Career
As a young man, Charles clerked in the general store owned by his brother-in-law Moses Seymour Marsh. Retail businesses were a growing part of the economy.
In 1835, soon after the birth of their first child, the Wheaton family moved to Syracuse, where Charles went into the hardware business. Wheaton and a variety of partners, including his brother Horace, built a prosperous company. Over the course of 20 years, the Wheatons lived in seven houses, moving to larger homes as family and fortune grew. None of the Wheaton homes in Syracuse are believed to exist.
In 1849, the Wheatons’ close friends and fellow abolitionists, John and Anna Loomis North, left Syracuse to move to Minnesota. Ellen noted their departure in her diary, “ thinks very highly of the climate and resources in Minnesota, and says it is rapidly filling up with an Eastern population.” The Norths were to play an important role in Wheaton’s life after Ellen’s early death in 1858.
When his hardware store burned in 1851, Wheaton built C.A. Wheaton & Co.—housed in the city’s grandest mercantile block, a four-story building overlooking the Erie Canal and Clinton Square. In 1852, the Wheatons were at the peak of their wealth. They moved to Fayette Park, one of the city’s most fashionable neighborhoods.
Wheaton sold his share of the hardware business in 1853. He also sold the Wheaton Block for $112,000, the largest sale to that date in Syracuse. He invested heavily in a printing press foundry. He also invested in a project to build a railroad from South Carolina to Tennessee. In 1854, a banking crisis and an economic depression struck New York. By 1855, the family would be broke.
Ellen died suddenly at age 42 on December 17, 1858, the day after the wedding of their eldest daughter Cornelia. Her funeral was a Swedenborgian service and she was buried in Hilltop Cemetery in Pompey, New York.
Read more about this topic: Charles Augustus Wheaton
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