Nathaniel M. Hodge

Nathaniel Hodge, eldest of the four children of Jennie Edith Martin and Jacob Sylvester Hodge, was born 9 August 1869 in Winslow, Stephenson County, IL. He lived the early part of his life there and in the neighboring village of Martintown, Green County, WI, a place founded by his maternal grandparents Nathaniel Martin and Hannah Strader. He was the very first grandchild of that couple to come into the world. Obviously he was named in honor of his grandfather. In fact, his full name was probably Nathaniel Martin Hodge. Unfortunately his middle name has not been fully documented. Nearly all records show him simply as Nathaniel Hodge, the middle initial “M” having been found just once, as part of his signature on a letter he wrote to his aunt Emma Ann Martin Brown in 1897. (That very signature is reproduced below right.)

While Nathaniel was very small, his father and his uncle Horatio Woodman Martin operated Hodge & Martin, a hardware/general store in Martintown. But the Panic of 1873 and consequent failure of a plan to bring rail service to Martintown made the future of the store dim, so the partnership dissolved. The Hodges -- the family now consisting not only of Nathaniel and his parents, but his sister Agnes Leona -- moved away in late 1873 or in 1874 in favor of Delavan, Faribault County, MN. This was where Nathaniel’s other grandparents, Daniel Hodge and Eliza Jane Bugh, were based. It was in Delavan that Adrian and Arthur, the two youngest of the family, were born. Adrian only lived three months before perishing of scarlet fever. Visits back to Martintown were rare. In the 1897 letter to his aunt, Nathaniel recalls the second-to-last such occasion being at Christmas, and Grandpa Martin carrying him upstairs to the bedroom overlooking the Martin family mills to see the presents, which included a brass trombone for Nathaniel himself. Obviously if he were small enough for a sixtyish man to successfully carry him up a set of stairs, he was still a young boy, and the Christmas being referred to occurred in the mid-1870s.

When Nathaniel was about ten years old, his mother’s mental health collapsed. She was admitted to an asylum in Madison, WI, and passed away there in early 1882. Nathaniel, Agnes, and Arthur, along with their father, took shelter with Hodge relatives in southwestern Wisconsin. During this time Jacob Hodge became a doctor, and after Jennie’s death, married second wife Josephine Florence Nye. Soon the family moved to Oskaloosa, Mahaska County, IA, where they spent the mid-1880s, J.S. Hodge becoming part of a medical partnership there. In the summer of 1887 came a major relocation. Many Oskaloosa-area families decided to reestablish themselves in Pasadena, Los Angeles County, CA, at that time a new town only a little more than a decade old. The Hodges decided they would become part of that migration. Eventually Jacob would go down in local history of Pasadena as one of the prominent men of the pioneer era, responsible for presiding over the community’s first hospital and helping to found Throop University, which would later become the famous Cal Tech.

Nathaniel spent the rest of his life in Pasadena. Inasmuch as he was no longer of school age by the time he became a Californian, he entered the working-man world right away. An 1888 business directory shows that he was a clerk for First National Bank in Pasadena by the summer of that year, even before he had turned nineteen. He probably continued to hold down similar sorts of wage-earning positions on a regular basis, but these dim in importance compared to his involvement in the various entrepreneurial ventures conducted by the Hodge men over the next twenty-five years or so. Early on, he helped his father develop and market a patent medicine called Liviti, a homeopathic remedy that probably consisted entirely of water from an aquifer below a hilltop in Linda Vista, brought up from underground by a windmill that Jacob commissioned. A more independent venture was his involvement in Hodge & Hodson Ice Company, an 1891 partnership in a day ice company -- a type of business that had only recently appeared in Pasadena. In 1896 Nathaniel joined with his father to form Inventors Manufacturing Company, a machine shop and inventors’ prototype shop. Nathaniel served as secretary/treasurer of the firm. The facilities were also used to house electric automobiles for those rare Pasadena residents who owned cars in those days. In the late 1890s, this aspect of the business operated under the name Electric Express & Storage Company -- Nathaniel is described in an 1898 directory as that firm’s solicitor (as in the British meaning of solicitor, i.e. the officer who takes care of a firm’s legal filings and accounting).

Inventors Manufacturing Company may have been partly his younger brother Arthur’s brainchild. Whether or not this is an exaggeration of the younger brother’s unquestioned engineering genius, there is no question Arthur became its guiding force after his return in the early autumn of 1900 from the gold fields of Nome, Alaska, and the death of Jacob Hodge in late October of that year. In 1901, the existing family businesses were merged and transformed into Hodge Brothers Company, which soon came to occupy a two-story, 11,700 square foot building at Union and DeLacy in Pasadena and employ dozens of workers. This new version of the business -- a corporation with three officers besides Nathaniel and Arthur -- featured a definite emphasis on automobiles, which were fast becoming mainstream in southern California culture. A major part of their building was given over to what was picturesquely referred to as the “auto stables,” where cars were not only stored overnight, but were washed and (as we would say today) detailed, and the batteries of the electric models were charged. The “auto stables” designation soon became obsolete as Americans became familiar with the term “garage,” and the sign out front was repainted to “auto station” to minimize the horse-and-buggy connotations.

