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This is the strange tale of one of the greatest architects of all time, Alexander Jackson Davis, and the extraordinary house he designed for one of the biggest assholes ever.
Built in 1835 on the Hartford Turnpike in New Haven, this Greek Revival beauty stood defiantly until 1926. Its circular front porch was an unabashed play on the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates in Athens, a tribute to Dionysus and the first ancient monument of the Corinthian order. Alex Davis designed a staggering number of houses. Only three had a porch like this one.
The lucky owner was Henry Whitney (1812-1856), a horticulturist from New York City whose lovely residence was a wedding gift from his father, Stephen Whitney, the second-richest man in America after John Jacob Astor. Davis biographer Roger Hale Newton called it an exciting breakout from the hoary Victorian models of the time — a style so radical, so divine, it deserved its own architectural classification. It didn’t get one.
Newton described Henry Whitney’s curved porch thusly: “So decorative a feature ceased to be merely utilitarian so far as weather was concerned.” About the inside, he wrote: “…all traces of the old-fashioned Georgian paneling [popular at the time] had given way to a burst of plaster ornament in high relief, to delicately wrought acanthus leaves, capitals and fluting, elaborate rinceaux in frieze, modillions, and plaster roses from which crystal chandeliers hung.” (Town & Davis Architects) Henry Whitney’s 1856 probate records describe the house as brick, with fifteen rooms before it was ham-handedly remodeled.
As with all Davis creations, Henry’s Corinthian extravaganza had a bougie name: Highwood. It was quickly renamed Belmont because there was already a Highwood in town, owned by the poet James A. Hillhouse. It was Alex Davis’ first executed design. Tragically, there was another Belmont in town, too. Designed by Alex Davis’ former partner, Ithiel Town, it was owned by Henrietta Edwards Whitney, the widow of inventor Eli Whitney. The Eli Whitneys weren’t related to the Stephen Whitneys, but Henry didn’t want any trouble so he started calling his pad The Grove. James Hillhouse started calling his Sachem’s Wood, in honor of his father, US Senator James Hillhouse. (Connecticutians called him “Sachem” on account of he kept a hatchet on his desk.) Connecticut newspapers amusingly called Henry’s house “High Belmont.”
In 1841 the New Haven Daily Herald described Henry’s estate thusly: “The mansion of Mr. Whitney is approached from the Hartford Turnpike by a serpentine walk leading to the southern front,” with borders that “were overspread with flowers and arranged with taste and elegance. … On the northerly side of this walk and east of the house itself, is situated the Parterre [a formal garden] consisting of many green house plants, and flowers, kept with particular care and neatness.”
Henry’s 1856 probate filing described the size of the property as 20 acres. In 1841 it included a 1-acre garden (slightly smaller than a football field) where Henry raised flowers, fruits, and rare vegetables. His strawberries had quite the local reputation.
Probably to the dismay of his hyper-ambitious father, Henry barely managed to achieve marginal success as gentleman farmer. He was the recording secretary of his county’s agricultural society, and was elected to the American Institute Committee on Agriculture (whatever that was) in 1841. He was a subscription agent for a magazine, The Cultivator and Genesee Farmer. He had a stud bull named Young Rocket who he’d let knock up your cow for $3.
At least Henry had a job, sort of, and his own house, unlike his brothers Samuel and Stephen Jr. They were profligate drunks and gamblers who lived with their rich daddy until they died unemployed. Stephen Sr blew a gasket upon learning posthumously that Stephen Jr had children with a woman he never married, and left nothing when he died in 1858. Senior placed $20,000 of his railroad stock (worth $815,000 in 2026 dollars) in her name and sent it to her.
Henry was an entitled f*ck-up like his brothers, in his own special way. In case you’ve ever questioned the value of a Yale diploma, Henry managed to obtain his, an MA, at the age of 18. He distinguished himself scholastically by joining a boycott against the dorm food. (Catalogue of the Officers and Graduates of Yale University, 1910) As the Class of 1830’s secretary, he was in charge of compiling a biographical database of his classmates, and publishing the data as a book. Beach bongo Henry was the class secretary from 1830 until 1856. The book wasn’t published until 1871.
In Memorial of the Class of 1830‘s introduction, the exasperated editor explained how Henry’s records “have been lost,” and apologized for having “imperfectly and unsatisfactorily to himself performed [Henry’s] work.”
Said publication contained 69 alumni biographies. Henry’s states the following: He “never followed his profession [law], or engaged in any business.” He “had a magnificent residence, and lived as a gentleman without employment, and entertained his friends, and was always glad to see and hear from his classmates, many of whom partook of his hospitality. … He was a noble hearted man, full of fine impulses; and but for the prospect of inheriting a large fortune … and had he been under any necessity to exert himself, he would have been a man of position and influence.” Ouch! (Memorial of the Class of 1830, Yale College, published 1871)
Henry had 26 years to produce a class memoir. He was too busy gardening and (according to Yale) breeding “fine stock.” (Biographical Notices of Graduates of Yale College, 1913) Translation: He raised trick ponies that performed at the Bowery Amphitheatre, and cattle that won beauty contests at Niblo’s Garden and Vauxhall Garden, venues popular with easily entertained New Yorkers. Yale felt his business pursuits required spin. (New York Herald, May 25 ,1853; The Spirit of the Times (NY), Nov. 28, 1840)
Stephen Whitney was probably sorry he gave Henry a house. Multiple designs were created for Henry by Alex Davis, and rejected — houses of different sizes and shapes, with four, six, and eight columns on the circular front porch.
Some drafts show two porches, some four. Henry wanted a big rectangular veranda in addition to the round one, but couldn’t decide whether it should be one story or two, or on the back of the house or the side. (City maps show a one-story porch, on the back.)
