I was browsing Facebook Marketplace the other day (as one does) looking at the usual algorithm driven “finds”. My feed is usually full of gardening items, old furniture, and old photographs and frames. When I see old photos or framed pictures of people, I scan the photos to see if there are any names associated with the people in the pictures. I have, on more than one occasion, shared the pictures to a genealogy or history group and reunited a family member with the photo in the ad. When I ran across a small painted portrait of a lady in a white dress recently, I checked the pictures to see what, if anything, was posted about the subject.
I was happy to find that the portrait had a name: Annie L Scott. Not only was the subject named, but the back of the portrait also said she was the mother of Robert B Scott Jr and that the portrait had been given to an aunt, Mrs. L. N. Scott, to be given to Robert on the occasion of his 21st birthday which seemed to have occurred on or about 30 April 1932. The artist was also named and the portrait was dated 1915.
A quick search of the internet brought up the artist who had worked in Minneapolis. I now had a location to start with so I began to search for a Robert B Scott in Minneapolis who was born about 1911. Within a few minutes, I found that his father was Robert B Scott Sr, and his mother was indeed Annie L Scott. Within another few minutes, I was far down a research rabbit hole involving riverboats and the St Paul Opera House .
Annie L Scott was born Annie L Goodell on 2 April 1872 along with her twin sister Nannie Margaret in Central Point, Goodhue county, Minnesota. The twins joined their older sister Martha, and in 1876 another sister, Elizabeth, came along. The girls were the daughters of Roswell Goodell and his second wife Nancy Mabin. Roswell’s family had long and deep roots into Massachusetts and in fact he is a descendant of the same Zachariah Goodell and Elizabeth Beauchamp that my husband descends from! Roswell is a descendant of their son Abraham and my husband descends from their son Thomas. Roswell’s mother was also a Goodell and she also descends from Zachariah and Elizabeth Goodell through their son Zachariah.
Annie was married in 1888 in Minneapolis to George Kissinger, a butcher with a hot temper. The local newspapers report several run ins with law enforcement and on 9 November 1900, it was reported in a local paper that Annie had been granted a divorce from George on the charge of desertion. There were no children from this marriage. Annie married Robert Boyd Scott in December 1900.
The Scott family was deeply involved in the riverboat business. Robert B Scott, Annie’s second husband, was born in Indiana in 1864. He was a bit of a jack-of-all-trades. He started working on riverboats with his father, also Robert Scott, as a young man, and then became an opera house manager working with his brother, Louis, in St. Paul, Minnesota. After Annie’s death in 1930, he retired from the opera house and then went to California and Arkansas. Robert married again in 1931 and died in Missouri in 1951 while visiting his sister in law. He outlived his parents, brothers, wives, and nearly outlived his son Robert Jr who died in 1953. The Scott line has very early roots in the area of Chester, Pennsylvania going back to the late 1600s. Some family histories say that the patriarch of the family was Hugh Scott who immigrated to the American colonies from Ireland around 1670, but other histories disagree.
Annie’s brother in law, Louis Napoleon Scott, worked as a clerk for a riverboat captain named John H. Reany. Mr. Reany had first married Marth Jane “Mattie” Scott, and after her death, he married her sister Margaret Scott. Both ladies were sisters to Louis and Robert’s father, also named Robert, making Mr. Reany Louis’ uncle. In August 1883, Louis gave up the riverboat business and became a theater manager at the Grand Opera House.
I wondered how the steamboat life intersected with the opera house so much so that several members of the Scott family and their associates seemed to have started on the river and ended up behind the stage. Louis worked for William F. Davidson after clerking for his uncle Mr. Reany. Mr. Davidson was one of the most successful operators of steamboat lines on the Mississippi in the 1870s and 1880s. After Louis worked for Davidson for seven years, he was made a general agent. He was exposed to some of the theatre companies that used the riverboats to travel between venues and became enamored with the life. Davidson owned a small theater in Saint Paul, MN and had the misfortune to lose two theatre managers within a few months time, one of these was Charles Hains who passed away. Davidson’s search for a new manager did not pan out and so he turned to Louis Scott. Louis admitted that he didn’t know anything about show business, but that he did know how to make a dollar and his theatre career began.
In 1883, the same year that he appointed Louis as theatre manager, Davidson built the Grand Opera House in Saint Paul. Louis met his first wife, Elizabeth Murphy Hains while working in the theatre. Elizabeth’s first husband was an American Civil War veteran turned Opera House manager named Charles Hains. Hains and William Davidson were early Opera House managers and investors and they both did very well for themselves financially. When he passed away in 1883, Charles left “Lizzie” a wealthy widow. After Charles’ death, Elizabeth became the assistant manager of the theatre under LN Scott. Louis and Elizabeth married in 1885. Elizabeth passed away in 1897 leaving an estate with 15 properties and a personal estate in excess of $10,000 of which her brothers, Milton and Louis, each received $300.
Louis later married Elizabeth Goodell – younger sister of Annie – in about 1898. At the height of hi career, Louis would manage the Grand, The Met, the Lyceum in Duluth, and the Grand in Superior, Wisconsin. Elizabeth ran the theatres after Louis died in 1929 and she also served on the board of the Saint Paul Business and Professional Women’s Association. Elizabeth was retired from the theatre by 1937 but was active in the community for many years. Elizabeth left an estate of approximately 2 million dollars when she died in 1955. Neither she nor Louis had any children. It was Elizabeth who was entrusted with the portrait of her sister to give to her nephew, Robert B Scott Jr, when he turned 21.
The third Scott brother, Josiah or “Jack”, appears to have lived mostly in St Louis, Missouri as an adult. Born in Kentucky, or possibly Indiana, he also learned riverboating from his father. All three of the brothers seemed to have moved and worked all along the Ohio, Missouri, and Mississippi rivers in their youth. Josiah married Lydia Zukowsky in Missouri in 1895 and seems to have settled there. In 1900, he was working as a janitor. He died, possibly by suicide, in 1904 in St Louis, leaving his wife Lydia with 2 young daughters. Lydia remarried to Ludwig Baumann in 1906. She had a son with Ludwig in 1909.
Annie’s son, Robert Boyd Scott, Jr married Josephine Ballot in 1939 and the couple had no children. Robert died in 1953 and is buried in Fort Snelling National Cemetery. Josephine died in 1989 and is buried with her husband. The only heirs of Annie would be the children of Josiah Scott, or the children of Annie’s twin Nannie, or Annie’s older sister Martha. Once I realized that Annie was a family member of my husband, we reached out to the seller to inquire about buying her portrait. We had a nice visit with the seller who lived about an hour from us and they were happy to know that Annie would be going to a relative (albeit quite a distant one). Now her portrait graces our living room bookshelf and Annie won’t be forgotten again.
WitzEnd Family History 