As mentioned last week in Niagara Discoveries, James and Jane Taft Atwater were married in 1851 and had five children who lived to adulthood. In the 1850s the Atwaters were living in Lockport at 49 Mulberry Street (now Elmwood Avenue). Their eldest child, Willard Taft Atwater, was born in 1852. In 1866 the family moved down the street to No. 23 Mulberry (when the numbering system changed in 1878, they were then living at 85 Mulberry).
James Atwater left his teaching job at the Union School in 1868 and went into business selling insurance and real estate with Elijah A. Holt at 77 Main Street. In the 1870s son Willard was working as a bookkeeper in Buffalo and Syracuse but was back in Lockport in the same occupation in 1878. In 1881 Willard married Sarah Ella Pierce and shortly afterward moved out west, first to Illinois and then to Minnesota. He continued as a bookkeeper and in 1900 listed his occupation as “Credit Manager.” Willard and Sarah had five children. He died in Minneapolis in 1911.
Charles Nelson, the Atwaters’ second son, was born in 1857 after the birth and death of two daughters. He entered the Navy in 1873 at the age of 16 years and graduated from the Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1878.
Although Charles is described in an article by his great-grandson, Russell Neyman, as “a smoker and a drinker… stubborn and argumentative,” he did have a soft touch when it came to the ladies. Neyman, who read his ancestor’s diaries, muses that “when he wasn’t doing his Navy thing, Charlie was on a constant search for a mate!” Charles found that mate in May Snowden of Peekskill. They were married in September of 1882 and had two daughters.
As a junior Naval officer Charles sailed on the last active cruise of the fabled USS Constitution, and as a lieutenant commander he and a contingent of U.S. Navy men captured a lighthouse in Puerto Rico during the Spanish-American War and held it during a counter attack by the Spanish. He retired from active duty in 1905 but continued to serve in a training capacity until the day of his death. Stricken on board the training ship Nantucket on April 22, 1919 in Charlestown Harbor, Massachusetts, during naval exercises, he was buried in Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors.
Edwin Carlton Atwater was born in Lockport in 1860. As a 20-year-old in 1880 he was working as a clerk in his father’s insurance agency. He married Alice Van Valkenberg, daughter of Thomas N. Van Valkenberg, Lockport businessman and politician, in 1888. They had three children. Like his brothers, Edwin did not stay in Lockport long after his marriage. The couple soon moved to Colorado and then to Montana where Edwin was employed as a “Special Agent, Gov’t Oil Works.” The family finally settled in Spokane, Washington, where Edwin was a manager in a belt factory and later established his own business, the Atwater Company. He died there in 1943.
Jennie Fay Atwater, the couple’s only surviving daughter, was born in 1865, the same year that Lockport became a city. She died unmarried in 1893.
James Atwater’s partnership with Elijah Holt had dissolved in 1877, and by the late 1880s, he had moved both his household and his business to new locations. The Atwater Insurance Company was relocated to 10 Hodge Opera House and the family moved to 268 Genesee Street, a red brick house that is still standing today.
NEXT WEEK: Atwater son Irving marries into the Tucker family of Niagara Falls and Lockport.