Davis no doubt had many pain-in-the-ass clients. Henry Whitney seems like an especially big one. Poor Alex Davis. If Henry Whitney was my client, I’d punch him.
Henry died in 1856, in three different places: Hartford (per Grove Street Cemetery); East Hartford (the Hartford Evening Press); and New Haven (Yale). He was barely 44. The city of New Haven reported he dropped dead from gastritis. Personally, I think Alex Davis finally caught up to him.
Maria Fitch, Henry’s second wife who got stuck raising his children, probably wanted to punch him, too. He didn’t leave a will to provide for her, probably because she gave him an ulcer. What he did to her was worse. Henry died with $10,584 in assets and $42,519 in debts.
His executor was Sam Whitney, his ne’er-do-well numbnuts brother. Sam made sure all Maria inherited was $35 and a cow. Later she received a $450 equity distribution from Henry’s estate in exchange for relinquishing her dower rights. Henry put her through a lot of shit, including making her marry him in four different cities: Norwich, New Haven, Columbia, and Hartford. Oh, to be a fly on the wall for that proposal.
Fun Schadenfreude Facts! When Henry died in 1856, Maria had five kids, no mans, and no inheritance. When her father-in-law Stephen Whitney died four years later, he bequeathed her a generous trust fund paying her $1,000 quarterly ($162,000 per year in 2026 dollars). He was a notorious tightwad whose fortune derived from railroading and turning around worthless stocks, property, and factory inventories created by the War of 1812, the 1835 New York City fire, and the Panic of 1837. He wasn’t bad, he just wasn’t a philanthropist. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper described him as “almost sarcastic in this toiling to accumulate a monster cloud of riches” he couldn’t take with him. Stephen’s last words were: “Don’t pay the $500 to bury me in Trinity churchyard. Foolish expense. Better buy stock in the Panama railroad with the money.” His bequest to Maria was therefore a pleasant shock. Unlike his sons, Stephen actually cared what happened to his grandkids.
Meanwhile, instead of liquidating The Grove to pay off Henry’s debts, his heirs tripled the estate’s size — from 20 acres to 62. In 1864 they finally tried to unload it. There were no takers.
As for Henry Whitney, he got two graves: one in Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, and one in the Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven. Seems like a lot for a guy who didn’t have a funeral. His family in New York didn’t publish a death notice in the New York newspapers. Not a single obituary was published for him that I could find.
Yale man. Sterling lineage. Legendary house. You’d think that rates an obituary. But nah. You know what kind of rich guy doesn’t have an obit somewhere when he dies? The kind who isn’t dead.
Now let’s take a little trip. It’ll be fun, I promise. Time travel! Alter egos! More empty coffins! Buckle up.
This seems like the best place to mention that Henry lived in the magical time after life insurance was invented and before Social Security numbers existed — a time when many Americans pretended to die in order to cash out their life insurance policies, or evade the law or failed marriages or creditors, and start anew. I wrote a whole book about people like that (The Freemans: A Lust Story). They didn’t even change their names. Sometimes they assumed the identities of dead people with similar names, appropriating the decedent’s records to establish a new identity. One example is William Burtsell Freeman, a New Yorker with nine different identities and eight wives. He was a mayor, stock broker, bank robber, murderer, arsonist, drug dealer, and phony Civil War hero who got away with all of it. He lived to be 96.
That said, Henry Whitney may have been unavailable for his funeral because he was in Hawaii selling “choice garden, fruit and grass seeds” (according to his ads) as Henry Martyn Whitney (1821 or 1824-1904). Exactly like New Haven Henry, he was a horticulturist and officer of his local ag org (the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society) who sold “the finest seeds ever imported.”
Henry Martyn Whitney’s Story:
A masterpiece of obfuscation.
It’s impossible to reconcile the dueling eventlines in his many biographies, but the coincidences are fire so please enjoy the bullet points:
🐀 New Haven Henry’s fruit exploits abruptly stopped appearing in Connecticut newspapers in 1845, the year after his first wife, Hannah Lawrence, died. This was exactly when Henry Martyn Whitney went to work in the print shop at Harper & Brothers publishing in Manhattan.
🐀 He wasn’t there long. By 1847 Henry owned a farm in Rochester, NY. He wasn’t there long, either. In 1848 the imperial government of Hawaii inexplicably offered him a job. The government paid for his trip. Nobody knows why. (In William Burtsell Freeman’s case, it was because he was a government spy.)
🐀 Before Henry took off, he had to sell his farm. His ad in the Rochester Daily Democrat described it as 25 acres, 2.5 miles north of the city, with “the finest soil in Monroe County” and 1,000 peach and apple trees. Henry was in such a rush, he offered to sell it below market value and hold the mortgage. His ad pleaded: “To a person of limited means the above is an offer which may not soon occur again, as the payments are on the most desirable terms.”
🐀 It was 1850 before he arrived in Hawaii, with a new wife. The job he’d been offered — Director of Government Printing, or editor of the government’s propaganda rag, The Polynesian, depending on your source — was given to someone else because it took Henry two years to get there.
🐀 He took a menial job at the government printing office, probably as a compositor, and immediately opened a store in the GPO building selling stationery, books, poultry, and every possible kind of imported seeds — vegetables, fruits, grass, trees, flowering plants, ornamental bushes. The combined fumes of printing ink, glue, solvents, pine pulp newsprint, rotting plant and fowl matter, and sulphuric pesticides must’ve been hallucinogenic.
In 1851 he submitted an application to the government to buy The Polynesian. He was turned down. He started his own newspaper, the Whalesmen’s List, featuring port schedules and maritime equipment vendor ads in direct competition with The Polynesian‘s Whalemen’s List.