Though Nathaniel had his own degree of skill with invention -- his name appears as co-inventor on a number of patents -- his core contribution while with Hodge Brothers Company appears to have been to handle the accounting (though in terms of directorship he served in the post of Secretary rather than Treasurer). Nathaniel would concentrate on bookkeeping and clerical supervision throughout the remainder of his career, but he did so in tandem with his brother for only a few more years. In 1906, he left the partnership. He became secretary (and bookkeeper) of John Wigmore & Sons Company in Los Angeles, a wholesale hardware supplier. He would stay with Wigmore for another seventeen years -- until bedridden by the illness that claimed his life. He also served as a counter clerk there, and eventually he became the assistant manager.

The 1892 voter register describes Nathaniel as 5’7” tall, with black hair, black eyes, and a dark complexion. In other words, his appearance suggested he had a large amount of African or Native American heritage. He may have had a bit of either or both through his father’s side, but it could not have been a high proportion. It seems to have instead simply been luck of the draw in terms of which genes he inherited. Certainly the tendency among the Martin clan was toward blue or hazel eyes and lighter brown or even blond hair, but dark hair, skin, and eyes were frequently seen in the Starr and Strader lines. Nathaniel’s brother Arthur and Arthur’s twin daughters Marian and Alice also possessed deep complexions and dark hair and eyes.

Nathaniel’s wife was Grace Weingarth. She was even more of a Pasadena pioneer than he. Born 22 March 1874, a daughter of Jacob Weingarth and Sarah Anorah Springer, Grace was a native of Shelbyville, Shelby County, IN. It was from Shelbyville that Pasadena’s first major influx of settlers had come. Grace and her parents and baby sister Lizzie had made their move in 1879. From then on the Weingarth name was associated with Pasadena, often in prominent ways. Grace’s uncle George Weingarth had come in 1882 and quickly established himself as the town’s first major photographer, immediately opening the Ferndale Gallery. At about the same time, Grace’s maternal grandfather John Biliter Springer had chosen to leave behind his building-construction business in Shelbyville -- an entirely sensible move given that Pasadena was being raised from empty lots and needed contractors here, there, and everywhere. John had built (and in some cases, designed) a number of structures that would become area landmarks, including the original Carmelita House mansion. (That venue, home of scholars Ezra and Jeanne Carr, was famous in the 1880s as a gathering place for literary folk.) While still in her teens, Grace had made a name for herself as one of Pasadena’s up-and-coming musicians. (Grace is shown at left in 1890 with her string quartet, The Pasadena Musical Group. She is the young lady at the upper left of the group with the banjo in her lap.) All of this is a way of saying that Nathaniel and Grace’s 13 February 1895 wedding, officiated by Rev. J.W. Phelps, was a major social event, uniting two of the city’s leading families.

Nathaniel and Grace established themselves at once at 1266 N. Raymond Avenue, near the home of his parents. The couple would never know another home during their decades together. Though most of his family moved away from Pasadena during that interval, hers remained. In the 1910s, her mother and stepfather Allen Spitzer moved in just a few doors away at 1329 N. Raymond. Many of the other neighbors were families whom the Weingarth clan had known in Shelbyville, or had come from Iowa with the Hodges -- some of the latter having been from Indiana to start with, including the Coffins (J.S. Hodge’s partner in the medical practice in Oskaloosa having been James L. Coffin.). Both spouses -- Grace in particular -- felt at home among this circle.

The couple had two daughters, Margaret Eliza Hodge and Sarah Jeanette Hodge. The girls were born in 1898 and 1909, eleven years apart, Sarah not arriving until Nathaniel was forty years old. Unfortunately this would mean that Sarah would spend the latter part of her childhood without her father, due to Nathaniel’s untimely death. But in another respect, he enjoyed more togetherness with his offspring than some fathers experience, because Margaret had a weak heart and never left home. She was not strong enough to live independently, though she was able to earn some income as an adult by teaching violin.

