was born in Leicester, Massachusetts on November 5, 1767 and who died on October 1, 1854 in Hamburg, New York. (Nathaniel Brown was my maternal 4th great-grandfather.)
Phillip Perry Brown was one of Nathaniel’s sons, having been born on September 17, 1790 in Bennington, Vermont. He was an ordained Baptist pastor who served several churches in Madison County, New York. He died in Madison, New York on September 23, 1876. (Phillip Perry Brown was my maternal 3rd great-grandfather.)
Phillip Perry was the father of Charles Edwin Brown, who was born on February 23, 1813 in Augusta, New York and who died in Ottumwa, Iowa on July 23, 1901.
Future posts will explore Charles Edwin’s ministry and service in Iowa and the lives of (a) his son, James DeGrush Brown (my maternal 1st great-grandfather); (b) Charles Edwin’s grandson, George Edwin Brown (my maternal grandfather); (c) and Charles Edwin’s great-grand-daughter, Marian Frances Brown Krohnke (my Mother). Another son of Charles Edwin–William Carlos Brown–had a remarkable railroad career that will be examined in other posts.
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[1] The source for this geneology is Carol Willits Brown, William Brown–English Immigrant of Hatfield and Leicester, Massachusetts, and His Descendants c. 1669-1994 (Gateway Press; Baltimore, MD 1994).
In May 1842 Rev. Charles Edwin Brown and his wife, Frances Lyon Brown, both 29 years old, and their two young sons (Benjamin Perry Brown, almost three years old, and Charles Perry Brown, one and a half years old) left their home in the small village of Warren in the central part of the State of New York to go on a Baptist missionary trip of roughly 1,500 miles to another small village, Maquoketa, in the eastern part of the Iowa Territory.
At the time Rev. Brown was the Pastor of the Baptist Church in Warren. Previously he had submitted an application for appointment as a missionary “in the distant West” with a preference for the Iowa Territory, and his application had been endorsed by the New York State Missionary Convention. Later the American Baptist Home Missionary Society appointed him to be a missionary to the forks of the Maquoketa River in Iowa at an annual salary of $100 plus $75 for travel expenses.
The Browns could not economically ship all of their household goods to Iowa so they sold everything except clothing, bedding, a table, a stand, a rocking chair and a small cook stove. These remnants weighed approximately 1,600 pounds.
This would not be an easy journey. Of course, there were no airplanes or automobiles on Interstate highways to take them there. Nor were there any cross-country railroads. An account of the journey that is set forth in the memoirs of Rev. Brown, my maternal great-great grandfather (2nd great-grandfather in Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s parlance), provides a window into what life and transportation were like in the U.S. of 1842 when approximately 17 million people lived in the 26 states of the Union. (Four years later, in 1846, Iowa became the 29th state in the Union.)
The First Stage: Warren to Utica, New York
Utica, NY, 1855
The initial stage of their trip for six or seven days, from Warren to Little Falls and Utica, New York, of approximately 130 miles presumably was by horse-drawn wagon. Utica, then a town with a population of approximately 13,000, was a terminus on the 17-year old Erie Canal that had been built to connect New York City’s harbor with Lake Erie and the other Great Lakes and thereby improve transportation into, and from, the interior of the U.S. This stage cost the family $15.00.
The Second Stage: Utica to Buffalo, New York
Erie CanalErie Canal Packet Boat
On Monday, May 2nd, at Utica the Browns boarded the Little Western, a passenger packet or Line boat on the Erie Canal for the second stage of their journey. They had a comfortable cabin in the bow. The kitchen and dining cabin were in the stern with freight and baggage amidships. “With good company, clean wholesome food, a sober and accommodating master and crew, the two hundred mile trip from Utica to Buffalo was comfortable and pleasant.” As the boat did not run on Sunday, it was tied up for the day in Tonawanda, New York. This gave the family the opportunity to attend a Methodist Church worship service in the morning and for Rev. Brown to preach in the afternoon. On Monday (May 9th), they arrived in Buffalo, then a town of 18,000 people. The family’s total fare at 2 cents per mile for each adult was $8.00.