🐀 Henry departed the GPO after less than a year for a gig delivering mail. And he wasn’t just a mail handler. He was the only mail handler. The post office was in the GPO building, so Henry started printing postage stamps.
Hard-hitting news coverage of Hawaii’s new mailman, calling the 39-year-old bigamist “a young man of great moral worth,” appeared in the Rochester Daily Democrat, then the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the New York Tribune, and the New York Times, submitted by someone (and by someone I mean Henry) for the benefit of Gothamites who clamored to know.
🐀 In 1854 he tried to buy the GPO for $5,000. He was turned down.
🐀 Henry wasn’t at the post office very long. In 1856 he founded a newspaper, the Pacific Commercial Advertiser (PCA).
🐀 In 1864 he heard that his rival, The Polynesian, was shutting down. In Presstime in Paradise: The Life and Times of The Honolulu Advertiser, 1856-1995, author George Chaplin claims Henry begged the government to let him take over The Polynesian in exchange for abandoning PCA. Four days after The Polynesian closed, Henry received this response from the Hawaiian Interior Minister: “I have the honor to inform you that I am not at present authorized to accept that proposal.” Henry later claimed The Polynesian tried to take over PCA, and he valiantly refused.
Henry’s Bio, According to Henry
Henry arrived in Honolulu in 1850 with a sketchy backstory about being the son of American Calvinist missionaries sent to Hawaii. Rev. Samuel Whitney and Mercy Partridge were real people. They arrived in 1820 to foist the gospel of Jesus and flannel clothing on the indigenous people, who forty years earlier had dismembered Capt. James Cook for a lot less.
🐀 Born in Hawaii in 1821, 1824, or 1825, Henry immediately or ten years later contracted an unspecified illness that caused him to go deaf. Instantly or at age 4 or 7 or in 1831 he was shipped off to live with relatives in Rochester.
🐀 When New Haven Henry attended Yale, raised exotic rutabagas, and judged cows at the New York Agricultural State Fair in Rochester, Honolulu Henry supposedly was attending prep schools in upstate New York: the Canandaigua Academy and the Rochester Collegiate Institute. The latter can’t be verified because it conveniently burned down in 1852. The Canandaigua Academy, however, has a long list of distinguished alumni posted right on its website. It includes Stephen A. Douglas, who ran against Abraham Lincoln for president and lost, and drag queen Pandora Boxx. Conspicuous by his absence is Henry Martyn Whitney, pioneer Hawaiian publisher.
🐀 After prep school, Henry worked briefly for Harper & Brothers in Manhattan (1845). He told people he was Harper’s print shop foreman, despite having negligible printing experience.
🐀 He moved back to Rochester to farm fruit trees.
🐀 In 1850 he returned to Hawaii at the age of 26 or 29, to be a bigshot newspaper honcho. For those keeping score, New Haven Henry was 38.
🐀 Honolulu Henry’s newspaper obits claim he “died suddenly” at home in 1904. Even that didn’t stop his bullying and self-aggrandizement. The Honolulu Independent and the Pacific Commercial Advertiser ran encyclopedic memorials, obviously self-penned, that were liberally interlarded with name-drops of Hawaiian celebrities and royalty and Mark Twain. Below is a whomper from the Independent, eviscerating a beloved Massachusetts civic leader and Civil War vet, Hawaii’s former New England consul general Gorham Gilman:
Gilman was a royalist in Hawaii and an accessionist at home in America. Henry was a bigger hypocrite by orders of magnitude, but Gilman had committed the unforgivable faux pas of selling travel guides and law books in competition with Henry 50 years earlier. He and Henry took to bitchslapping each other in the press — in Henry’s case, even after he was dead.
The obit above is the only one I found mentioning Gilman. Many others called Henry’s relationship with Mark Twain “an intimacy of many years.” They (and by “they” I mean Henry) also said Henry’s own “character was rock-ribbed in the qualities of manliness” and he was “always on the right side of a moral issue.” They forgot to mention how humble he was, and his mysterious wife.
There really wasn’t much else to say about Henry’s legacy. Like his father Stephen, he didn’t build institutions for the people or champion philanthropic causes. In the end, all Henry had was stories. Bad ones. And now, here’s
What Really Happened
As you probably guessed, Henry had shirttail passengers and sycophants galore, but not many friends. He met Mark Twain in 1866 when the author visited Hawaii as a reporter for the Sacramento Union. Twain borrowed a book from someone and returned to America with it. Henry claimed the book was his. It wasn’t. Their “intimacy of many years” consisted of Henry excoriating Twain in his newspaper about the book, and still punching at him in the San Francisco Morning Call a decade after Twain returned the book to the lender. Twain called Henry a boorish liar and threatened to eat him.
It burned Henry up that his own writing was never in a league with Twain’s. He considered himself the superior humorist, when in reality he was the biggest insufferable hack ever born. The only thing he ever said that made me laugh was years later, at an 1882 New York State financial investigation hearing when a senator asked him the dumbest question ever. Henry was then a banker/broker, with a client with both deposit and loan accounts. The senator demanded to know why Henry was paying a lower interest rate on the deposit account than he was charging for the loan, and wasn’t the client being cheated? Since this is how it’s been done since the Assyrians invented banks, Henry answered the senator like he was five. “Deposit accounts are treated one way and other accounts in another way. No, sir.”