Shown here are some of the individuals associated with the Hodge, Weingarth, and Atwood families as they appeared in late 1905 or possibly very early 1906, the date calculating by guessing the age of the baby, who is assumed to be Nathaniel’s nephew Arthur Oscar Atwood Hodge, born in January, 1905. (The identification is tentative because the shoes, hard to see in this low-resolution version, are quite feminine, suggesting a female child, and the man holding the baby does not entirely resemble the father, Nathaniel’s brother Arthur Judson Hodge. An alternate pair might be Thomas H. Nelmes, Jr., husband of Lizzie Weingarth, meaning the baby might be his son Nairn Aveling Nelmes, born in mid-1905.) The setting is believed to be the Pasadena home of Mary Ann Hall Atwood, the mother-in-law of Arthur Judson Hodge. At this point in time, A.J. Hodge and his wife and young family were residing with Mary Ann. From left to right: Mary Ann Hall Atwood, Esther Louise Hodge on Mary’s lap, Jennie Esther Atwood Hodge (in back, chin partly obscured), unknown woman (quite possibly Lizzie Weingarth Nelmes), Arthur Judson Hodge (I.D. tentative), holding the baby, Arthur Oscar Atwood Hodge (the baby, I.D. tentative), Margaret Eliza Hodge (the girl holding the stuffed animal), probably Sarah Anorah Springer Weingarth, Grace Weingarth Hodge, Nathaniel M. Hodge, Woody Gethen (the woman in the dark skirt, a friend of Mary Ann Hall), and on the far right, another relative of Grace Weingarth, perhaps an aunt.

After a decline in health that went on for four years, Nathaniel passed away at home at 1266 Raymond Avenue at 8:25 in the evening of 28 February 1923. As his daughter Sarah would point out decades later in a letter to relatives, that precise date of death is somewhat eerie. Nathaniel’s mother had died on the 28th of February as well, as had his great-grandfather Jacob Strader. His doctor attributed his demise to a stroke caused by arteriosclerosis. A diagnosis like that is akin to saying, “He got old and died.” Nathaniel was only fifty-three years old. It is tempting to suspect his decline was the result of something more pernicious than plaque in his arteries, but Nathaniel went to his grave with the specific nature of that agent undiscovered. His remains were interred in the family plot at Mountain View Cemetery in Altadena, Los Angeles County, CA.

Nathaniel’s widow and daughters continued on as a tandem at the family home at 1266 N. Raymond for a year or two after his death, then moved less than a mile south and slightly west to 55 N. Pasadena Avenue. This was probably a downsizing move in order to save money. Without Nathaniel, there was naturally some consciousness of having no breadwinner to generate further income. Eventually Sarah would step into this role, but given that she had been only thirteen years old at the time of Nathaniel’s death, the household had to coast on assets and savings for a while. The ability to do so undoubtedly had something to do with Weingarth legacy wealth. Some of this wealth belonged to Grace herself, but it is probably fair to say she might not have been able to cope were it not for the support -- or at least the prospect of support -- from her mother and her sister Lizzie. Both were quite comfortable financially. Lizzie had married Thomas Hassey Nelmes, Jr. in 1901, a son of an English scientist and engineer who had been the founder and an original partner in Pasadena’s first municipal water company. The elder Thomas Nelmes had died in 1903. Lizzie had ended up with a large chunk of land and a major stake in the water company as a result of her 1908 divorce from Thomas, Jr. Happily, Grace seems to have been on good terms with her mother and sister and knew she could count on them when and if things got dicey. This was important given that Sarah did not reach an employable age until the late 1920s, and Margaret’s income as a violin teacher working within the home could not have been enough to support three people.

Margaret passed away in 1933 a little more than nine months after Grace’s mother had perished. It was a double blow. However, Lizzie Nelmes was still close at hand elsewhere in town, and Sarah continued to live at home at 55 N. Pasadena Avenue. This mother-daughter living arrangement was maintained throughout Grace’s final seven years of life. In 1940, Grace’s health failed. She developed lymphatic leukemia. After half a year of deterioration she was admitted to Burnett & Todd Rest Home in Pasadena on Halloween, and died at that institution 5 November 1940. She was only sixty-seven but compared to her loved ones, she reached a high-water mark, certainly surviving longer than Nathaniel or Margaret, and much longer than her father, who had died in 1882 only three years after the move to Pasadena, and shy of thirty-seven years of age. Grace’s physician -- the one who signed the death certificate -- was Mae Lorimer Dowlin. As it happens, Mae was a great great granddaughter of John Starr and Catharine Weitzel and was therefore a third cousin of Nathaniel Hodge. Grace and Mae were probably unaware of this genealogical connection. Nathaniel’s great-grandmother Rachel Starr Strader had known her niece Naomi Johnson, grandmother of Mae, quite well in the 1820s in Vermilion County, IL, but the two family branches are unlikely to have had much contact after the 1830s. But perhaps they were aware. If not, the coincidence is remarkable, because Mae Dowlin was the physician who signed Margaret Eliza Hodge’s death certificate in 1933, so there was more than one crossing-of-paths.

Nathaniel M. Hodge’s genealogical line is now extinct. Sarah chose not to marry or have children. Margaret’s invalid status prevented her from becoming a mother.

Children of Nathaniel M. Hodge with Grace Weingarth

Margaret Eliza Hodge

Sarah Jeanette Hodge

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