HAROLD AYMAR SANDS AND PAULDING FOSDICK
Harold Aymar Sands and Paulding Fosdick were prominent New Yorkers. They were both noted athletes, clubmen and avid sportsmen, whose families appeared in the New York Social Register for generations. They frequented Newport and Palm Beach seasonally, and often appeared in society columns. They both married twice, and married heiresses. Like many of their northern friends who bought houses and plantations as sporting estates and winter residences in the region, they purchased the Georgetown house on the Bluff (likely dirt cheap) as a seasonal residence for hunting, fishing, and socializing with their friends.
Harold A. Sands (1886-1951) was the son of William Henry and Augusta Lorillard Sands. His grandfather, Samuel S. Sands, had been a New York banker, head of S.S. Sands & Co., and broker for a number of important financial interests including the Astor family. His mother was a descendant of a French immigrant who founded P. Lorillard and Company in New York City to process tobacco, cigars, and snuff. It later became Lorillard Tobacco Company and marketed cigarettes under the brand names Newport, Maverick, Old Gold, Kent, True, Satin, and Max, and, still in existence, it is today the oldest tobacco company in the U.S.
Harold Sand’s grandfather, Jacob Lorillard, with his brother Pierre, created Tuxedo Park, New York, and with Pierre’s son, Griswold Lorillard, are credited with having invented the tuxedo.
Harold was a cotton broker, a member of the New York Stock Exchange and the New York Cotton Exchange. He served as a lieutenant in the Air Corps during World War I. He was a champion marksman and golfer, who won trophies throughout his life.
In 1910, he married Katharine Hynson McFadden of Philadelphia, whose grandfather, George H. McFadden, owned a cotton brokerage firm later known as McFadden Brothers, with which her father was associated. The family owned plantations in Memphis, Tennessee, and controlled the market price of cotton for decades. Interestingly, the fashion designer Mary McFadden is from the same family.
Paulding Fosdick (1881-1967) was born in Tarrytown, New York. His grandfather, Charles B. Fosdick, was a leather merchant and banker in New York City. His parents, Charles Baldwin Fosdick and Jennie Parkhurst (Clark) Fosdick, were involved in a contentious divorce in 1888, in which she divorced him for cruelty and for custody of the two children. This was a scandal well-publicized in the press when Paulding was a child. His mother afterward married Charles A. Childs (d. 1912), head the New York City firm, C. M. Childs & Company, paint manufacturers.
Fosdick attended Cutler's School in New York and Harvard, where he lettered in hockey. He became a broker, the president of the Lenox Land & Improvement Company.
In 1909, he married Katherine Yoakum, the daughter of millionaire railroad tycoon Benjamin Franklin Yoakum. Harold A. Sands was in the wedding.
A few years later, the Paulding Fosdicks were included in The 469 Ultra-Fashionables of America: A Social Guide Book and Register to Date [Charles Wilbur de Lyon Nicholls, Governor-General of the National Society of Scions of Colonial Cavaliers (New York, Broadway Pub. Co, 1912: 93).
They had one daughter, Anita Yoakum Fosdick, who tragically died in 1927 at the age of 15.
The Georgetown Times reports in February of 1928, the year Sands and Fosdick purchased the house, that Benjamin Franklin Yoakum, the railway magnate, spent a mouth at the Georgetown house on the Bluff with his daughter, Mrs. Paulding Fosdick.
On March 22, 1929, the Georgetown Times ran an article headlined “Police Get Youths Responsible For Flower Theft,” which informs its readership that after months of thefts of japonica plants from Georgetown cemeteries and yards, the culprits were caught red-handed removing japonica plants off the Kaminski plot at Beth Elohim Cemetery. They had been having a “go between” sell them to a member of the winter colony, Paulding Fosdick. The article goes on to say that as soon as Fosdick discovered the bushes had been stolen, he returned them to the owner and “refused to purchase any further offerings from the dealers.”
On December 20, 1929, the Georgetown Times in “Northern Citizens Now Returning To Their Homes Here” again makes mention of the Paulding Fosdick and Harold Sands purchase the year before of “one of the most attractive homes on the waterfront,” and notes the on-going improvements being made to the property. The article claims: “Mr. Fosdick has recently had a floating dock built to accommodate his yacht, which will arrive from the north in the near future.”
In 1930, Charles S. Murray published an article in the South Carolina Gazette in Columbia under the headline, “Baronial Estates In Old-South Setting in Georgetown,” in which he reports: “About a year and a half ago Mr.[Paul D.] Mills purchased the old [Stewart Parker] house, in which legend has it Washington was once entertained. The house, which had fallen into ill repair, was remodeled and enlarged, but Mr. Mills was careful to preserve every board that could be salvaged. The wainscoting in the mansion is particularly fine, and every piece has been replaced. Mr. Mills is also owner of ‘Windsor’ plantation on the Black River. The Taylor property, situated in the city near the Mills residence, has been acquired by Paulding Fosdick and Harold Sands, of New York. The house has been remodeled and Mr. Fosdick has made extensive improvements on the waterfront.” [Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the Second of the Seventy-First Congress. (United States. Congress: U.S. Government Printing Office), 1930: 8336.]