But judge for yourself. In 1900 the New York Times published a 930-word satirical op-ed, “A Plea for the Hyphen” by one Henry M. Whitney, chock full of pseudo-intellectual “humor” about seeds, cheese, typography, and whatever this is:
As you also may have guessed, Henry Martyn Whitney wasn’t really born in Hawaii. 1860s immigrations records show him claiming he was born in Idaho. In the 1890 Hawaii census, his son Henry Jr stated Henry Sr was foreign born. In the 1900 census, Henry Sr claimed his father was Canadian. Yes, that would be the Rev. Samuel Whitney, who was neither Canadian nor related to Honolulu Henry at all, except maybe distantly.
Rent-A-Parent Fun Facts! Samuel Whitney (1793-1845) was a mechanic from New Haven. He enrolled at Yale in 1817, but dropped out more or less immediately to join his mission’s sortie to Hawaii. (per The Friend, the ABCF Mission newsletter, Jan. 15, 1846, Vol. IV, No. II. Later sources claim Sam graduated from Yale in 1819, but he doesn’t appear in Catalogue of the Officers and Graduates of Yale University in New Haven Connecticut 1701-1924.)
Mercy Partridge Whitney (1795-1872) claimed to be from Pittsfield, MA, although the Rochester Daily Democrat seemed to think she was from Rochester and kvelled over her visit from Hawaii in 1860. The Mormon mission that assigned Sam to Hawaii ordered him to find a wife before his departure in a month. Sam and Mercy became engaged two hours after being introduced. (Jedidiah Morse, A Report to the Secretary of War of the United States, on Indian Affairs, Comprising a Narrative of a Tour Performed in the Summer of 1820, by S. Converse, 1822)
Sam and Mercy, being model Christians, offloaded all their children on strangers in faraway places when they were very young.
Author W.P. Alexander wrote The Friend‘s 4-page obituary in 1845 describing Sam’s death from liver disease in excruciating detail. He said Sam’s deathbed chats included his wife, servants, and friends’ children by name, but none of his own siblings or children because he couldn’t remember them. (The Friend, Jan. 15, 1846, Vol. IV, No. II)
Here’s what I think really happened: There was a Henry Martyn Whitney, once, a sickly Hawaiian child whose mother and father mailed him to relatives in Rochester in 1831, because they were horrible parents. Henry died there.
Meanwhile, New Haven Henry Whitney was plotting his reinvention as an important businessman in another universe. He was in Rochester in the early 1840s, judging livestock at fairs and hiding from his family in Connecticut, when he heard that another Henry Whitney had died. Jackpot! Rev. Sam Whitney suddenly became convenient.
Sam was but a humble missionary struggling in Hawaii until his circumstances changed dramatically, judging by his letters to his American contacts, in the early 1840s. He went from begging them to take goatskins in trade for wheat, to having plenty of money to buy anything he couldn’t get in Hawaii, which apparently was everything.
Long story short: Young Henry Martyn Whitney’s identity was sold, by a guy who needed cash to a guy who needed a cover. New Haven Henry appropriated Henry Martyn Whitney’s narrative. As I explained (or tried to), this is something people did with frightening regularity back then.
Nobody dared tell Mercy, who kept writing letters to her son that he never answered until 1842, telling her about a job he’d gotten in the printing industry. Fun Jerk Facts! New Haven Henry was still married to Hannah Lawrence at that point, meaning he was planning his exit two years before she died. It also suggests maybe she didn’t die at age 29 from natural causes.
Rev. Sam Whitney died in 1845. Mercy was left hacking away alone in the Hawaiian outback — old, probably broke, and one taco short of a special (judging by her correspondence) when Henry appeared on her doorstep in 1850. She hadn’t seen her son in twenty years, and he’d been a little boy back then. Henry could’ve been anyone.
He probably gave her money — enough for her roundtrip visit to New England in 1860, the only trip Mercy made home after moving to Hawaii. She wrote in her journal that the ship Henry arrived on in 1850 anchored in the bay near her house; he walked to her house, surprised her, stayed for the day, and cut out. (Hobey, Hobey Goodale, 2011)
We Now Join Henry Whitney in Hawaii
Honolulu Henry had a wife, Catherine March (and Marsh, 1821, 1826, and 1829-1896), whom everyone called Kate. She was born in New Hampshire (per her wedding record and FindAGrave), and somehow also New York (per her daughter Helen’s 1880 census entry). She lived in Brooklyn in 1848, per a letter written by Henry’s sister Emily. Henry stated Brooklyn as his residence on their 1849 New Hampshire marriage license.
🐀 Brooklyn directories from 1845 through 1850 show a Catherine Marsh on Gold Street near Vinegar Hill, and New Haven Henry’s fave brother Sam at 10 Joralemon Street in Brooklyn Heights. Henry’s not listed. How he and Kate met is a mystery, but he may have couch surfed in Brooklyn when he worked for Harper’s.
🐀 Honolulu Henry and Kate March married in two places, Rochester, NY, and Portsmouth, NH, a few months before New Haven Henry married Maria Fitch four times in Connecticut in 1850.
You may well ask: If the two Henrys were one person, why would he do such a shitty thing? Simple. He had three children in New Haven under the age of twelve from his marriage to Hannah Lawrence. In 1849 he was all set to ditch three motherless kids to be a Hawaiian dick, but he couldn’t let go of The Grove.
Cynical much? You bet. Henry arrived at a solution: marry Maria to run his dumb salad farm and raise his kids while he was criming in Paradise with Kate.
Fun Fact! New Haven Henry Whitney was AWOL from the 1850 US census. It’s almost as if he was away, doing … something.
Henry may have had buyer’s remorse. Maria Fitch got pregnant twice after her husband moved to Hawaii in 1850. (He visited America a lot, stringing her along for six years.) Did his wives know about each other? Well, they kept banging him, so I’m guessing no. At first.
