Dudley Leavitt Pickman - Descendants and Legacy

Descendants and Legacy

Dudley Leavitt Pickman's son William Dudley Pickman continued the family trading enterprises, eventually moving the shipping interests to Boston but retaining a counting house in Salem. William Dudley Pickman married Caroline Silsbee, daughter of Salem merchant Zachariah F. Silsbee. William Dudley Pickman's partner in the Boston-based firm was his son Dudley Leavitt Pickman, who became a fixture in Boston business and social circles, and a large donor of family art and antiques to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, as well as a trustee of Salem's Peabody Museum.

Dudley Leavitt Pickman's daughter Elizabeth became the second wife of Salem merchant Richard Saltonstall Rogers, whose first wife Sarah Crowninshield died young. Pickman's daughter Catherine Saunders married Boston merchant Richard S. Fay. One of Pickman's sons, Edward Motley, attended Harvard Law School, and became a Boston writer.

His son Dudley Leavitt Pickman Jr. attended Noble and Greenough School, Harvard College, where he was president of the Hasty Pudding Club, and Harvard Law School, practiced law in Boston and lived in a 40-room granite mansion, staffed by five servants and designed by architect Stanford White at 191 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, as well as in Beverly, Massachusetts. He served as a director for a number of public companies, including a subsidiary of Calumet and Hecla Mining Company and as one of the first three trustees of the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow House National Park site in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Dudley Leavitt Pickman Jr. continued the family's tradition of making gifts of significant family heirlooms and antiques to the collection of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, including a teapot by silversmith John Coburn bearing the Pickman family coat of arms. Born in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1885, Dudley Leavitt Pickman Jr. also became a noted mountaineer and porcelain expert, who published several books on the subject. Along with his friends Harold Stirling Vanderbilt, Francis Bacon and Frederic Allen, Pickman played the first game of contract bridge in its modern form. He married the widow of Boston businessman Alexander Lynde Cochrane.

In its obituary of Dudley Leavitt Pickman Jr., The New York Times noted the lawyer and author's service as trustee of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, as well as his avocation as "a noted mountain climber". Pickman, who died at his residence at 38 Beacon Street on Beacon Hill, was 87.

The Pickman family intermarried with other prominent early Salem and Boston families, including that of Joseph Story Fay, the Crowninshields, the Pickerings, the Rodmans, the Silsbees, Rogers, Saunders and Motleys and others.

The family also later owned an estate located near Two Brothers Rocks in Bedford, Massachusetts, so named because the lands were patented by both Massachusetts Bay Colony governors John Winthrop and Thomas Dudley. Dudley Leavitt Pickman and his progeny were descended from both early governors.

The Salem merchant Dudley Leavitt Pickman is buried at Salem's Harmony Grove Cemetery, not far from the grave of his partner, merchant and United States Senator from Massachusetts Nathaniel Silsbee. Pickman's tombstone reads: "A successful merchant, distinguished for his sound practical good sense and an inflexible regard to truth and justice."