In December of 1929, Bernard Baruch’s house “Old Relick” at Hobcaw burned down while the Baruch family was gathered there for the Christmas holidays. On January 17, 1930, the Georgetown Times reports in a column, “Within Georgetown’s Winter Colony”: “Bernard M. Baruch has rented the Fosdick house in Georgetown, pending the erection of his new dwelling on the Waccamaw peninsula, according to information received at this office. The Baruch family will move into the Georgetown house within the course of a few days.”
Then in 1931, Sands and Fosdick sold the house on the Bluff to the Harold Kaminskis.
While in Paris in 1931, Paulding Fosdick and a friend, Leonard Replogle, invented a form of the game bridge which they called Towie. In 1935, they sought to make Towie a popular game in the United States, with limited success. However, it was quite popular in Paul Beach, where Fosdick remained the expert as late as 1952. [Life magazine 32:3 (Jan 21, 1952): 98.]
Harold A. Sands and Katherine Yoakum divorced and in 1935, he married Muriel Egerton Winthrop Broadman, a direct descendant of John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts. She was the daughter of Egerton L. Winthrop, a lawyer prominent in New York society during the Gilded Age. She was a champion amateur equestrian in Newport, where her family had an estate. They afterward lived in Newport, and had a number of children. In 1938, they purchased the historic Sherman Farm in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, where they lived until Harold’s death in 1951.
Paulding Fosdick and Katherine McFadden Fosdick also divorced and in 1935, he married Emily H. Bedford Davie (1882-1975), daughter of the late E. T. Bedford, wealthy Standard Oil director. She became a leader of Tuxedo Park society while the wife of Preston Davie. She next married Russell Sard, then Paulding Fosdick. After each divorce, it was said, her ex-husbands resigned from the Tuxedo Club and never appeared there again. Emily, however, stayed on at Tuxedo Park with each new husband, “keeping very much within the confines of ‘the Park.’" [Daily News, New York (February 2, 1941):179.]
In 1936, the new Mrs. Fosdick purchased “Seaside,”a villa in Newport fronting the Cliffs. [Newport Mercury, Newport, Rhode Island (January 31, 1936):1.] The couple lived between Newport and residences in New York City, Tuxedo Park, and her villa at Palm Beach. On April 20, 1941 in Palm Beach, the Paulding Fosdicks were among the guests at a cocktail party given in behalf of the exiled Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
When in 1952, Cleveland Amory published The Last Resorts: A Portrait of American Society at Play -- which is a glimpse into the then-world of the very rich -- he describes Paulding Fosdick as one of Palm Beach’s few remaining denizens who were then still able “to put on the old-time dog” and “boast inordinarily about the sterling virtues of his butler.” Fosdick was known to never be without his butler, who became his valet when he traveled.
It’s interesting to conjecture that Paulding Fosdick’s butler may have been an inspiration to Julia Pyatt Kaminski when, in 1931 she and Harold bought the house from Sands and Fosdick. I rather doubt many folks in Georgetown, other than the “rich Yankees” who wintered in the region, had butlers. Yet Julia was known to have always had a white-coated butler during her years as chatelaine of the house on the Bluff.
Among them was Marcelo Soriano, who in the 1940 census of Georgetown, was living at Harold and Julia's (9 King Street), and was listed as a "cook (private)," but he was remembered locally as her bulter. Soriano was Filipino, 55 years old in 1940, and married. He lived into his 90's and died in Charleston in 1982.
In her will, Julia left her last butler, Walter Cruel, Jr. (1922-1977), a bequest if he remained in her employ at the time of her death. Cruel was a South Carolina native. According to his World War II Army Enlistment Records, he enlisted in 1943. At the time, he had two years of high school and had worked as a tinsmith, coppersmith, and sheet metal worker. He was married to Earline Hannah Cruel (1922-1999) from Lake City, South Carolina. Water Cruel completed basic training at Fort Jackson in Columbia, then was stationed in Richmond, Indiana. There “Pfc. Walter Cruel of Georgetown, S. C” was on the kitchen staff of an exceptional cook, a Cpl. James M. Hines of Georgia, the oldest member of the company, who had 20 years’ experience in cooking and was excellent at it. A general who visited the company there in 1944 commented, “It is the only company I know in the field that serve meals in a plated dinner set. I had a feeling as if I were in the Savoy hotel.” [“In Naval Service Richmond, Ind.” Indianapolis Recorder (the longest-published African American newspaper in Indiana), August 12, 1944.]
This speaks well for Water Cruel’s later employ with Julia at the Kaminski house. He outlived Julia by a few years. He afterward lived at 430 Cannon Street in Georgetown. He is buried in the graveyard of Bethel A.M.E. Church, founded by freed slaves as the first African American congregation in Georgetown County.
by Jennie Holton Fant