On March 13, 1854, Henry Martyn Whitney sold the contents of his Honolulu house — everything, inside and out, including his horses and buggy — and put the place up for rent. On April 22 Kate and their two kids boarded a steamship to San Francisco without Henry. On August 4 a Mr. Whitney stepped off a ship in New York City. I mean, I wasn’t there, but that smells like a bustup to moi.
A year and a half later, New Haven Henry “died” (wink wink) and Honolulu Henry was back in Hawaii with Kate. They had four more children. Maria Fitch moved on. She married businessman Nathan Baldwin in 1862.
All boat, no paddle
Four months after New Haven Henry died, Honolulu Henry started his newspaper, the Pacific Commercial Advertiser, despite having no publishing or editorial experience. (No, my friend, printing is not publishing.)
Henry’s prose style was characterized by … well, let’s call it melodramatic flair. His 1500-word tour de force of hardblow in the first issue of PCA began with this:
Thank Heaven, the day at length has dawned when the Hawaiian nation can boast a free press, untrammeled by government patronage or party pledges, unbiased by ministerial frowns or favors.
Over time, Henry’s chroniclers inflated PCA‘s historic importance to milestone status. The truth is, it was just a 4-page weekly (except when it was 3 pages), basically a Victorian Pennysaver. It wasn’t the largest paper in Hawaii. It wasn’t even the first or only English-language one. The inaugural edition was 600 copies printed on a hand press. Its royalty-patronizing feature story was King Kamehameha IV’s wedding; the rest was ads for ships in port at Honolulu Harbor and hundreds of vessel timetables. Free press! Yay!
PCA‘s printing facility quickly became way bigger than necessary. It had at least three presses. The start-up cost was $21,808 ($854,400 in today’s dollars) and yes, this is the enterprise Henry proposed abandoning in exchange for The Polynesian — it wasn’t his money, why should he care?
It’s unclear who paid for the start-up. Certainly not Henry’s widowed missionary mother. And definitely not Henry, who lived in a thatched-roof adobe house. Nor was it the Hawaiian government, which hated him a little more each day. He tried to store 15 tons of rice in their refinery building. (They said no.) He interfered in elections. He rampaged through Honolulu on horseback with his posse, for fun. He was a spoiled nepo baby with nothing to show for it, until someone bought him a newspaper.
PCA focused on maritime commerce. Honolulu was a newly prosperous international shipping hub. And coincidentally, New Haven Henry’s second-richest-man-in-America father Stephen Whitney, still very much alive in New York, happened to be a major player in cargo shipping to China and the East Indies. His cash cow was cotton. Fun Facts! Honolulu Henry tried to persuade Hawaiian farmers to grow Sea Island cotton on a grand scale. Wonder where he got that idea? He even gave them premium seeds. It didn’t work out.
Neither did his newspaper. PCA was a treasure trove of toddlerish name-calling and petty vendettas. Henry earned the ire of the Hawaiian government by publishing smack talk about their politics. He was sued for libel by R.G. Wylie, Hawaii’s Minister of the Interior. He tried to get hula dancing banned (“the native heathen dance, shameful in the extreme”). He got into a knife fight with a judge who was a Confederate sympathizer, attracting an angry mob to PCA‘s office. Henry’s anti-slavery editorials resulted in advertising boycotts by angry Hawaiian sugar planters. In 1870 he went broke and sold PCA.
In May 1871 Henry gave his lawyer, Joseph Carter, power of attorney over all his Hawaiian businesses. Then he and Kate sailed off on what biographer Meiric Dutton called “a six-month sojourn” to the East Coast, without three of their four minor children or any immediate plan to return.
The End (Finally!) of Henry Whitney
Henry Martyn Whitney was gone for four years. During that time, Henry Norris Whitney (1839 or 1845-1920), a Brooklynite with a wife named Catherine whom everyone called Kate, scored his first Wall Street job with Robinson, Chase and Company as a cashier.
His boss was Benjamin Kissam, brother-in-law of William H. Vanderbilt. Henry was made a partner in 1880, and the brokerage was renamed Kissam, Whitney & Company. Henry got the job just by being a Whitney, never dreaming they’d expect him to actually, you know, do any work.
Here’s the thing: Henry Norris Whitney didn’t exist before 1867, when the Plymouth Church of Brooklyn mentioned him in a news item as a member. Unlike every other East Coast Whitney, he’s not listed in The Whitney Family of Connecticut. He didn’t appear in any census until 1870, or in a New York metro directory until 1871. He has no parents. No siblings. No birth record. No college degree. No military service during the Civil War. No industry or civic awards. No political appointments. No land records. Not even a marriage license with Kate Shipman (aka Kate Hauf, 1843-1907), the wife he had four children with in Brooklyn starting exactly when Honolulu Henry and Kate Whitney left Oahu. (The Hawaiian child they took along in 1871 was 19-year-old Helen, dropped off in San Francisco where she remained until at least 1890.) And just like Honolulu Kate, Brooklyn Kate isn’t mentioned in any of her husband’s obituaries. That must’ve been some marriage. Dude has a FindAGrave page effusively commemorating a fur storage warehouse he co-owned in Brooklyn.
Fun Resurrection Fact! According to immigration records, neither Henry nor his wife Kate took any trips to Hawaii from 1870 through 1874. They must’ve been up to something.
Henry’s Wife
🐀 Kate Shipman was born in New York City. Kate March’s daughter claimed her mother also was born in New York City (not New Hampshire). That and other coicidences make me think “Kate Whitney” was two people, a hybrid product of magically fudged records.
🐀 In the 1850 census, the year Henry Whitney split to Hawaii, Kate Shipman was the 6-year-old daughter of Horatio Shipman, an accountant living in Hartford (and ten years later, a hardware salesman living in a boarding house).