The Dart Grain Elevator, Buffalo, NY, 1842
With the Erie Canal, Buffalo became a key junction for the shipment of western grain to the east coast and beyond as the Great Lakes ships were too big to go on the Erie Canal. Until 1842 loose grain on the ships had to be manually scooped into baskets and transferred to the wharves by block and tackle while sacks, barrels and casks of grain and flour had be to manually hauled to the wharves and then loaded onto the canal boats, oftentimes with an in-between hauling into and out of warehouses. In late 1842, however, this changed with the invention by Joseph Dart and Robert Dunbar of a grain elevator with a steam-powered conveyor belt and buckets for the direct transfer of grain from the ships to grain elevators on the land.
The Third Stage: Buffalo, New York to Chicago, Illinois
Great Western Steamer
On May 9th, the family boarded the Great Western, a Great Lakes steamer, for the third stage of their journey. The four-year old, 185-foot Great Western was one of the largest and finest of the day and was the first to have a spacious upper cabin for its nearly 400 passengers. The entire hull was occupied by the boilers with holds for freight and wood.
Great Lakes Map
Prior to completion of the Erie Canal in 1825, shipping on the Great Lakes was primarily on sailing craft as traffic was not sufficient to make the more-expensive steamers profitable to operate. The Erie Canal, however, expanded Lakes traffic so that steamers increasingly became the preferred mode of transportation as they offered fast, efficient and predictable delivery of passengers and freight.
The Great Lakes voyage on the Great Western steamer took six days before arrival on Sunday, May 15th, in the village of Chicago, population of approximately 5,000. Other than a storm the first night out, the trip was pleasant with short stops in Cleveland (population of 6,000) and Detroit (population of 9,000). Mrs. Brown commented that on the way they had seen the “pleasant villages” of Milwaukee, Racine and Southport, Wisconsin. The total fare for the family was $48.00.
The Fourth Stage: Chicago to Savanna, Illinois
After an overnight stay at the New York House, a two-story hotel in Chicago, Rev. Brown hired a man with horses and lumber wagon to take the family and their possessions the additional 200 miles to Savanna, Illinois on the Mississippi River. Their rocking chair and a small chair were put on top of the boxes for Mrs. Brown and the older son to sit on during the ride.
On Monday, May 16th, the fourth stage of the journey began in the lumber wagon. After two over-night stops, they arrived in the town of Rockford, Illinois, the home of the wagon owner. Unfortunately the owner had to testify in a trial, and the family was forced to stay there until the following Monday. The delay, however, gave Rev. Brown the opportunity to preach that Sunday in Rockford’s Baptist Church, his “first sermon in the west.”
On the following Monday after a day’s ride, near Crane’s Grove, Illinois, they asked Mrs. Crane, “middle aged and stout” with a pail of milk, if they could stay there that night. She replied, “Oh, I reckon, though I am mighty tired. The old cow gives a right smart of milk, well on to half a bushel.”
The next morning, the owner of the lumber wagon discovered that he had overfed his horses and one had died. Mr. Crane was then enlisted to take the Browns, again by horse-drawn wagon, the next 18 miles to Cherry Grove, Illinois, where the next day (May 24th) another man, Mr. Gardner, took the family to Savanna, Illinois on the Mississippi River. This was the Brown family’s first view “of the mighty river, its volume then being much greater than in later years.”
The Fifth Stage: Savanna, Illinois to Charleston, Iowa
Mississippi River, Savanna, Illinois
The fifth stage of the journey on the evening of the 24th was a ferry across the Mississippi River from Savanna to Charleston (later Sabula), Iowa where they stayed the night in the local tavern. Perhaps the ferry looked like the one pictured at the right.
The Sixth Stage: Charleston to Maquoketa, Iowa
The next morning, May 25th, Rev. Brown hired yet another man and team to take them the final 25 to 30 miles to Maquoketa, Iowa. Around midnight they arrived at their destination, Mr. C. W. Doolittle’s cabin. “With cordial frontier hospitality . . . Mr. and Mrs. Doolittle turned out and welcomed us, prepared supper and then gave us their bed, while they found lodging for themselves and family in the cabin loft. Tired and worn by the long and tedious last day’s drive we slept sweetly and soundly, four in the bed, myself, wife and two children.”
Conclusion
This six-stage journey took a month: 6 or 7 days from Warren to Utica plus 24 days from Utica to Maquoketa.
