In October 1908, John Quincy Boner returned home to Milan, Missouri, from a trip to Kansas City. For several days my great, great grandfather had been complaining of a pain in his side. The pain wasn’t bad enough, though, to keep the 78-year-old from going uptown on the 27th. Downtown Milan probably didn’t look a […]
Rancho Joaquina Needed a Facelift Before It Could be Shown to the Public
The year was 1970. The occasion was the annual Phoenix Home and Garden Show. The opportunity was to open my great grandfather J.E. Thompson’s 46-year-old Rancho Joaquina estate for public viewing. The problem: It was a mess, inside and out. In stepped the local chapter of the American Institute of Interior Designers, along with The […]
The Judah P. Benjamin Files: The Treacherous Touch-the-Wig Tour
My self-appointed mission: To drive all the way to New Orleans for a special viewing of clothes belonging to my third grand uncle Judah P. Benjamin. With any luck, the Touch the Wig tour would end with a precious co-mingling of DNA so that genealogists would know I’d made the vital connection many years from […]
The Rough and Rocky Road to Peter’s Rock
It took a good two hours of calling around the Covington, Va., area to find someone with the foggiest notion of where Peter’s Rock might be found. Local history books said the historic site was out on Highway 311, just past the entrance to the Alleghany Cemetery. But no Alleghany Cemetery shows up on Google […]
Phoenician Officials Razed Mabel Thompson’s Historically Significant Phoenix Estate
In one of the greatest tragedies in Thompson family history, officials at the Phoenician hotel raised Mabel Thompson Filor’s historically significant Phoenix estate to make way for the Canyon Suites, a bland collection of luxury vacation cottages. A Starwood Hotel website — Starwood bought the Phoenician about 10 years ago — attempts to put the […]
Clergy Inhabit Mabel Thompson Filor’s Old Stony Point Estate
Mabel Thompson may not be as famous as her well-heeled older brothers William Boyce and Joseph Edward, but she was very wealthy nonetheless. Born in Butte, Montana, in 1886, Mabel married a stockbroker, Walter Filor, eight years her senior. He earned enough to buy Mabel a very impressive, 150-acre estate in Stony Point, New York, […]