FamilySearch and the American Historical Society leave out her father and brutally murdered son (see Bonus Dickery, upcoming), but the latter says her great-grandfather, Reuben Wadsworth (1753-1836) of Hartford, “served in the Revolutionary army at Bunker Hill.” Thanks to him, Kate Shipman managed to join the DAR and Society of Colonial Dames.
🐀 Kate March was 29 in 1850. Her father was John March, Jr., who died in 1824. He had three wives, two daughters named Catherine (FamilySearch), and no daughters named Catherine (FindAGrave). Other records show Catherine was born a couple of years after her father died, and the whole March family changed their name to Nash.
No father is shown on either Kate’s FindAGrave page. Both dads strike me as losers who might find a cash offer for their vital records attractive.
Kate Whitney’s trainwreck of a paper trail was an easy mod. In those day, people just trotted into city hall, asked for vital records, changed them by hand — crossed things out, wrote other things in — handed them back, and slipped the clerk a tip. Nobody gave a damn. You wouldn’t believe the crap I’ve seen. It was the Victorian-era equivalent of hijacking a stranger’s email addy to open a Target account, so that when Target gets hacked again, you won’t but you can still buy stuff.
The age discrepancy between Kate Shipman and Henry Whitney (32 years) is downright comical. There’s no logical explanation for them hooking up. That’s why I think he bought Catherine Shipman’s identity for Kate March to use in New York, and the original Catherine Shipman became Kate Hauf and sailed on. Another candidate is a 30-year-old Catherine Shipman of Brooklyn, father unknown, who died of comsumption in 1872 (city cn 3131). If her death wasn’t publicized, she was perfect fo the Whitneys. All they needed was her birth certificate. Either way, when busybodies inquired about Kate’s lineage, she needed only to invoke her war hero great-grandfather, and say she looked old because life is hard, bite me. They’d nod and coo and leave her alone.
And that, I believe, is how Henry Martyn Whitney became Henry Norris Whitney, and Kate March Whitney became Kate Shipman Whitney, and they settled down in New York.
Why the hell would anyone go to so much trouble?, one might reasonably ask. Answer: Lots of people knew Henry in New York, and bigamy had been criminalized in 1862. Three of New Haven Henry’s siblings, five of his abandoned children, and Maria Fitch (now only a $2 train ticket away, for chrissakes!) were all still alive in 1871. If the district attorney found out he’d returned from the dead and sandbagged his last wife, things could get awkward.
At this point, you may be wondering how Henry stayed under the radar. It was like this: Being a power franchise, the Whitneys had powerful friends. New York newspapers knew better than to mess with them. Remember William Burtsell Freeman? They knew exactly who he was. It was the worst-kept secret in town. His friends included Boss William Tweed, tax commissioner John Hayward, and Governor Rosswell Flower. The press always called him just “Mr. Freeman.” William was only ever outed once, when a New York World reporter unwittingly published his real name in connection with a felony committed in 1878 by one of William’s other selves, Max Friedman. They were sued out of business and fled to California.
Presumably that’s why Honolulu Henry’s will, written in August 1896, demanded “no publicity of the details” as is customary. It contained the names of his four Hawaiian children who were still alive in 1896, plus his uber-wealthy plantation-owner son-in-law, William Whitmore Goodale.
Media Fun Fact! The Brooklyn Daily Eagle went nuts publishing the juicy details of Henry Norris Whitney’s will in 1920, calling him “Henry M. Whitney” over and over, which sure sounds like payback. Karma’s a bitch.
In February 1896, Honolulu Kate died a reclusive invalid. It seems no one had seen her in years, not since … <checks notes> … a certain Henry Whitney in New York scored a big-time bank exec job in 1894. Kate’s obit in the the Honolulu Star-Bulletin said that when she expired, Henry was out of town.
Apparently she was, too. Kate Shipman was living the life of a society dame at 65 South Oxford Street in Fort Greene, Brooklyn (below), where Henry was president of the Schermerhorn Bank.
Henry had a superpower: No one ever knew where he was, or what he was doing. He spun like a bumper car every time he hit a wall. He was tough to reach, being usually on a ship. He was like that assclown on the Titanic who snuck into a lifeboat dressed like a woman, because who would ever know?
There are many records of Henry Whitney getting on and off steamships between 1850 and 1890, including one that stopped to rescue a shipwrecked crew in the Pacific in 1871, resulting in Henry’s noble heroism and the interminable essay he wrote about it.
Henry kept returning to Hawaii because he loved being a big fish in a little pond. Hawaiians considered him an intellectual, something that would never happen in New York. He owned businesses and land in Hawaii. Fun Spook Fact! The US government incentivized him to (among other things) grease the wheels for its Department of War to lease Pearl Harbor as a naval base. Like The Grove, Hawaii was a prize Henry didn’t want to give up.
He finally bit off too much in 1883, when he became Hawaii’s postmaster, again, when he was supposed to be working for Kissam, Whitney in New York. While preoccupied with that, he didn’t notice his assistant, I.B. Peterson, embezzling $422 ($14,000 in 2026 dollars) from the post office.
1883 just got worse and worser. Henry’s Hawaiian son Hervey died under suspicious circumstances. Henry seized Hervey’s property. (See Bonus Dickery, upcoming.) Hervey’s business partner and co-tenant, King David Kalakaua, was Henry’s boss. Torqued over losing Hervey, the post office money, and probably some property in Miss Piggy’s greedy land grab, the king demanded Henry’s resignation. Henry refused. You already know where this is going.