Rev. Brown served as a Baptist missionary in Iowa for most of the following 36 years, a subject that will be examined in a subsequent post.
In the early 1970’s the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (the Board) approved the acquisition of two Iowa (Bettendorf and Keokuk) banks by Minneapolis-based Northwest Bancorporation (Northwest).[1]
At the time, federal law provided that no acquisition of a state bank by an out-of-state bank holding company was permissible unless such an acquisition was “specifically authorized by the statute laws of the State in which . . . [the acquired] bank is located.”[2] An Iowa statute at the time generally barred out-of-state bank holding company acquisitions of Iowa banks “unless such bank holding company was on January 1, 1971, registered with the federal reserve board as a bank holding company, and on that date owned at least two banks in [Iowa].”[3] This is what is colloquially called a “grandfather clause,” and at the time Northwest was the only out-of-state bank holding company owned or controlled any Iowa banks and thus was the only person covered by this grandfather clause.[4]
The Board’s approval was contested and challenged by the Iowa Independent Bankers Corporation (Iowa Bankers), an association of over 400 Iowa banks on various grounds. The key ground was the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Iowa Bankers argued that the Iowa statute violated equal protection by creating two classes of out-of-state bank holding companies: (a) those owning one or no Iowa banks and (b) those owning two or more Iowa banks with Northwest being the only such holding company in the latter class.[5]
The Board in approving the acquisitions declined to rule on this constitutional objection. It said that only the judiciary could do so.[6] Thus, the Iowa Bankers petitioned the appropriate federal court of appeals in Washington, D.C. to set aside the Board’s approval on this and other grounds.
Faegre & Benson was the regular outside general counsel for Northwest, and I was designated as the Faegre lawyer responsible for defending the Board’s approval of the acquisitions. With the help of others at the law firm, I wrote the appellate brief for Northwest and argued the case before the appellate court.
U.S. Courthouse, Washington, D.C.
In February 1975, the appellate court unanimously affirmed the Board’s approval of the acquisitions and dismissed the petition by the Iowa Bankers.
On the Equal Protection issue, the court stated that as the Iowa statute did not create a suspect classification or impinge upon fundamental rights, the court’s review was limited to determining whether the statute had a rational relationship to a legitimate state purpose. The appropriate classes under the statute, said the court, were those holding companies not owning any Iowa banks and those that already did. More importantly, the court concluded it was “perfectly rational for the Iowa legislature to determine that Northwest . . . [had] a pre-existing stake in the Iowa banking system and [had] . . . proven itself to be a positive force in the system [and] should be allowed to compete on the same basis as other Iowa banks . . . .” Likewise it was rational for the Iowa legislature, according to the court, to decide that Iowa would not be well served if other out-of-state holding companies “were allowed wholesale entry into the Iowa market.”[7]
Jackson Square, French Quarter, New Orleans French Quarter, New Orleans
At the same time as the Northwest litigation, the same legal issue was presented to the U.S. Supreme Court. In City of New Orleans v. Duke, a New Orleans ordinance banned pushcart vendors in the French Quarter except for those who already had done so continuously for over eight years with only two such vendors (one hot dogs; the other, ice cream) qualifying under that grandfather clause.[8] The Supreme Court held that the ordinance was constitutional. It stated, “When local economic regulation is challenged solely as violating the Equal Protection Clause, this Court consistently defers to legislative determinations as to the desirability of particular statutory discriminations.” Such regulations are valid, according to the Court, so long as their classifications are “rationally related to a legitimate state interest. States are accorded wide latitude in the regulation of their local economies under their police powers, and rational distinctions may be made with substantially less than mathematical exactitude.” Therefore, the Supreme Court concluded that the “record makes abundantly clear that the . . . ordinance, including the ‘grandfather provision,’ is solely an economic regulation aimed at enhancing the vital role of the French Quarter’s tourist-oriented charm in the economy of New Orleans.”[9]
That is why I say buying banks is the same as selling hot dogs under the law.
[1]Iowa Independent Bankers v. Board of Governors, 511 F.2d 1288 (D.C. Cir. 1975), cert. denied, 423 U.S. 875 (1976). Northwest Bancorporation in 1983 changed its name to Norwest Corporation, which in 1998 was merged into Wells Fargo & Company of San Francisco.
