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Ernesto · (This post was last modified: 02-27-2021 10:38 AM by Ernesto.)

(06-03-2013 02:23 AM)margotdarby Wrote: Thanks. Pure happenstance!

Two or three days ago I was idly Googling 'George N. Sanders' or someone else in the charmed circle. I got a link to this symposium with a mention of Patrick C. Martin, and that sent me off on this tangent. I checked out P.C. Martin on some newspaper databases, and found a lot. I didn't think the results from 1841-42 could be this fellow--very young then, only around 24--but the vital information about him dovetailed perfectly with the other sparse bits we have.

I made one factual error in recounting the brig 'Cicero' case. Captain Cox was stabbed by P.C. Martin, but he did not die. The mate, a man named Brown, did. Cox was very much alive and provided testimony. It appears that Martin's brother-in-law did so too. It all looks like a family-firm feud that blew up badly.

Minor, later, newsprint about Patrick C. Martin and family: After moving to Pittsburgh, Mr. Martin suffered some business loss in the great city fire of 1845. The family was back in Baltimore by the early 1850s. They traveled to New York a lot, by steamboat and rail. In 1853 they were in all the papers as injured survivors of a head-on collision on a single-track stretch of the Camden and Amboy Railroad in Old Bridge, New Jersey. (To judge by the news coverage, this suicide-bend was already historical and notorious in 1853, and like the overbuilt B&O stone bridges in Baltimore it's been preserved for us. The East Brunswick Historical Society website proudly informs us that "The single track train built in 1832 still passes through the village [Historic District of Old Bridge].")

Further afield, I now have pretty good hunches that a) Patrick C. Martin knew James D. Bulloch prior to 1861, and this was his main connection to the circle; and b) he didn't die in an 1864 shipwreck near the mouth of the St. Lawrence, but merely lay low for a few years, while his wife listed herself as a "widow" in the Montreal directory. I'm sure many others have chased these suspicions down with more persistence than I have, but maybe I can come up with something.

Margot
do you have the reference for the symposium about Martin selling Catholic material. I'd like to follow up.