In 1886 Henry was somehow still the postmaster. He got distracted once more when he bought a new bully pulpit, the Hawaiian Gazette. His post office got robbed again, this time of $4,000 ($142,000 in 2026 dollars). There was an arrest, and a trial. The prosecution’s star witness was I.B. Peterson, still under indictment for his robbery in 1883. Thomas Walker, the defendant, and Peterson were both acquitted. The government’s stolen money was never recovered. That corked it for King Kalakaua. He fired Henry as postmaster for negligence.
Henry continued to identify himself as postmaster general of Hawaii on immigration manifests until at least 1890.
Henry was chronically incapable of taking a hint. He was a pest who attached himself to any passing pantsleg because a free ride is a free ride, even if it’s not going where you hoped. He didn’t quit the Hawaiian Gazette until 1894, when he became president of the new Schermerhorn Bank in Brooklyn.
There was only one teeny problem with his fine new plan: He was still a partner at Schermerhorn’s competitor — Kissam, Whitney — whose biggest clients were the Vanderbilts. So due to being a steaming turdpile of extortion bait and conflicts of interest and indictments waiting to happen, Henry was persuaded to resign from the Schermerhorn Bank in 1899. He and Kissam parted ways, too.
In 1901 Henry opened his own brokerage, H.N. Whitney & Sons. It was run by his three New York sons, the oldest of whom was only 30, in poor health, and would be dead by 1908. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle described him as “not paying great attention to business.” Nevertheless, the Whitneys optimistically bought seats at the New York Stock Exchange. They were probably a little short on cash by 1904.
Fun 1904 Fact! Remember Honolulu Henry Martyn Whitney? He died in 1904 — with a whopper of an insurance policy worth over $92,297 ($3.67 million in 2026 dollars).
What a coincidence! In 1904 Henry Norris Whitney bought the fancy gothic mansion (below) at 258 West 72nd Street off Central Park.
Kate Shipman died in 1907. Henry Norris Whitney stopped appearing in society columns in 1908, the year their son Charles got his head got blown off in Henry’s mansion (see Bonus Dickery, upcoming).
Kate had a much younger sister, an anti-suffragist named Elizabeth Wadsworth Coffin who lived with the Whitneys before her marriage. In 1907, the year Kate died, Liz’ wealthy husband Sturgis Coffin died, too. From a bullet to the head.
Liz moved into The Wyoming apartment building at 853 7th Avenue. In 1912 Henry moved into The Wyoming, too. They took a trip to Naples. She was half his age.
Fun Incest Facts! In 1905 the Brooklyn Daily Eagle identified Henry Norris Whitney’s wife as Caroline (not Kate) Whitney. Hmm. New Haven Henry Whitney had a sister named Caroline. She shared the exact same timespan with Honolulu Henry’s wife, Kate March. Caroline outlived three husbands. One was their cousin, another was the second husband of Henry’s former wife, Maria Fitch. All three of Caroline’s husbands were dead by 1898. Maybe she got bored. Might this explain the mystery of who Kate March really was, at least sometimes? Hawaiians thought that sort of thing was okay.
So, New Haven Henry shared a sister, Emily in New Haven, with Honolulu Henry, and a — whatever she was — named Caroline with Henry Norris Whitney. Seems fair.
On January 21, 1920, Henry Norris Whitney (or someone) expired at his apartment at The Wyoming. His municipal death certificate shows he died of vascular disease and aortic stenosis in whatever he had instead of a heart.
Officially, he was 81. If he was New Haven Henry, that actually made him <checks notes> 108 years old. It’s not impossible, I suppose. But here’s the thing: No state record exists for a Henry Whitney death in New York City in any year from 1898 to 1920. If one were to ask me, I’d guess his family arranged his trip abroad in 1912, and it was permanent.
Rest in pieces, Henry.
S
till not sure all these Henrys were one big asshole? This is for you.
Every bio ever written about Henry Martyn Whitney insists he was deaf.
If all the Henrys in this story were actually one person who happened to be deaf, they should’ve all been deaf, right? Yup. But Henry Martyn Whitney’s condition miraculously improved in Hawaii, where he wasn’t too deaf to get into an impassioned shouting match with a knife-waving slaver,* or to hammer out detailed New York mail protocols with Hawaii Interior Minister Wylie and the US Commissioner to Hawaii, David Gregg. Now, is it too much to ask that a dumbass impersonating a deaf guy not be a concert pianist?
*Multiple accounts of this event exist, ranging from the slaver was trapped under a chair against a wall and almost killed, to the two men weren’t even in the same room. No accounts said anything about passing notes.
🐀 Henry Martyn Whitney’s deafness apparently was subjective. On the occasion of his annoying American cousin’s visit to Hawaii, Henry pretended he couldn’t hear him until he left. Henry also owned a “very superior and rich-toned” 7-octave carved rosewood Steinway piano that he was selling in 1870 for $500 ($12,700 in 2026 dollars). Bonus! He was a Steinway sales agent. In those days, agents gave demonstrations, instruction, and tune-ups.
🐀 The 1875 New York State census had a deaf checkoff box that Henry Norris Whitney left blank. His 1920 New York Times obituary says he was the organist for the Plymouth Church in Brooklyn “before and during the Civil War.” There are many newspaper mentions of Henry performing there, the earliest being a Temperance Society meeting in 1867. Bruh, the Civil War ended in 1865. The American Historical Society assures us that “as a young man, [Henry Norris Whitney] became an accomplished organist.”
🐀 New Haven Henry Whitney played — surprise! — the piano. In 1856 his was carted out of The Grove by an estate auctioneer. His family couldn’t wait to get rid of it.
I rest my case. Three identities. Three Liberaces. Three creepy mysogynist child-abusing bigamists. One Henry Whitney.
Bonus Dickery
Three mysterious Whitney family deaths!
1. Henry Norris Whitney had a 38-year-old bachelor son, Charles, who died by a so-called self-inflicted gunshot in 1908, in his father’s home, while his father was there. Two days later Charles’ “intimate friend” (according to the New York Daily Tribune), William Bourne Nevin, was pulverized by a subway train at the 79th Street station. The Trib called it suicide, but the Washington Star and dozens of eyewitnesses said he was “shoved to the tracks.” Some said they saw Nevin “whirl through the air and disappear beneath the wheels.”
2. Henry Martyn Whitney had a bachelor son, Frederick, who was 35 in December 1897 when masked thugs dragged him from the lodging he shared with another man in Wallace, Idaho. Fred died from a “gunshot wound at the hands of parties unknown,” according to the coroner. The Victoria Daily Colonist reported he’d been shot in the leg, which isn’t typically fatal.
Fred had recently quit working for a mining company in Butte, Montana, managed by his brother-in-law, Charles Goodale, to take a better job at the Helena-Frisco silver mine in Wallace. The San Francisco Call reported that Fred was “from Butte, where he had influential relatives.” They were never identified by the many newspapers that covered his murder, but The Hawaiian Gazette noted that Henry Whitney was in Butte when Fred was shot, “to visit his son.” Henry left without visiting Fred in the hospital.
Fred’s death certificate was filed in Montana, where no one would look for it. It calls him F.D. Whitney, and except for death date, age, and burial place, it contains exactly two words: Shot, and the undertaker’s last name. (FamilySearch clearly identifies him as Frederick Damon Whitney, son of Henry Martyn Whitney and Catherine March, born in Hawaii in 1867. He was 4 when his parents split to America without him.)
3. Henry Martyn Whitney had another bachelor son, 33-year-old Hervey Ely Whitney, who died violently in July 1883. The Honolulu Daily Bulleton said “the supposed cause of death” of poor Hervey — baseball player, rancher, steeplechase competitor — was a brain hemorrhage caused by falling off a horse while herding cattle. No one took him to a doctor for two days. Co-owner of a large ranch with King Kalakaua, Hervey was widely admired, especially by Henry. He buried Hervey the next day and immediately petitioned a probate court to award him Hervey’s entire $25,000 estate ($830,000 in 2026 dollars) because he allegedly died intestate. (His will was probably in Henry’s drawer with the Yale alumni data.) On July 24 a judge approved the petition, and on July 30 Henry boarded a steamship bound for San Francisco. Henry Whitney creeps me out.
By the way, I’m not suggesting that three gay men with parents named Henry and Kate Whitney who all died under suspicious circumstances are somehow the same person. I’m saying anyone who would willingly abandon ten children might also be open to killing them.
Okay, where was I? Oh, yeah…
Henry Whitney’s New Haven House
This is The Grove, the house that started this mess because Henry Whitney refused to give it up. Somehow, The Grove outlived him. It was a house everyone in town described in superlatives and drooled over for 88 years. Was it really all that?
Below is a photo taken long after it was built (circa 1875, the only photo I could find). The bricks may have been clad with thick cement to mimic brownstone, a treatment Alex Davis liked on his houses. Most of The Grove’s original decorative details are gone. The front door and windows are probably replacements. Still, a noble crib. The parterre is visible on the right. (Photo: Agrisso Forte Collection)
A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, with a cherry on top.
The Grove was eventually remodeled beyond recognition. City surveys and a smudgy little cartoon on Will Taylor’s 1879 map of every building in New Haven tell the story of its frankensteinian transformation.
How cringe was it? The Grove’s circular porch stopped looking anything like Alex Davis’ depictions by 1879. To illustrate what Taylor drew with his blobby pen (below left), I defiled Davis’ 1835 drawing (below right) to show the Queen Anne-style turret that replaced his open porch. It was offset from the center, indicating the building gained an addition on the left, or lost mass on the right, or both. The asymmetrical arrangement of window bays clearly shown by Taylor was never suggested by Davis.
Below is the house’s evolution. From left: Davis’ original 1835 design with a 2-story circular porch, followed by Taylor’s 1879 boarded-over porch that shows a dome on top, or maybe it’s a cone. Next we see three 1900s city maps. Only two show a circular wooden porch. They don’t match. Click on the pic to see everything bigger.
In 1864 the New York Times described the house as 52 feet square. Sanborn’s 1900s maps show a house about 47 feet square. In the 1830s, Davis drew an oblong floor plan (below) showing a house 61 feet wide.
How did Davis’ roomy Grecian temple become Sanborn’s ring box with a clown nose?
Maps tell all. Taylor’s shows the porches converted to living space by 1879 — enclosed, with windows. By 1901 the circular porch was still half-round, but reduced to one story. The 1911 map shows it removed entirely. By 1924 it was restored to a full-circle, 2-story, wood-enclosed feature with an iron chimney inside.
Some people shouldn’t be allowed to have nice houses. Wait’ll you hear what else happened.
In 1893 there was a fire on the Whitney property involving a barn full of dynamite. (?!?!?) The fire chief arrived and was told to stand down, which right there is pretty weird. The New Haven Morning Journal and Courier reported that “some excitement was caused” when the neighbors found out about the dynamite. The newspaper claimed only the barn behind the house blew up. However, insurance was involved so I suspect part of the house blew off with it.
Of course, this timeline only accounts for why The Grove shrank, and not why its porches were boarded over. But it certainly explains why people stopped dropping by to take pictures.
By the time of the barn bavovna, Henry’s son Stephen Lawrence Whitney (1841-1905) had inherited The Grove. His son, Henry’s grandson Stephen Whitney (1887-1930), was next and last. He was (among other things) a contractor. He and his old man skunked the place up good. The last Whitney lived in The Grove until 1926, when he sold it to developers. It’s an apartment complex now.
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